ncertainty, that tiny face was
always before him, uplifted of lip, smiling back into John Anderson's
vacant eyes until his own lips began to curve again and he turned once
more, nodding his head and murmuring contentedly, to the clay upon his
bench.

Out in the larger front room, as she hovered over the work spread out
before her, the girl, too, was talking aloud to herself, not in the
toneless, rambling voice that came from John Anderson's mumbling
lips, but in hushed, rapt, broken sentences which were softly tinged
with incredulous wonder.

The yellow glow of the single lamp, pushed far across the table from
her, where the most of its radiance was swallowed up by the gloom of
the uncurtained window, flickered unsteadily across her shining,
tumbled hair, coloring the faintly blue, thinly penciled lines beneath
her tip-tilted eyes with a hint of weariness totally at variance with
the firm little sloping shoulders and full lips, pursed in a childish
pout over a mouthful of pins.

The hours had passed swiftly that day for Dryad Anderson; and the last
one of all--the one since she had lighted the single small lamp in the
room and set it in the window, so far across the table from her that
she had to strain more and more closely over her swift flashing
scissors in the thickening dusk--had flown on winged feet, even faster
than she knew.

Twice, early in the evening she had laid the long shears aside and
risen from the matter that engrossed her almost to the exclusion of
every other thought, to peer intently out of the window across the
valley at the bleak old farmhouse on the crest of the opposite ridge;
and each time as she settled herself once more in the chair, hunched
boyishly over the table edge, she only nodded her bright head in
utter, undisturbed unconsciousness of the passage of time.

"He's late getting home tonight," she told herself aloud, after she
had searched the outer darkness in vain for any answering signal, but
there was not even the faintest trace of troubled worry in her words.
She merely smiled with mock severity.

"He's later than he ought to be--even if it is his last week back in
the hills. Next week I'll have to make him wait----"

Her vaguely murmured threat drifted away into nothingness, left
unfinished as she rose and stood, hands lightly bracketed upon her
hips, scrutinizing the completed work.

"There," she went on softly, sighing in deep relief, "there--that's
done--if--if it will