brain of an engineer and the prophetic vision of a seer.

IV

The next months were the hardest of her life. The long dreary battle
against insurmountable obstacles she had been able to bear with a stoical
front, but the sickening alternations of emotions which now filled her
days wore upon her until she was fairly suffocated. About mail time each
day she became of an unendurable irritability, so that poor Miss Molly was
quite afraid to go near her. For the first time in her life there was no
living thing growing in her house.

"Don't you mean to have any service this Christmas?" asked Miss Molly one
day.

Miss Abigail shouted at her so fiercely that she retreated in a panic.
"Why not? Why shouldn't we? What makes you think such a thing?"

"Why, I didn't know of anybody to go but just you and me, and I noticed
that you hadn't any flowers started for decorations the way you always do."

Miss Abigail flamed and fulminated as though her timid little friend had
offered her an insult. "I've been to service in that church every
Christmas since I was born and I shall till I die. And as for my not
growing any flowers, that's _my_ business, ain't it!" Her voice cracked
under the outraged emphasis she put on it.

Her companion fled away without a word, and Miss Abigail sank into a chair
trembling. It came over her with a shock that her preoccupation had been
so great that she had _forgotten_ about her winter flowers.

The fortnight before Christmas was interminable to her. Every morning she
broke a hobbling path through the snow to the post-office, where she
waited with a haggard face for the postmaster's verdict of "nothing." The
rest of the day she wandered desolately about her house, from one window
to another, always staring, staring up at Hemlock Mountain.

She disposed of the problem of the Christmas service with the absent
competence of a person engrossed in greater matters. Miss Molly had
declared it impossible--there was no money for a minister, there was no
congregation, there was no fuel for the furnace. Miss Abigail wrote so
urgently to the Theological Seminary of the next State that they promised
one of their seniors for the service; and she loaded a hand sled with wood
from her own woodshed and, harnessing herself and Miss Molly to it, drew
it with painful difficulty through the empty village street. There was not
enough of this fuel to fill even once the great furnace in the cellar, so
she decreed