r that, always "father dear." Then Reuben would wake Jane up, sighing
usually, "Poor mother, how tired she is!" Sometimes Jane said when she
kissed Draxy, at the door of her little room, "Why don't you kiss your pa
for good-night?"

"I kissed father before you waked up, ma," was always Draxy's quiet
answer.

And so the years went on. There was much discomfort, much deprivation in
Reuben Miller's house. Food was not scarce; the farm yielded enough, such
as it was, very coarse and without variety; but money was hard to get; the
store seemed to be absolutely unremunerative, though customers were not
wanting; and the store and the farm were all that Reuben Miller had in the
world. But in spite of the poor food; in spite of the lack of most which
money buys; in spite of the loyal, tender, passionate despair of her
devotion to her father, Draxy grew fairer and fairer, stronger and
stronger. At fourteen her physique was that of superb womanhood. She had
inherited her body wholly from her father. For generations back, the
Millers had been marked for their fine frames. The men were all over six
feet tall, and magnificently made; and the women were much above the
average size and strength. On Draxy's fourteenth birthday she weighed one
hundred and fifty pounds, and measured five feet six inches in height. Her
coloring was that of an English girl, and her bright brown hair fell below
her waist in thick masses. To see the face of a simple-hearted child,
eager but serene, determined but lovingly gentle, surrounded and glorified
by such splendid physical womanhood, was a rare sight. Reuben Miller's
eyes filled with tears often as he secretly watched his daughter, and said
to himself, "Oh, what is to be her fate! what man is worthy of the wife
she will be?" But the village people saw only a healthy, handsome girl,
"overgrown," they thought, and "as queer as her father before her," they
said, for Draxy, very early in life, had withdrawn herself somewhat from
the companionship of the young people of the town.

As for Jane, she loved and reverenced Draxy, very much as she did Reuben,
with touching devotion, but without any real comprehension of her nature.
If she sometimes felt a pang in seeing how much more Reuben talked with
Draxy than with her, how much more he sought to be with Draxy than with
her, she stifled it, and, reproaching herself for disloyalty to each, set
herself to work for them harder than before.

In Draxy's sixteent