eed to work."

"Why not?"

"There's plenty that wants to marry her round about," was the boy's
self-conscious summing up.

With a sense of revolt, Van Alen left him, and, undressing in the room
with the canopy bed, he called up vaguely the vision of a little girl
who had visited them in the city. She had had green eyes and freckles
and red hair. Beyond that she had made no impression on his callowness.
And her name was Mazie Wetherell.

He threw himself on the couch, and the night winds, coming in through
the open window, stirred the curtains of the canopy bed with the light
touch of a ghostly hand.

Then dreams came, and through them ran the thread of his hope of seeing
Mazie Wetherell in the morning.

But even with such preparation, her beauty seemed to come upon him
unawares when he saw her at breakfast. And again at noon, and again at
night. But it was the third day before he saw her alone.

All that day he had explored the length and breadth of the family
estate, finding it barren, finding that the population of the little
village at its edge had decreased to a mere handful of laggards, finding
that there was no lawyer within miles and but one doctor; gaining a
final impression that back here in the hills men would come no more
where once men had thronged.

It was almost evening when he followed a furrowed brown road that led
westward. Above the bleak line of the horizon the sun hung, a red gold
disk. There were other reds, too, along the way--the sumac flaming
scarlet against the gray fence-rails; the sweetbrier, crimson-spotted
with berries; the creeper, clinging with ruddy fingers to dead
tree-trunks; the maple leaves rosy with first frosts.

And into this vividness came the girl who had waited on the table, and
her flaming cheeks and copper hair seemed to challenge the glow of the
autumn landscape.

She would have passed him with a nod, but he stopped her.

"You must not run away, Mazie Wetherell," he said; "you used to treat me
better than that when you were a little girl."

She laughed. "Do you remember my freckles and red hair?"

"I remember your lovely manners."

"I had to have nice manners. It is only pretty children who can afford
to be bad."

"And pretty women?" he asked, with his eyes on the color that came and
went.

She flung out her hands in a gesture of protest "I have seen so few."

His lips were opened to tell her of her own beauty, but something
restrained him, some percept