ngth, and no one save
Hamilton Burton himself suspected that this antipathy was growing into
an obsession.

Besides, there were more important matters to consider, and a hundred
active enemies to watch. Any such moment of relaxed vigilance as he
himself had seized to overthrow the preeminence of others would be used
to overthrow his own.

While he rode on the highest crest of Fortune's wave the one member of
his family who had remained unchanged fell ill. For a week all else was
forgotten while the Burton family waited the outcome in Aunt Hannah's
bedroom.

That austere old spinster talked in her delirium of other days and
denied that they had altered. In broken rambling words she took them all
back with her to a life they had put behind them. The names of cows and
horses in whose care Hamilton had so many hundred times taken down and
put up the panel of stable-lot bars dwelt on her trembling lips and she
smiled contentedly over simple things. Finally, she told them that she
was sleepy and would talk no longer, because tomorrow morning she must
be up early and give the house a thorough cleaning. With that
announcement she turned her seamed face to the wall and slept. It was a
placid sleep which no clamor of an alarm clock would ever disturb.

Because she had always insisted upon it with the childish pertinacity of
the simple-souled, the Burton family went back with her to the ragged
slopes of the White Mountains. They saw again, for the first time since
they had turned away from their padlocked door, the hills and rocks and
rutted roads that had once been their own country.

Jefferson Edwardes went with them, and when the funeral was ended and
the little cortege left the churchyard, he and Mary Burton remained a
while among the graves. Most of the trees were stark and naked, but to
one or two still clung shreds of departed autumn brilliancy. A maple
still boasted a few scarlet tatters of the banner with which it had
done honor to the Frost King. By the decaying wall of the little church
a scrub oak rattled its tenacious leafage of russet brown.

About the two tilted and careened the neglected tombstones of those who
slept humbly but restfully here. The gaunt hills, too, tilted and
careened in heaped-up barriers of dilapidation to the distance where the
autumn veiled them in a smoky purple. But above them was the glow of
crimson and rose-ash, where the sunset burned.

Mary's beautiful eyes were bright with tears