l. She was
like the first arbutus flowers." Surely this woman with her pallid skin
and her faded spiritless eyes could not have been the one they meant!

There was some talk between my Father and his patient, the gist of which
I could not get, absorbed as I was with the face inside the patch-work
quilt. We went out silently, after I had taken a last, long look into
the bundle.--Lisbeth had come into my world.

* * * * *

Some twenty years were to go by before I was to realize the significance
of the scene that I had witnessed that winter morning at the old frame
farmhouse. It was the year of my return to America with Jim Shepherd,
whose career as a rising young painter had just begun to be heralded,
that I felt impelled to revisit the place of my childhood. Not my least
interest lay in seeing Lisbeth again. I remembered her as a fragile
upstanding girl of twelve with soft hair the color of dead leaves and
gray inquiring eyes. But whatever it was that I was to find I was
conscious that I would see it with new appreciation of values. For if my
eight years of medical work abroad had sharpened my discernment, even
more had my intimacy with Jim Shepherd swept my mind clean of prejudice
and casuistry.

To strangers Jim must often have appeared naive and undevious. The fact
was that his passion for truth-probing and his worship of the
undiscovered loveliness of life had obscured whatever self-consciousness
had been born in him. Meeting him for the first time was like entering
another element. It left you a little flat. That candor and eagerness of
his at first balked you, it made negligible your traditions of thought
and speech. One ended by loving him.

On our arrival at the sparse little village I told him of the Dartons. I
had had no news of them for the past four years, and inquiries among the
neighbors left me only the more at sea. Lisbeth they seldom saw, they
said; she never went to church or meetings; and, especially since her
mother, in an unprecedented flare of rebellion, had gone to live with a
married sister in town, she had grown silent and taciturn. As for old
Con Darton, he was going to seed, in spite of the remnants of an earlier
erudition that still clung to him. That is, though he went about
unshaven and in slovenly frayed clothing, he still quoted fluently from
the Bible and Gray's "Elegy." Among the villagers he had come to have
the reputation of a philosopher and an ill-