, his great shoulders in the vividly checkered coat began to
sag--they slumped downward-until his head was bowed and his face lay
hidden in the long arms crooked limply asprawl across the table-top.

Once more he spoke aloud, hours later.

"They didn't want me," he repeated dully. "Not even for the work I
could do!"

CHAPTER III

It was very quiet in the front room of the little cottage that
squatted in the black shadow below Judge Maynard's huge house on the
hill. No sound broke the heavy silence save the staccato clip-clip
of the long shears in the fingers of the girl who was leaning almost
breathlessly over the work spread out on the table beneath the
feeble glow of the single oil-lamp, unless the faint, monotonous
murmur which came in an endless sing-song from the lips of the
stooped, white-haired old figure in the small back room beyond the
door could be named anything so definite.

John Anderson's lips always moved when he worked. His fingers,
strong and clean-jointed and almost womanishly smooth--the only part
of the man not pitifully seared with age--flew with a bewildering
nimbleness one moment, only to dwell the next with a lingering
caress upon the shaping features before him; and for each caress of
his finger tips there was an accompanying, vacantly gentle smile or
an uncertainly emphatic nod of the silvered head which gave the
one-sided conversation a touch of uncanny reality.

And yet, at regularly recurring intervals, even his busy fingers
faltered, while he sat head bent far over to one side as though he
were listening for something, waiting for some reply. At every such
pause the vacant smile left his face and failed to return immediately.
The monotonously inflectionless conversation was still, too, for the
time, and he merely sat and stared perplexedly about him, around the
small workshop, bare except for the single high-stool that held him
and the littered bench on which he leaned.

There was a foot-wide shelf against each wall of that room, fastened
waist high from the floor, and upon it stood countless small white
statues, all slim and frail of limb, all upturned and smiling of lip.
They were miraculously alike, these delicate white figures, each with
a throat-tightening heartache in its wistful face--so alike in form
and expression that they might have been cast in a single mold.
Wherever his eyes might fall, whenever he turned in one of those
endlessly repeated fits of faltering u