ed the new day, its
beauty charmed her when she went out for a walk after her dinner--or,
rather, after her mid-day biscuit. It was so fresh, so sweet, so virgin;
and the spruce woods around the old Lloyd place were athrill with busy
spring doings and all sprinkled through with young lights and shadows.
Some of their delight found its way into the Old Lady's bitter heart
as she wandered through them, and when she came out at the little plank
bridge over the brook down under the beeches, she felt almost gentle and
tender once more. There was one big beech there, in particular, which
the Old Lady loved for reasons best known to herself--a great, tall
beech with a trunk like the shaft of a gray marble column and a leafy
spread of branches over the still, golden-brown pool made beneath it by
the brook. It had been a young sapling in the days that were haloed by
the vanished glory of the Old Lady's life.

The Old Lady heard childish voices and laughter afar up the lane which
led to William Spencer's place just above the woods. William Spencer's
front lane ran out to the main road in a different direction, but this
"back lane" furnished a short cut and his children always went to school
that way.

The Old Lady shrank hastily back behind a clump of young spruces. She
did not like the Spencer children because they always seemed so afraid
of her. Through the spruce screen she could see them coming gaily down
the lane--the two older ones in front, the twins behind, clinging to the
hands of a tall, slim, young girl--the new music teacher, probably. The
Old Lady had heard from the egg pedlar that she was going to board at
William Spencer's, but she had not heard her name.

She looked at her with some curiosity as they drew near--and then, all
at once, the Old Lady's heart gave a great bound and began to beat as it
had not beaten for years, while her breath came quickly and she trembled
violently. Who--WHO could this girl be?

Under the new music teacher's straw hat were masses of fine chestnut
hair of the very shade and wave that the Old Lady remembered on another
head in vanished years; from under those waves looked large, violet-blue
eyes with very black lashes and brows--and the Old Lady knew those eyes
as well as she knew her own; and the new music teacher's face, with all
its beauty of delicate outline and dainty colouring and glad, buoyant
youth, was a face from the Old Lady's past--a perfect resemblance in
every respect