ver solved is another matter
and this story deals with that.

Meredith Thornton was young and beautiful. Up to the hour that she let
go she had lived as they live who are drugged. She had looked on life
with her senses blurred and her actions largely controlled by others.

Old Becky, on the other hand, had gripped life with no uncertain hold;
she, according to the vernacular of her hills, "had the call to larn,"
and she learned deeply.

Sister Angela had clung to the Wheel. She had swung well around the
circle and she believed she was nearing the end when the strange demand
was made upon her.

The demand was made by Meredith Thornton and Becky Adams. Meredith, from
her great distance, somewhat prepared Sister Angela by a letter, but
Becky, being unable either to read or write, simply took to the trail
from her lonely cabin on Thunder Peak and claimed a promise made three
years before.

And now, since _The Rock_ played a definite part in what happened, it
should have a word here.

In a land where nearly all the solid substance is rock--not stone, mind
you--_The Rock_ held a peculiar position. It dominated the landscape and
the imagination of Silver Gap, and the superstition as well. It was a
huge, greenish-white mass, a mile to the east of Thunder Peak, and over
its smooth face innumerable waterfalls trickled and shone. With this
colour and motion, like a mighty Artist, the wind and light played,
forming pictures that needed little fancy to discern.

At times cities would be delicately outlined with towers and roofs
rising loftily; then again one might see a deep wood with a road winding
far and away, luring home-tied feet to wander. And sometimes--not often,
to be sure--the Ship would ride at anchor as on a painted sea.

The Ship boded no good to Silver Gap as any one could tell. It had
brought the plague and the flood; it brought bad crops and raids on
hidden stills; it waited until its evil cargo had done its worst and
then it sailed away in the night, bearing its pitiful load of dead, or
its burden of fear and hate. Surely there was good and sufficient reason
for dreading the appearance of The Ship, and on a certain autumn morning
it appeared and soon after the two women, unknown to each other, came to
Ridge House and this story began.

CHAPTER I

"_Wait and thy soul shall speak._"

There is, in the human soul, as in the depths of the ocean, a state of
eternal calm. Around it the waves of unrest