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Harriet’s face brightened.”Thank ye Mis’ Simonds,” she said, with reluctant courtesy.”I’m much obleeged to you an’ the neighbors. I think mebbe we’ll be able to eat some of them doughnuts if they air tough,” she added, mollifyingly, as her caller turned down the foot-path.

“My, Harriét,” said Charlotte, lifting up a weakly, wondering, peaked old face, “what did you tell her them doughnuts was tough fur?”

“Charlotte, do you want everybody to look down on us, an’ think we ain’t no account at all, just like any beggars, ’cause they bring us in vittles?” said Harriet, with a grim glance at her sister’s meek, unconscious face.

“No, Harriét.”The poor little old woman on the doorstep fairly cowered before her aggressive old sister.

“Then don’t hender me agin when I tell folks their doughnuts is tough an’ their pertaters is poor. If I don’t kinder keep up an’ show some sperrit, I sha’n’t think nothing of myself, an’ other folks won’t nuther, and fust thing we know they’ll kerry us to the poorhouse. You’d ‘a been there before now if it hadn’t been for me, Charlotte.”

Charlotte looked meekly convinced, and her sister sat down on a chair in the doorway to scrape her dandelions.

“Did you git a good mess, Harriét?” asked Charlotte, in a humble tone.

“Toler’ble.”

“They’ll be proper relishin’ with that piece of pork Mis’ Mann brought in yesterday. O Lord, Harriét, it’s a chink!”

Harriet sniffed.

Her sister caught with her sensitive ear the little contemptuous sound.”I guess,” she said, querulously, and with more pertinacity than she had shown in the matter of the doughnuts, “that if you was in the dark, as I am, Harriét, you wouldn’t make fun an’ turn up your nose at chinks. If you had seen the light streamin’ in all of a sudden through some little hole that you hadn’t know of before when you set down on the door-step this mornin’, and the wind with the smell of the apple blows in it came in your face, an’ when Mis’ Simonds brought them hot doughnuts, an’ when I thought of the pork an’ greens jest now – O Lord, how it did shine in!An’ it does now. If you was me, Harriét, you would know there was chinks.”

Tears began starting from the sightless eyes, and streaming pitifully down the pale old cheeks.

Harriet looked at her sister, and her grim face softened.

“Why, Charlotte, hev it that thar ischinks if you want to. Who cares?”

“Thar ischinks, Harriét.”

“Wa’al, thar ischinks, then. If I don’t hurry, I sha’n’t get these greens in in time for dinner.”

When the two old women sat down complacently to their meal of pork and dandelion greens in their little kitchen they did not dream how destiny slowly and surely was introducing some new colors into their web of life, even when it was almost completed, and that this was one of the last meals they would eat in their old home for many a day. In about a week from that day they were established in the “Old Ladies’ Home” in a neighboring city. It came about in this wise: Mrs. Simonds, the woman who had brought the gift of hot doughnuts, was a smart, energetic person, bent on doing good, and she did a great deal. To be sure, she always did it in her own way. If she chose to give hot doughnuts, she gave hot doughnuts; it made not the slightest difference to her if the recipients of her charity would infinitely have preferred ginger cookies. Still, a great many would like hot doughnuts, and she did unquestionably a great deal of good.

She had a worthy coadjutor in the person of a rich and childless elderly widow in the place. They had fairly entered into a partnership in good works, with about an equal capital on both sides, the widow furnishing the money, and Mrs. Simonds, who had much the better head of the two, furnishing the active schemes of benevolence.