nd a
wakeful, troubled heart into which love had flashed like a meteor and
which it threatened, now, to sear like a lightning bolt. It seemed to
her that life had gone aimlessly, uneventfully on until without warning
or preparation it had burst into a glory of discovery and in the same
breath into a chaos of destruction.

"Kain't ye give me no encouragement yit, Uncle Jase?" she whispered once
when he came to the bedside, with a convulsive catching at her throat,
though her eyes were dry and hot, and the old man, too ruggedly honest
to soften the edge of fact with evasion, shook his head.

"I hain't got no power ter say yit--afore I sees how he wakes up
termorrer," he admitted. "Why don't ye lay down, leetle gal? I'll
summons ye ef airy need arises."

But the girl shook her head and later the old man, stirring on his
pallet, heard her praying in an almost argumentative tone of
supplication:

"Ye sees, Almighty God, hit don't call for no master _big_ miracle ter
save him ... an' Ye've done fotched ther dead back ter life afore now."

That night Dorothy Harper grew up. For the first time she recognized the
call of her adult womanhood which centred about one man and made its own
universe. She would not be a child again.

* * * * *

The town of Lake Erie was no town at all, but a scant cluster of
shack-like buildings at the crossing of two roads, which were hardly
roads at all, either.

The place had been called Lake Erie when the veterans who had gone to
the "War of Twelve" came home from service with Perry--for in no war
that the nation has waged has this hermit people failed of response and
representation.

This morning it stood as an unsightly detail against a background of
impressive beauty. Back of it rose wooded steeps, running the whole
lovely gamut of greenery and blossoming colour to a sun-filled sky which
was flawless.

The store of Jake Crabbott was open and already possessed of its quorum
for the discussion of the day's news.

And to-day there _was_ news! A dozen hickory-shirted and slouch-hatted
men lounged against the wall or on empty boxes and broken chairs about
its porch and door.

The talk was all of the stranger who had come so recently from Virginia
and who had found such a hostile welcome awaiting him. Spice was added
to the debate by a realization in the mind of every man who joined in it
that the mysterious firer of those shots might be--and probably was