[Illustration:  As she turned to her turkey-slicing.]

The guests at the Pennington house that evening divided the honors equally between the new preacher, for whom the party was made, and Miss Morgan, whose last niece had married and left her but two days before.  Most of the guests had met the new preacher; but none of them—­save one or two of her intimate friends—­could know how the lonely little old woman was faring in the cottage whence one by one her adopted birds had flown.  They called her “little Miss Morgan” in the town, and the story of her life of devotion to her brothers’ and sisters’ children was familiar to every one about her.  For ten years she had lived in Willow Creek caring for her brothers’ orphans.  She came to the community from the East, and found what she brought—­culture, friends, and kindness at every turn.  The children whom she had cared for had grown up, filed through the town’s real estate college, and then mating had left the little spinster alone.

[Illustration:  The new preacher, for whom the party was made.]

At the Penningtons’ that evening she was cheerful enough—­so cheerful, indeed, in her little bird-like way, that many of those who talked with her fancied that the resourceful little body was beyond the reach of petty grief.  The modest, almost girlish smile beamed through the wrinkles of fifty autumns as brightly that evening at the Penningtons’ as the town had ever seen it.  From her place in a high-backed chair in the corner, Miss Morgan, in her shy, self-deprecatory way, shed her faint benediction about her as she had done for a decade.  There was a sweetness in Miss Morgan’s manner that made the old men gallant to her in a boyish way; and the wives, who loved her, were proud of their husbands’ chivalry.  During the evening at the Penningtons’ the conversation found much of its inspiration in the Memorial Day services on the morrow and in anecdotes about the thriftlessness of Calhoun Perkins.  Memorial Day was one of the holidays which Miss Morgan kept in her heart.  Then she decorated each year a lover’s grave—­a grave she had never seen.  The day had been sacred in her heart to the memory of a spring night, and the moon and the lilacs and the blue uniform of a soldier.  Upon other days she waved this memory away with a gay little sigh, and would have none of it.  But on Memorial Day she bade the vision come into her heart and bide a while.

But she did not open the door there at the party.  They said to one another, going home that night:  “Well, I don’t see’s she minds it a bit.  Isn’t that pluck for you—­not lonesome, not grumpy—­just the same little body she was when we first saw her.  Well—­I know one thing—­I couldn’t do it.”

As for Miss Morgan, while she was walking home that night, she was thinking of the women of her age whom she had just left; the romance seemed to be gone completely from their lives, their faces seemed a trifle hard to her, and she was wondering if life would have gone so with her if there had been no Shiloh.