they had always
hardened before, whenever they rebuked her slim, elfish untidiness,
for upon the face of stone, which was the face of his wife, John
Anderson's chisel had left a fleeting, poignantly wistful smile that
seemed touched with the glory of the Virgin Mother herself.

They merely stood and stared--the townsfolk--and yet they only half
understood, for when it was noised about the street a few days later
that John Anderson had given up forever his occupation of chiseling
tombstones for the bleak Boltonwood cemetery--an occupation which at
least had yielded him a bare living--and had locked himself up in that
back room to "putter with lumps of clay," he was instantly convicted
of being queer in the eyes of the entire thrifty community, even
without his senseless antagonism of the Judge in the years that
followed to clinch the verdict.

After the first few weeks that followed that night the village saw
less and less of the man who went on living alone in the small white
cottage with only the child to keep him company--the girl-child whom
he had named Dryad, perhaps in a blind, groping hunger for beauty,
perhaps in sheer revolt against the myriad Janes and Anns and Marthas
about him. His hair was snow white before she was half grown; he was
an old man, wrinkled of face and vacant of eye, who bent always over
the bench in his back-room shop too engrossed with his work even to
note that, day by day, her face and slim body and tumbled yellow hair
grew more and more like the face which was always smiling up at him
from the shaping clay or marble.

Months passed before he opened his lips again for speech. Then he
began to talk; he began to murmur little, disjointed intimate phrases
of endearment to the stone face growing under his fingers--phrases
that were more than half unintelligible to strange ears--until as the
habit grew there came long periods, days at a time, when he carried on
an uncannily one-sided conversation with the empty air before him, or,
as the villagers often hinted, with some one whom his eyes alone could
see.

But as the years went by even this novelty lost its spice with long
familiarity. The cottage at the edge of town went from straggling
neglect to utter ruin, but John Anderson still clung to it with a
senseless stubbornness over which they often shook their heads in
pity--in heartfelt commiseration for the Judge who had to endure this
eyesore at his very doors, in spite of all his shrewdne