d a nose too
large and high--that ugliness which even love's eyes can scarcely
ameliorate into good drawing.

The temperament attached to these painful disabilities had been warm and
strongly womanly. Born a century or so earlier, in a French Court, or any
great world vivid with picturesque living, she would in all probability
have been a remarkable personage, her ugliness a sort of distinction; but
she had been born in Willowfield, and had lived its life and been bound by
its limits. She had been comfortably well off--she had a large square
house with a garden, an income sufficient to provide for extremely
respectable existence in Willowfield, but not large enough to allow of
experiments with the outside world. She had never met a man whom she could
have loved, who would have loved her, and she was essentially--though
Willowfield would never have dreamed it--a woman who should have loved and
mated. A lifetime of narrow, unstimulating years and thwarted instincts
had made age treat her ill. She was a thin woman with burning eyes, and a
personality people were afraid of.

She had always found an interest in John Baird. When he had come to
Willowfield she had seen in him that element which her whole long life
had lacked. His emotional potentialities had wakened her imagination. If
she had been a young woman she knew that she might have fallen tragically
and hopelessly in love with him; as an old woman she found it well worth
her while to watch him and speculate upon him. When he had become engaged
to Agnes Stornaway, she had watched him and secretly wondered how the
engagement would end; when it had ended in marriage she had not wondered,
but she had seen many things other people did not see. "He is not in love
with her," had been her mental decision, "but he is emotional, and he is
in love with her being in love with him. There is no foretelling what
will come of it."

Baird had found himself attracted by Miss Amory. He did not know that if
she had been young she would, despite her ugliness, have had a powerful
feminine effect on him. He used to go and talk to her, and he was not
conscious that he went when he was made restless by a lack of something
in the mental atmosphere about him. He could talk to her as he could not
talk to the rest of Willowfield. She read and thought and argued with
herself, and as a product of a provincial dogmatic New England town was a
curious development.

"Were you once a brilliant, wick