re and lovely
now. Unconsciously she bowed her head on her hands, and a cry quivered
from her heart. The yellow sunlight made a ripple of golden water on
the wall behind her and threw a wavering radiance on her soft brown
hair.

It was at that moment that the Rev. Hugh Grantley, the new Presbyterian
minister, opened the vestry door.

CHAPTER V

THE RELICT OF THE LATE MCGUIRE

Close beside the Watson estate with its strangely shaped dwelling stood
another small house, which was the earthly abode of one Mrs. McGuire,
also of Irish extraction, who had been a widow for forty years. Mrs.
McGuire was a tall, raw-boned, angular woman with piercing black eyes,
and a firm forbidding jaw. One look at Mrs. McGuire usually made a book
agent forget the name of his book. When she shut her mouth, no lips
were visible; her upturned nose seemed seriously to contemplate running
up under her sun bonnet to escape from this wicked world with all its
troubling, and especially from John Watson, his wife and his family of
nine.

One fruitful cause of dispute between Mrs. McGuire and the Watsons was
the boundary line between the two estates. In the spring Mrs. Watson
and the boys put up a fence of green poplar poles where they thought
the fence should be, hoping that it might serve the double purpose of
dividing the lots and be a social barrier between them and the relict
of the late McGuire. The relict watched and waited and said not a word,
but it was the ominous silence that comes before the hail.

Mrs. McGuire hated the Watson family collectively, but it was upon John
Watson, the man of few words, that she lavished the whole wealth of her
South of Ireland hatred, for John Watson had on more than one occasion
got the better of her in a wordy encounter.

One time when the boundary dispute was at its height, she had burst
upon John as he went to his work in the morning, with a storm of
far-reaching and comprehensive epithets. She gave him the history of
the Watson family, past, present, and future--especially the future;
every Watson that ever left Ireland came in for a brief but pungent
notice.

John stood thoughtfully rubbing his chin, and when she stopped, not
from lack of words, but from lack of breath, he slowly remarked:

"Mistress McGuire, yer a lady."

"Yer a liar!" she snapped back, with a still more eloquent burst of
invectives.

John lighted his pipe with great deliberation, and when it was drawing
nicely he took