a transparent pallor in her white skin and heavy shadows
beneath her big dark eyes that made them seem even larger and duskier.
A whispered rumor went around that she was not too strong--that it was
the brisk keen air for which John Anderson had brought her to the
hills.

The little drab cottage had been white then and there was scarcely a
day but what the passers-by saw the slender girl, in soft fluttering
things that contrasted painfully with their dingy calico, the thick
gleaming mass of hair that crowned her head wind-tossed into her eyes,
standing with her face buried in an armful of crimson blossoms in the
same garden where the weeds were now breast high, or running with
mad, childish abandon between the high hedgerows. And many a night
after it was too dark to see they heard the man's heavier bass
underrunning the light treble of her laughter which, to their
sensitive ears, was never quite free from a tinge of mockery.

CHAPTER II

For a year or more it was like that, and then the day came which, with
dawn, found John Anderson changed into a gray-haired, white-faced man,
whose eyes always seemed to be looking beyond one, and who spoke but
seldom, even when he was spoken to. During the month that followed
that night hardly a person in the village heard a word pass his lips,
except, perhaps, those members of the church societies who had
volunteered to help care for the baby.

He locked himself up in the small shop which occupied the back room of
the house and day after day he worked there alone in a deadly quiet,
strangely mechanical fashion. Sometimes far into the night they heard
the tap-tap of his mallet as he chipped away, bit by bit, on a slender
shaft of white marble, until more than one man in those days shook his
head dubiously and vouchsafed his neighbor the information that John
Anderson "wa'n't quite right."

A month passed during which the steady chip-chip scarcely ever ceased;
and yet, when the work was finally finished and set up over the fresh
little mound in the grounds behind the church, and they came to stand
before it, they found nothing ready for them to say. For once the
tongues of the hillsfolk were sobered into silence.

It was like her--that slim little white statue--so like her in its
pallor and frailty of feature and limb that they only gasped and then
fell to whispering behind their hands at the resemblance. And somehow,
too, as they stared, their faces failed to harden as