great big giant bound hand and foot. She was a
strange child, full of some wonderful power that she hardly understood
herself--a child quite out of the common groove of life, quite above the
people who surrounded her. They understood her beauty, her defiance, her
pride, but not the dramatic instinct and power that, innate in her, made
every word and action seem strange.

Honest, stolid Robert Noel was bewildered by her; he did his best in
every way, but he had an uneasy consciousness that his best was but a
poor attempt. He sent her to school, the best in Rashleigh, but she
learned anything and everything except obedience.

She looked out of place even there, this dark-eyed Spanish girl, among
the pretty pink and white children with fair hair and blue eyes. She
bewildered even the children; they obeyed her, and she had the greatest
influence over them. She taught them recitations and plays, she fired
their imaginations by wonderful stories; she was a new, brilliant,
wonderful element in their lives. Even the school mistress, meek through
the long suffering of years, even she worshiped and feared her--the
brilliant, tiresome girl, who was like a flash of light among the
others. She had a face so grand and a voice so thrilling it was no
unusual thing when she was reading aloud in the school-room for the
others to suspend all work, thrilled to the heart by the sound of her
voice. She soon learned all that the Rashleigh governess could teach
her--she taught herself even more. She had little taste for drawing,
much for music, but her whole heart and soul were in books.

Young as she was, it was grand to hear her trilling out the pretty love
speeches of Juliet, declaring the wrongs of Constance or Katherine,
moaning out the woes of Desdemona. She had Shakespeare almost by heart,
and she loved the grand old dramatist.

When she was sixteen her uncle took her from school, and then the
perplexities of his honest life began. He wanted her to take her place
as mistress of the house, to superintend the farm and the dairy, to take
affectionate interest in the poultry and birds, to see that the butter
was of a deep, rich yellow, and the new laid eggs sent to market. From
the moment he intrusted those matters in her hands, his life became a
burden to him, for they were entirely neglected.

Farmer Noel would go into his dairy and find everything wrong, the cream
spilled, the butter spoiled; but when he looked at the dark-eyed youn