nd twelve-year-old Juno acting as
cook and mother for a brood of ten. A few months later she persuaded the
father to let the girl come down to her school, and in the succeeding years
she became St. Hilda's right hand and the mainstay in the supervision of
the kitchen, housework, and laundry, and even in the management of the
Mission's farm. No one had the subtle understanding of St. Hilda's charges
as had Juno--no one could handle them quite so well. So that it was with
real grief and great personal loss that St. Hilda opened the way for Juno
to go to school in the Bluegrass. And now, one sunset in mid-May, she was
back at the Mission in Happy Valley, and the two were in each other's arms.

Happy Valley it was no longer, for throughout it the plague had spread
fear or sickness or death in every little home. St. Hilda had gathered
her own little sufferers in tents collected from a railway-camp over the
mountains, a surveying party, and from the Bluegrass. A volunteer doctor
had come from the "settlements," and two nurses, and so Juno took to the
outside work up and down the river, up every little creek, and out in
the hills. All day and far into the night she was gone. Sometimes she
did not for days come back to the Mission. Her face grew white and
drawn, and her cheeks hollow from poor food, meagre snatches of sleep,
and untiring work. The doctor warned her, St. Hilda warned her, she
got anxious warning letters from her husband, but on she went. And
the inevitable happened.

One hot midday, as she watched by the bedside of a little patient with
a branch of maple in her hand to keep the flies away, she drowsed, and
one of the wretched little insects lighted on her moist red lips. Soon
thereafter the "walking typhoid" caught her as she was striding past
Lum Chapman's blacksmith-shop. Instinctively she kept on toward home,
and reached there raving: "Don't let him come--don't let him come!" And
when the news got about the heart of Happy Valley almost bled.

Only St. Hilda guessed what the mutterings of the sick girl meant, but
she did not heed them, and the professor from New England soon crossed
Mason and Dixon's line for the first time in his life. For the first
time he fell under the spell of the Southern hills--graceful, gracious
big hills, real mountains, densely wooded like thickets to their very
tops--so densely wooded, indeed, that they seemed overspread with a
great shaggy green rug that swept on and on over the f