been
there yet if she hadn't heard us call."

"You must sit down," said the doctor kindly. "I'll just have a look at
my patient and then help this young man get some supper. Your name
is--?"

"Phoebe," she answered, shrinking with shyness.

"Phoebe what?"

"I have no other name."

Phoebe had been accustomed all her life to the courtesy and gentleness
of one man, her father. The few others she had known were rough
mountaineers, and here was she, barefooted and ragged, treated like a
princess by two men.

While the doctor fried ham and eggs, the staple of every camp, Ben made
a pot of tea, and presently drew up a table in front of her and placed
on it a tray set as neatly as he knew how. Phoebe watched the
proceedings with wide frightened eyes. She tried to hide her bare feet
under her ragged dress and to draw down the sleeves over her hands,
brown and stained with blackberry juice. Later, when they had made her a
bed on one of the divans and left her to sleep until daylight, she was
too bewildered to say good-night.

All her life Phoebe had lived in the little mountain cabin. She had
never known a mother and she had never had a friend. Her father had
taught her many things, however, and one was to read from the books on
the shelf. There were several books on astronomy; Pilgrim's Progress;
the Bible; a volume of Shakespeare; a history of England; a translation
of the "Iliad", and some volumes of poetry:--Keats, Tennyson and
Browning. Where her father had got these books and the silver and the
blue china, she knew no more than he. He had tried and tried to
remember, but he had forgotten. He had no identity, no past. His name,
his family, everything connected with his early life had gone. His past
life had stopped when he had gone for a physician. He had taught his
little girl to read, as we have said, and when old enough she had often
read aloud in the long winter evenings. He had seemed to listen with
absorbed interest, but it is difficult to say how much he grasped of the
words he heard, or whether they were mere words to him with no
collective significance.

With a certain instinct left to him from that mysterious dead past, he
had imparted to his daughter an unmistakable refinement of speech and
manner. About some things he was even fastidious,--her way of eating,
the appearance of the table and the silver. He himself was excessively
neat and orderly and had periods of great industry, weaving baskets of
swe