pillow. "It gives me the creeps. Times
are when I fancy there is a ghost of a girl face in the flowers. Sandy
laughs at me--but I've caught the sight more than once in certain
lights and its real upsetting."

"Well, I want that he should take all the art in that he's capable of
digesting, and I want you to see mountains and what not that you've
hungered after all your days and I want to see--Paris!"

"It's a real outlandish city for morals, Levi."

"Well, it will make me glad to get back to Boston, Matilda," Levi
chuckled. "Now lie down and try to sleep."

"I feel real drowsy, Levi. My! how much I have got to be grateful for.
You are a good man, brother. Time was when I feared success might
harden you."

Levi did not rest well that night. Alone in his prim, old-fashioned
chamber he lay and made plans for the future.

"And after we come back," he thought, "I'm going to send Sandy up to
the hills with blank checks in his pocket. I'm going to see what he
can do in the way of redeeming Lost Hollow. He'll never be happy away
from that God-forsaken place--it's in his soul and system. There's
that land, too, I bought seven years ago! That oughtn't to be lying
fallow."

Then his roving thoughts settled on his sister. "Matilda must consent
to more help here in the house--she looks peaked."

A sharp pang brought him to an upright position. He seemed to be
beside lonely Sandy as he had stood that very day by an obscure
grave--somewhere in a shabby little graveyard.

"Matilda has been one sister in ten thousand and she's asked precious
little. Caroline got things quite naturally while she lived at
home--'Tilda took the leavings always and patched, somehow, a thankful,
beautiful life out of them. She's going to get whole pieces of cloth
from now----" he muttered, "with Sandy thrown in."

CHAPTER XVII

Perhaps it was the spring air; perhaps it was the turn in the tide of
Cynthia Walden's life, but whatever it was it roused her and gripped
her from early morning. At six o'clock on that May day she awoke in
her shabby room of Stoneledge and looked out of the vine-covered
window, heard a bird sing a wild, delicious little song, and then sat
up with the strange thrill of happiness flooding her heart and soul.

It was a warm morning, more like late June than late May, and both the
bird and the girl felt the joy in the promise of summer.

At nineteen Cynthia, like the spring morn, bore the mark of her