emotional man, feelings rarely showed on his face,
and his wife alone knew how hard the blow had been to him--she knew
because she had suffered from the same stroke. But the children, the
younger brother Charles and the sister Mary could not always remember,
and with them the impression of the one who was gone would grow dimmer
in time. The border too always expected a certain percentage of loss in
human life, it was one of the facts with which the people must reckon,
and thus the name of Henry Ware was rarely spoken.

To-day was without a cloud. New emigrants had come across the mountains,
adding welcome strength to the colony, and extending the limits of the
village. But danger had passed them by, they had heard once or twice
more of the great war in the far-away East, but it was so distant and
vague that most of them forgot it; the Indians across the Ohio had never
come this way, and so far Henry Ware was the only toll that they had
paid to the wilderness. There was cause for happiness, as human
happiness goes.

A slim girl bearing in her hand a wooden pail came through the gate of
the palisade. She was bare-headed, but her wonderful dark-brown hair
coiled in a shining mass was touched here and there with golden gleams
where the sunshine fell upon it. Her face, browned somewhat, was yet
very white on the forehead, and the cheeks had the crimson flush of
health. She wore a dress of homemade linsey dyed red, and its close fit
suggested the curves of her supple, splendid young figure. She walked
with strong elastic step toward the spring that gushed from a hillside,
and which after a short course fell into the little river.

It was Lucy Upton, grown much taller now, as youth develops rapidly on
the border, a creature nourished into physical perfection first by the
good blood that was in her, then developed in the open air, and by work,
neither too little nor too much.

She reached the spring, and setting the pail by its side looked down at
the cool, gushing stream. It invited her and she ran her white rounded
arm through it, making curves and oblongs that were gone before they
were finished. She was in a thoughtful mood. Once or twice she looked at
the forest, and each time that she looked she shivered because the
shadow of the wilderness was then very heavy upon her.

Silas Pennypacker, the schoolmaster, came to the spring while she was
there, and they spoke together, because they were great friends, these
two. H