, his own
arrest, trial and conviction. The white glare of hateful publicity had
been thrown, without warning, upon him and his motherless brat. He'd
been torn away from his quiet haunts at the lake side and shut up in the
narrow confines of a fetid cell. The enforced separation from his
daughter, at the critical period between girl and womanhood, had left
her alone in the shanty and exposed her to countless perils and
hardships. Unmitigated calamities, especially the long imprisonment,
they had seemed at the time, but the event proved otherwise.

Friends had arisen and helped him establish his innocence and win his
pardon. The responsibilities thrown upon the squatter girl had been met
with love and courage and had disciplined her high temper and awakened
her ambition. The dirt and disorder that had formerly obtained in the
shack had disappeared. Her housewifely arts had transformed the hut into
a comfortable home, rough to be sure, small and inadequate, but
immaculate and satisfactory.

The shanty stood on a little point of land projecting into the lake.
Huge weeping willows shrouded it from the sun in summer. They mourned
and murmured of the past, when the breezes of morning and evening
stirred their whispering leaves. Their bare limbs thrashed and pounded
the tin roof when the storm winds tore down the lake. In front and to
one side, Tessibel's new privet hedge shone a dark, dusky green, and the
flower beds were beginning to show orderly life through the blackish
mold. The shack itself was rather more pretentious than most of the
squatter shanties. It had two rooms and was thoroughly battened against
the storms.

Coming into the path, Orn met his daughter and went with her to the
house.

The greatest change the year had brought was in the girl herself. She
had ripened into the early maturity common to the squatter woman. She
was no longer the red-haired tatterdemalion who had romped over the
rocks and quarreled with the boys of the Silent City. Her tom-boy days,
amid the ceaseless struggles against the hardships of the Storm Country,
gave to her slender body strength and lent to it poise and grace.
Bright brown eyes lighted by loving intelligence illumined her face,
tanned by sun and wind, but very sweet and winsome, especially when the
curving red lips melted into a smile. A profusion of burnished red
curls, falling about her shoulders almost to her hips, completed the
vivid picture. Tess of the Storm Country,