nd rug-making and the grandfather would fain have toned down that
exuberance of beauty and vivacity into the meeker pattern of
maidenhood he had been accustomed to.

When Joscelyn was seventeen Deborah Morgan noticed a change in her.
The girl became quieter and more brooding, falling at times into
strange, idle reveries, with her hands clasped over her knee and her
big eyes fixed unseeingly on space; or she would creep away for
solitary rambles in the beech wood, going away droopingly and
returning with dusky glowing cheeks and a nameless radiance, as of
some newly discovered power, shining through every muscle and motion.
Mrs. Morgan thought the child needed a tonic and gave her sulphur and
molasses.

One day the revelation came. Cyrus and Deborah had driven across the
valley to visit their married daughter. Not finding her at home they
returned. Mrs. Morgan went into the house while her husband went to
the stable. Joscelyn was not in the kitchen, but the grandmother heard
the sound of voices and laughter in the sitting room across the hall.

"What company has Josie got?" she wondered, as she opened the hall
door and paused for a moment on the threshold to listen. As she
listened her old face grew grey and pinched; she turned noiselessly
and left the house, and flew to her husband as one distracted.

"Cyrus, Josie is play-acting in the room ... laughing and reciting and
going on. I heard her. Oh, I've always feared it would break out in
her and it has! Come you and listen to her."

The old couple crept through the kitchen and across the hall to the
open parlour door as if they were stalking a thief. Joscelyn's laugh
rang out as they did so ... a mocking, triumphant peal. Cyrus and
Deborah shivered as if they had heard sacrilege.

Joscelyn had put on a trailing, clinging black skirt which her aunt
had sent her a year ago and which she had never been permitted to
wear. It transformed her into a woman. She had cast aside her waist of
dark plum-coloured homespun and wrapped a silken shawl about herself
until only her beautiful arms and shoulders were left bare. Her hair,
glossy and brown, with burnished red lights where the rays of the dull
autumn sun struck on it through the window, was heaped high on her
head and held in place by a fillet of pearl beads. Her cheeks were
crimson, her whole body from head to foot instinct and alive with a
beauty that to Cyrus and Deborah, as they stood mute with horror in
the open d