of generations. The most stately garden will go to ragged and
weed-choked desolation if left too long untended.

But he could hardly hope to make his more fashionable world see that.
The freshness of her charm would be less obvious than the lapses of her
grammar; the flash of her wit less marked than her difficulties with a
tea-cup.

Blossom, too, of late had been troubled with a restlessness of spirit,
new to her experience. Until that day last June upon which so many
important things had happened the gay spontaneity of her nature had
dealt little with perplexities. She had acknowledged a deep and
unsatisfied yearning for "education" and a fuller life, but even that
was not poignantly destructive of happiness.

Then within a space of twenty-four hours, Henderson had made his
appearance, bringing a sense of contact with the wonder-world beyond
the purple barriers; she had prayed through the night for Turner and he
had come to her at dawn with his pledge--and finally, she had confessed
her love.

In short she had matured with that swift sequence of happenings into
womanhood, and since then nothing had been quite the same. But of all
the unsettling elements, the disturbing-in-chief was Jerry Henderson.
He had flashed into her life with all the startling fascination of
Cinderella's prince, and matters hitherto accepted as axiomatic
remained no longer certain.

"Gittin' education" had before that meant keeping pace with Turner's
ambition. Now it involved a pathetic effort to raise herself to
Henderson's more complex plane.

She had sought as studiously as Jerry himself to banish the absurd idea
that this readjustment of values was sentimental, and she had as
signally failed.

These changes in herself had been of such gradual incubation that she
had never realized their force sufficiently to face and analyze
them--yet she had sent young Stacy away without a caress!

"I'm jest the same as plighted to Bear Cat," she told herself
accusingly, because loyalty was an element of her blood. "I ain't
hardly got ther right to think of Mr. Henderson." But she did think of
him. Perhaps she was culpable, but she was very young. Turner had
seemed a planet among small stars--then Jerry had come like a flaming
comet--and her heart was in sore doubt.

When, on his return, Henderson dropped from the step of the rickety
day-coach to the cinder platform of the station at Marlin Town, he met
Uncle Israel Calvert who paused to greet h