* * * * *

Blossom who, until a few weeks ago, had been thought of as a lovely
child, was now the "Widder Henderson" to all who spoke her name. The
people she met accosted her with a lugubrious sympathy which was hard
to bear, so that she hastened by with a furtive shyness and an anxiety
to be left alone. Every day she made her pilgrimage to the graveyard to
lay freshly cut evergreens on the grave there, and the rabbit that had
its nest deep under the thorns sat on its haunches regarding her with a
frank curiosity devoid of fear. He seemed to recognize a kinship of shy
aloofness between them which need not set even his most timorous of
hearts into a flutter.

Yet although she was the "Widder Henderson," who had experienced the
bitter fate of so many mountain wives, she was after all, in years and
in experience, a child.

Until a little while ago--a very little while--she had sung with the
birds and her spirits had sparkled with the sunshine that flashed back
from woodland greenery. Life had seemed a simple thing with the rainbow
promise of romance lying somewhere ahead. Then Turner had awakened her
to a conception of adult love--a conception which might have satisfied
all her dreams had not Jerry Henderson come to dazzle her and alter her
standards of comparison. Henderson had, as even his critic at the club
admitted, that "damned charm" that is seductively indefinable yet
potent, and what had been "damned charm" to the clubman's
sophistication was a marvelous and prodigal wonder to the mountain
girl. He had wooed her passionately in the shadow of death. He had come
back to her through the shadow of death, and left her to go, not only
into its shadow, but its grimly mysterious reality. Now he was not only
her hero but also her martyr.

Mountain children know little of Christmas, except that it is often a
period of tragedy, since then men ride wildly with pistol and jug, and
hilarity turns too often to homicide. But one Christmas legend the
children do know: that on the night and at the hour of the Saviour's
birth the cattle kneel in homage and the sere elder bushes, for a brief
matter of miraculous minutes, break into a foam of bloom.

Blossom clung to that beautiful parable, even now finding comfort in
its sentiment, as she stood among the untended graves.

"I wonder now," she speculated, nodding her head wistfully toward the
inquisitive cotton-tail that sat wriggling its dimi