suitors.

But the secret was all her own of how something in her had awakened.
This little girl would never again be precisely the same Mary Burton who
had started out that Saturday afternoon with a heart full of rebellion
and who had come back appeased.

And Ham, his mother feared, was finding his burdens too heavy for young
shoulders. He had made no complaint, but an expression of settled
abstraction had come into his face and at home he was always silent.

After the falling of the first heavy snow neither Paul nor Mary ventured
out to school, but Ham's avid hunger for education lost no coveted day
of the term. When his morning work was ended, wrapped in patched
mackinaw and traveling on snowshoes, he made the trip across the white
slopes, where only the pines were green, and came back at the day's end
for his evening chores. The trip was a bit shortened now because the
lake was ice-locked and he could cross between the flag-marked holes of
the pickerel-fishers. He had been afraid to speak of those things which
were burning consumingly in his mind; afraid that if once he let slip
the leash of restraint he would be carried away on a tide of passion.
But some day he must speak, and, strangely enough, the match that
lighted the train of powder was the second coming of the young man who
had met Mary on the road.

He came near nightfall, on snowshoes, and when he knocked it was the
girl who opened the door. At first, she did not recognize him because
the mountain tan had given way to a pallor of recent illness and the
face was very thin. But as soon as he smiled, the whimsical eyes
proclaimed him.

"You--you haven't died yet," Mary Burton spoke instinctively, and stood
holding the door open to the blustering of the sharp wind, quite
forgetful that she was barring his way. But the young man who had come
out of the thickening twilight laughed. He shook the snow off his
mackinaw, for a fresh downfall was making the air almost as white as the
drifts below.

"Not yet," he assured her, "but unless you let me come in out of the
cold I shall probably perish on your doorstep."

Tom Burton, the father, sat gazing at the stove in the center of the
room. He was propped in a heavy chair with cushions about him, and he,
too, had grown thinner and rawer of joint. He had been for some time
thus silently staring ahead with a pipe long forgotten and dead of ash
in his hand and an old newspaper--so old as to be no longer a
newspaper