at the edge of Storm garden.
On the other side of it sat a very weary woman, cradled between its
hospitable roots, with her back turned on the workaday world and her
face to the open country. This was her eyrie; and here, when another
woman would have been shut into a darkened chamber courting sleep, came
Kate Kildare on occasion to rest her soul.

To the left and right of her rose taller hills, of which Storm was the
forerunner, the first small ripple of the Cumberlands as they broke upon
the plain. At her feet stretched mile after rolling mile of summer
green, and gold, and brown. There were dappled pastures of bluegrass,
clover-fields, beech-woods, great golden reaches of corn; there was the
rich black-green of tobacco--not much of that, for Kate Kildare loved
her land too well to ruin it. Here and there the farm of some neighbor
showed larger patches of the parasite that soon or late must sap
Kentucky of its vigor, even while it fills her coffers with gold; but
these were few. The greater part of the land in sight was Kildare land.
Storms, like some feudal keep of the Old World, brooded its chickens
under its wings, watchfully.

Far away, perhaps five miles or so, the roof of another mansion showed
among the trees; a new house. Kate rarely looked in that direction. It
made her feel crowded. It was not the only direction from which she kept
her eyes averted. On the edge of the distant horizon rested always a low
gray cloud, never lifting, nor shifting. It seemed to her an aureole of
shadow crowning some evil thing, even as the saints in old paintings are
crowned with light. It was the smoke of the little city of Frankfort,
where there is a penitentiary.

The plateau at her feet was crossed by many a slender thread of road, to
one of which her eyes came presently, as wandering feet stray naturally
into a path they often use. It was rather a famous road, with a name of
its own in history. Wild creatures had made it centuries ago, on their
way from the hills to the river. The silent moccasins of Indians had
widened it; later, pioneers, Kildares and their hardy kindred, flintlock
on shoulder, ear alert for the crackling of a twig in the primeval
forest, seeking a place of safety for their women and children in the
new world they had come to conquer. Now it was become a thoroughfare for
prosperous loaded wains, for world-famed horses, for their supplanter,
the automobile, which in ever-increasing numbers has come to en