nd all the while, when the wind
had made every leaf a whispering tongue, it had been trying to tell her
many ancient stories.

"I knows, now, old roof tree," she murmured. "I've done found out erbout
ye," and her hand patted the close-knit bark.

Then, in the subtle influence of the moonlight and the night that awoke
all the young fires of dreaming, she half closed her eyes and seemed to
see a woman who looked like herself yet who--in the phantasy of that
moment--was arrayed in a gown of silk and small satin slippers, looking
up into the eyes of a man whose hair was dark and whose chin was cleft
and whose smile flashed upon white teeth. Only as the dream took hold
upon her its spirit changed and the other woman seemed to be herself and
the man seemed to be the one whom she had glimpsed to-day.

Then her reveries were broken. In the shallow water of the ford down at
the river splashed a horse's hoofs and she heard a voice singing in the
weird falsetto of mountain minstrelsy an old ballade which, like much
else of the life there, was a heritage from other times.

So the girl brushed an impatient hand over rudely awakened eyes and
turned back to the door, knowing that Bas Rowlett had come sparking.

CHAPTER III

It was a distraite maiden who greeted the visiting swain that night and
one so inattentive to his wooing that his silences became long, under
discouragement, and his temper sullen. Earlier than was his custom he
bade her good-night and took himself moodily away.

Then Dorothy Harper kindled a lamp and hastened to the attic where she
sat with her head bowed over the old diary while the house, save for
herself, slept and the moon rode down toward the west.

Often her eyes wandered away from the bone-yellow pages of the ancient
document and grew pensive in dreamy meditation. This record was opening,
for her, the door of intimately wrought history upon the past of her
family and her nation when both had been in their bravest youth.

She did not read it all nor even a substantial part of it because
between scraps of difficult perusal came long and alluring intervals of
easy revery. Had she followed its sequence more steadily many things
would have been made manifest to her which she only came to know later,
paying for the knowledge with a usury of experience and suffering.

Yet since that old diary not only set out essential matters in the lives
of her ancestors but also things integral and germane to