kind of a masquerade which the church societies gave
from time to time to eke out the minister's salary and which, while he
had never attended, Young Denny had often heard described as
"poverty-parties," because everybody wore the oldest of his old
clothes--but a marvelously brilliant thing of hired costumes. It did
not mean so much to him, this last, and yet as he thought of it his
tight lips twisted into a slow smile and his eyes swung from their
hungry contemplation of the great Maynard house to a little clump of
brushwood which made a darker blot against the black shadow of the
hill from the crest of which the Judge's place dominated the
surrounding country. Little by little Denny Bolton's lean face lost
its hint of hardness; the lines that ran from his thin nose to the
corners of his lips disappeared as he smiled--smiled with whimsical
gentleness--at the light that glimmered from a single window through
the tangled bushes, twinkling back at him unblinkingly.

There was a tiny cottage behind that light, a little drab cottage of a
half dozen rooms. It stood, unpainted and unkempt, in a wedge-shaped
acre of neglected garden which, between high weeds and uncut
shrubbery, had long before gone to straggling ruin. And that
wedge-shaped acre which cut a deep fissure in the edge of the
immaculate pastures of Boltonwood's wealthiest citizen was like a
barbed thorn in Judge Maynard's side.

The latter was not a judge in reality; partly the size of the cash
balance which rumor whispered he carried at the county bank, partly
the fact that he was the only lawyer in that section, had earned him
the title. But every trick of his tricky trade which he could invent
he had brought against the owner of that little, dilapidated cottage
in a vain effort to force him to sell. And yet the acre of neglect
and ruin still clung like an unsightly burr to the hem of his
smooth-rolling acres.

The people of Boltonwood were given to calling John Anderson a fool,
and not alone because he persisted in his senseless antagonism of a
man as great in the township as was Judge Maynard. There was at least
one other reason. It was almost twenty years now since the day when
John Anderson had first appeared in the stern old hill town, bringing
with him a frail slip of a woman with great, moist violet-blue eyes
and tumbled yellow hair, whose very white and gold prettiness had
seemed to their puritanical eyes the flaunting of an ungodly thing.
There was