joy and
kill the peace of distant countrysides.

But to Kate Kildare the early history of that road meant nothing. It was
for her the road that led back, a two days' journey, into her girlhood.

In the house Jacqueline was singing, her voice drowning the mellow tones
of the old piano, ringing out singularly pure and clear, like a child's,
lacking as yet the modulations to be learned of one teacher alone; life.
It was a new song that Philip Benoix had brought for her to try:

"A little winding road
Goes over the hill to the plain--
A little road that crosses the plain
And comes to the hill again.
I sought for Love on that road--"

sang Jacqueline, cheerfully.

The eyes of the listener filled with sharp tears. She too had sought for
Love on that road.

She saw herself riding down it into her great adventure, so young, so
laughing and brave, Basil Kildare on his great horse beside her, all the
world a misty golden green. She saw--even with closed eyes, she saw--the
turn of the road where Jacques Benoix, Philip's father, had come to meet
them on their wedding journey.

So far her memories often led her before she stopped them. But the
experience of the night had left her oddly stirred and weakened, not
quite herself. To-day the memories had their way with her.

She lived again through the whirlwind courtship that was still
remembered in a community where sudden marriages are not unusual; saw
again, as she had first seen it, the arresting, great figure of Basil
Kildare framed in a ballroom door, with smoldering black eyes upon her,
that spoke so much more eloquently than his tongue. Yet his tongue had
done well enough, too, that night. Before their first dance was over he
had said to her: "I have been watching you grow up, Kate. Now I think
you are old enough to marry me."

Two weeks later they went to her mother, hand in hand.

"But, my dearest!" fluttered the startled lady, "Mr. Kildare is a man of
forty, and you only seventeen, only a child! Besides--"

"Mr. Kildare," answered the girl, with a proud glance at her lover,
"will help me to become a woman, Mother dear."

What was she, newly widowed, who had depended in all things upon her
husband, to oppose such a pair of wills? Rumors of the wild doings at
Storm were not lacking in that gentler community, nor was the Kildare
blood what she would have chosen to mix with her own. But there is among
this type of women always the rather touchi