ss or the
reputed size of his balance at the County National.

But if time had dimmed their interest in the father, it had only
served to whet their keen curiosity over the girl, who, in the
intervening eighteen years, had changed from a half-starved, half-clad
child that flashed through the thickets like a wild thing, into a long
slender-limbed creature with wide, duskily violet eyes and shimmering,
tumbled hair--a creature of swift, passionate moods who, if they could
only have known it, was startlingly like the wild things for which he
had named her.

They were not given to the reading of heathen mythology, the people of
Boltonwood, and so they could not know. But with every passing day
they did realize that Dryad Anderson's fiercely wistful little face
was growing more and more like that of the little statue in the
grounds behind the church--the stone face of John Anderson's frail
bride of a year--long since turned a dull, nondescript gray by the sun
and weather.

She had the same trick of smiling with her eyes when there was no
mirth lurking in the corners of her full lips, the same full-throated
little laugh that carried the faintest hint of mockery in its thrill.
Year by year her slim body lost its unformed boyishness in a new soft
roundness which her long outgrown skirt and too scant little waist
failed completely to conceal. And the hillsfolk were given to shaking
their heads over her now, just as the generation before had done, for
to cap it all--the last straw upon the back of their toleration--Dryad
Anderson had "took up" with Denny Bolton, Young Denny, the last of his
name. Nothing more was needed to damn her forever in the eyes of the
hills people, although they could not have explained just why, even if
they had tried.

And Young Denny, waiting there in the thickening dusk before his own
dark place, smiled gravely back at that single blinking light in the
window of the cottage squatting under the hill--he smiled with
whimsical gentleness, a man's smile that softened somehow the hard
lines of jaw and lip. It was more than three years now since the first
night when he had stood and watched for it to flash out across the
valley before he had turned and gone to set a lamp in the dark front
windows behind him in answer to it.

He could never remember just how they had agreed upon that signal--there
had never been any mutual agreement--but every Saturday night since
that first one, three years back, he h