Pretty Pansy lay lazily in the hammock at the foot of the lawn, and listened to the south wind rushing through the tree tops overhead, thinking to herself, with a blush, that it seemed to be whispering a name--whispering it over and over: “Norman Wylde!” At the top of the green, sloping lawn stood a big white farmhouse, with long porches shaded by rose vines and honeysuckles. Pansy’s uncle and aunt lived there, and she had come on a month’s visit to them. The month was slipping away very fast now, and she must soon return to her work in Richmond, for Pansy Laurens was no pampered favorite of fortune, but an employee of one of the great tobacco factories. Pansy was only fifteen when her father, a machinist at the Tredegar Works, had died and left his wife and five children penniless, save for what they could earn by the labor of their own hands. Pansy was the eldest, and her mother had to take her from school that the labor of her little white hands might help to earn the family support. Nothing offered but the tobacco factories, and Pansy went there, while her brother Willie found work as a cash boy in a dry-goods store on Broad Street. The three younger ones, being too small to work, were continued at school, while the mother took in sewing to help eke out the family income. It was hard on them all, most especially on Pansy, who was so intelligent and refined, and who hated to leave school and toil at repulsive tasks among companions who were mostly uncongenial, for, although some of the girls were sweet and pretty as herself, others were coarse and rude, and sneered at her, calling her proud and ambitious, although they knew at heart that they were only jealous of the lovely face, so round and dimpled, with its big purplish-blue eyes, shaded by such a beautiful fringe of long black curling lashes. They all envied her that fair face and those silky masses of wavy dark hair that made such a becoming frame for the transparent white skin, with its wild-rose tints and delicate tracery of blue veins. But, pretty or ugly, it did not matter, the girl said to herself sometimes, with bitter discontent, as she looked at her fair reflection in the mirror. She was nothing but a factory girl, after all, and there were people who looked down on her for that act as if the very sound were the essence of vulgarity. To have been a shopgirl even, or a dressmaker, or milliner, would have been far more genteel, she said to herself. This was the first time in three years that she had got away from the factory, and she would not have done so then if she had not been given a furlough from work because there was a temporary dullness in trade.