features, beautiful as they were, became unimportant. Her other features, except her nose and her upper lip, were like her mother's; she had evidently a maternal inheritance, permeated and strengthened by a different strain.

She had not inherited, it was clear, from little Mrs. Bent the good mind which put her at the head of her class in college. Mrs. Bent was not a dull person, and she had certainly strength of will, but she had no aptitude for books even though she sat from time to time with one of Eleanor's volumes in her hand and listened for hours together while Eleanor read to her. Sometimes when her daughter was not about she looked in a puzzled, frightened way over what Eleanor had been reading, and she kept an old grammar hidden under a pile of neatly folded clothes in her bureau drawer.

Poor little Mrs. Bent made a brave effort to follow her swan in her flight. She had not, however, risen far, even in her effort to speak as others spoke. Her mistakes were those of a low stratum. Falling from her pretty lips in her youth and heard by uncritical ears, they had not seemed so dreadful. Now they were shocking. In her anxiety to do well, she sometimes formed new words upon the analogy of those which she knew.

"I thicken it with cream and I thinnen it with vinegar," she would say sweetly.

Sometimes a sudden "them there," long pruned from Eleanor's speech, slipped from her mother's tongue. "Them there" Mrs. Bent knew was execrable and was tortured by that knowledge.

Eleanor was now almost twenty years old, and seldom do twenty years flow with such smooth current. She could not remember when she had come to Waltonville to live, and she could recall distinctly only one incident in her life before she started to the village school. Children, in families where the past is frequently referred to, recall, or imagine that they recall, many incidents, but to Eleanor nothing was recalled.

The single incident which she remembered was impressed upon her by terror. Her mother and she were walking together upon a shady street when a man stopped them and spoke to them. "So you've come back, Margie!" was all that Eleanor could remember but the words remained in her mind. The man had laid his hand on her mother's arm, and Mrs. Bent had jerked away and had hurried down the street. Eleanor had seen the man a hundred times since, a heavy, dissipated creature named Bates who sat all day on the porch of the hotel.

When she went to school the teacher, a newcomer in Waltonville, asked her her father's name and she had stood bewildered.

"Her father is dead, I guess," said the little girl next to her.

Eleanor nodded solemnly. A day or two later, when the teacher's question came to her mind again, she repeated it to her mother. Mrs. Bent, whose experience had not prepared her for the questions of a first day in school, stared at her daughter.

"The teacher asked me, and a little girl said she guessed he was dead, and so I said he was dead. Was that right, mother?"

Mrs. Bent's face grew deathly pale, so that long afterwards the incident came back to Eleanor.

"Yes, that was right," said she.

Another problem suggested itself.

"Were we ever away from here?"

"Why do you ask that?"

"Because that man said, 'So you've come back.'"

Mrs. Bent shivered. "Yes, we were away from here once. Don't think of that man, and don't ever speak to him. If he comes toward you, you run, Nellie." Then Mrs. Bent took the little girl roughly by the arm. "Children should be seen and not heard—remember that!"

From Eleanor's first year in school a few vivid experiences remained. Racing home, she had fallen and had cut her head and several stitches had to be put in under her thick hair. A neighbor, running for the old doctor, had returned with the newcomer, Dr. Green, who had dismissed the spectators and had hurt her terribly. Then he had carried her to bed, where she slept for a long time and waked with a burning pain in her head, the first pain she had ever had.

When he came the next day, she was better and he had sat by her bed for a long time, asking her question after question about her lessons. He spoke in a stern, fierce tone, as though nothing about her education or about the world pleased him. He corrected savagely her inherited errors in speech as though he could re-make her language in a morning. Her eyes closed in the middle of a sentence, and when she woke he was no longer in the room. But it seemed to her that a voice was still about, going on and on and on. Another excited voice made answer after a long time, "I ain't a-goin' to do it!" If it was Dr. Green's voice and if it was to Mrs. Bent that he was speaking, their knowledge of one another had advanced far beyond the stage of casual acquaintance. Their dialogue was not a conversation, but a quarrel.

The next day, when Eleanor sat up against the pillows, Dr. Green brought her a book. He had written "Eleanor" on the fly-leaf.

"Nellie is a nonsensical name," he declared. "It must be changed."

Eleanor looked at her mother.

"I don't care," said Mrs. Bent. If Eleanor had been dragged from the grave instead of suffering a small scalp wound, she could have been no more terrified. Her face was tear-stained, her color was gone, and one hand closed and opened constantly upon the other. In her eyes shone not only anguish, but a fierce anger. She seemed to take little pleasure in this friend of her youth.

The picture book was the first of a long series of books which appeared in the little house. First came story-books, wonder-tales, fairy-tales, "Robinson Crusoe," "Swiss Family Robinson," then a set of Scott, then poetry. Presently a bookcase had to be bought, then another.

She was allowed to go henceforth to Dr. Green's untidy office, or, at least, her mother did not reprove her when she came late from school because Dr. Green had called to her to stop, or to climb into his buggy and go with him into the country. She had ceased to be afraid of him; once or twice she ventured a shy touch of hand. There was a need in little Eleanor's soul which he supplied, a precocious intellectual curiosity which was now wakening. Presently she began to ask questions and Dr. Green answered them. Curt and positive as he was with others, he never was curt with her. He sometimes examined her to see what she had retained, and smiled to himself over the success of his teachings. Eleanor had gained all unconsciously a knowledge far superior to that of Cora Scott or even to that of Richard Lister. Neither Dr. Scott nor Dr. Lister talked to their offspring about world politics, about the literature of their own country and all others, about the trees by the wayside and the stars in the heavens as Dr. Green talked to little Eleanor Bent. It was when she repeated at home, as nearly as she could in his language, all his wisdom, that Mrs. Bent took to studying her grammar in the evenings, after Eleanor had gone to bed, and hiding it under her pillow.

Eleanor was deeply impressed by what she read and was also acutely conscious of the world about her. She had vivid impressions of each detail of the landscape before the door; of the smooth, concave fields rising to the blue hills, which rose in turn to mountains of paler blue; of the winding stream with its accompanying mists; of the journeying sun with its single moment of rest through all the year in a deep cradle in the southwestern ridge; of the distant, dim sound of the train which made its way along the next valley with rhythmic thunder; of the peace of quiet afternoons and evenings; of the changing light.

She had not yet, though she was graduating from college, begun to observe or to understand the sorrows or