urned her head as her companion came up behind her on the garden
path, half expecting to have his eyes meet hers with a visible shade of
sardonic mockery, and prepared to meet it halfway with a similar
amusement at the absurdity of human beings, herself included.

* * * * *

He was not looking at her at all, but straight before him, unconscious
for an instant that she had turned her eyes on him, and in this instant
before the customary mask of self-consciousness dropped over his face,
she read there, plain and startling to see, unmistakable to her grown
woman's experience of life, the marks of a deep, and painful, and
present emotion.

All of her hair-splitting speculations withered to nothing. She did not
even wonder what it was that moved him so strangely and dreadfully.
There was no room for thought in the profound awed impersonal sympathy
which with a great hush came upon her at the sight of another human
being in pain.

He felt some intimate emanation from her, turned towards her, and for
the faintest fraction of time they looked at each other through a rent
in the veil of life.

* * * * *

Cousin Hetty's old voice called them cheerfully, "Over here, this way
under the willow-tree."

They turned in that direction, to hear her saying, ". . . that was in 1763
and of course they came on horseback, using the Indian trails the men
had learned during the French-and-Indian wars. Great-grandmother (she
was a twelve-year-old girl then) had brought along a willow switch from
their home in Connecticut. When the whole lot of them decided to settle
here in the valley, and her folks took this land to be theirs, she stuck
her willow switch into the ground, alongside the brook here, and this is
the tree it grew to be. Looks pretty battered up, don't it, like other
old folks."

Mr. Welles tipped his pale, quiet face back to look up at the great
tree, stretching its huge, stiff old limbs mutilated by time and
weather, across the tiny, crystal brook dimpling and smiling and
murmuring among its many-colored pebbles. "Queer, isn't it," he
speculated, "how old the tree has grown, and how the brook has stayed
just as young as ever."

"It's the other way around between 'Gene Powers' house and his
pine-tree," commented Aunt Hetty. "The pine-tree gets bigger and finer
and stronger all the time, seems 'sthough, and the house gets more
battered and feeble-looking."

M