strained and intense, her big eyes fixed on a red,
pulsing planet above the hemlocks outside, she said:

"Dear God, I'll give you three days to move his stony heart to let me
go to school; if you don't do it by then, I'm going to worship graven
images!"

Priscilla at that time was eight, and three days seemed to her a generous
time limit. But Nathaniel's stony heart did not melt, and at the end of
the three days Priscilla ceased to pray for many and many a year, and
forthwith she proceeded to worship a graven image of her own creation.

A mile up the grassy road, beyond Lonely Farm and on the way toward the
deep woods, was an open space of rich, red rock surrounded by a soft,
feathery fringe of undergrowth and a few well-grown trees. From this spot
one could see the Channel widened out into the Little Bay: the myriad
islands, and, off to the west, the Secret and Fox Portages, beyond which
lay the Great Bay, where the storms raged and the wind--such wind as
Kenmore never knew--howled and tore like a raging fiend!

In this open stretch of trees and rock Priscilla set up her own god. She
had found the bleached skull of a cow in one of her father's pastures;
this gruesome thing mounted upon a forked stick, its empty eye-sockets
and ears filled with twigs and dried grasses, was sufficiently pagan
and horrible to demand an entirely unique form of worship, and this
Priscilla proceeded to evolve. She invented weird words, meaningless but
high-sounding; she propitiated her idol with wild dances and an abandon
of restraint. Before it she had moments of strange silence when, with
wonder-filled eyes, she waited for suggestion and impression by which to
be guided. Very young was she when intuitively she sensed the inner call
that was always so deeply to sway her. Through the years from eight to
fourteen Priscilla worshipped more or less frequently before her secret
shrine. The uncanny ceremony eased many an overstrained hour and did for
the girl what should have been done in a more normal way. The place on
the red rock became her sanctuary. To it she carried her daily task of
sewing and dreamed her long dreams.

The Glenns rarely went to church--the distance was too great--but
Nathaniel, looming high and stern across the table in the bare kitchen,
morning and night, set forth the rigid, unlovely creed of his belief.
This fell upon Priscilla's unheeding ears, but the hours before the
shrine were deeply, tenderly religious, althou