ch they were reared, and whose
thoughts were often as crude as their half-savage and sometimes lawless
customs, came to sit at the feet of this gentle one, who received them
all with such kindly interest and instinctive understanding. And young
men and girls came, drawn by the magic that was hers, to confide in
this woman who listened with such rare tact and loving sympathy to their
troubles and their dreams, and who, in the deepest things of their young
lives, was mother to them all.

Nor were the mountain folk her only disciples. Always there were the
letters she continued to write, addressed to almost every corner of
the land. And every year there would come, for a week or a month, at
different times during the summer, men and women from the great world of
larger affairs who had need of the strength and courage and patience and
hope they never failed to find in that little log house by the river.
And so, in time, it came to be known that those letters written by
Auntie Sue went to men and women who, in their childhood school days,
had received from her their first lessons in writing; and that her
visitors, many of them distinguished in the world of railroads and
cities, were of that large circle of busy souls who had never ceased to
be her pupils.

Thus it came that the garden was made a little larger, and two rooms
were added to the house, with other modest improvements, to accommodate
Auntie Sue's grown-up boys and girls when they came to visit her. But
never was there a hired servant, so that her guests must do their own
household tasks, because, Auntie Sue said, that was good for them and
mostly what they needed.

It should also be said here that among her many pupils who lived beyond
the sky-line of the far, blue hills, not one knew more of the
real secret of Auntie Sue's life and character than did the Ozark
mountaineers of the Elbow Rock district, among whom she had chosen to
pass the evening of her day.

Then came one who learned the secret. He learned--but that is my story.
I must not tell the secret here.

CHAPTER II.

THE MAN IN THE DARK.

A man stood at a window, looking out into the night. There was no light
in the room. The stars were hidden behind a thick curtain of sullen
clouds.

The house was a wretchedly constructed, long-neglected building of
a type common to those old river towns that in their many years of
uselessness have lost all civic pride, and in their own resultant
squalo