your name is Mary Burton? I must remember that because in, say
ten years, provided I last that long, I expect to hear of you."

"Hear of me? Why?" she demanded.

The stranger bent forward and coughed, and when the paroxysm had ended
he smiled whimsically again.

"I'll tell you a secret, though God knows it's a perilous thing to feed
a woman's vanity--even a woman of eleven. Did anyone ever tell you that
you are possessed of a marvelous pair of eyes?"

Instinctively little Mary Burton flinched as though she had been struck
and she raised one hand to her face to touch her long lashes. Silent
tears welled up; tears of indignant pain because she thought she was
being cruelly ridiculed.

But the stranger had no such thought. If to the uneducated opinion of
Lake Forsaken, Mary's face was a matter for jest and libel, the
impression made on the young man who had been reared in the capitals of
Europe was quite different. He had been sent, on the verge of manhood,
into the hermit's seclusion with the hermit's opportunity of reflecting
on all he had seen, and digesting his experience into a philosophy
beyond his years.

Perhaps had Mary been born into her own Puritan environment two
centuries earlier, she might have faced even sterner criticism, for
there was without doubt a strange uncommonplaceness about her which the
thought of that day might have charged to the attendance of witches
about her birth. The promise of beauty she had, but a beauty unlike that
of common standards. It was a quality that at first caught the beholder
like the shock of a plunge into cold water, and then set him tingling
through his pulses--also like a plunge into an icy pool.

To the farmer folk Mary was merely "queer," but as the man in the buggy
sat looking down at her he realized the promise of something strangely
gorgeous. As she shifted her position a shaft of mellow sunlight struck
her face and it was as though her witch--or fairy--godmother had
switched on a blaze of color.

"I wasn't making fun of you," declared the stranger; and his voice held
so simple and courteous a note that Mary smiled again and was reassured.

The child was still thin and awkward and undeveloped of line or
proportion, but color, which many painters will tell you is the
soul-essence of all beauty, she had in the same wasteful splendor that
the autumn woods had it in their carnival abundance.

Her hair was heavy, and its gold was of the lustrous and burnished sor