wild glance of gratitude, of sorrow. In that
instant her heart yearned intensely over the long-limbed girl, standing
so sorrowful and proud, and cut by Fate.

"How will you manage?" she cried impulsively. "He _is_ so fond of you!"

"I can manage. Promise me one thing?"

"Anything I have."

Vesty smiled. "Promise me, if Notely should be sick, in danger, I
mean, or hurt, unfortunate, it might be--you would let me know, and let
me come and care for him, just while he needed care. I want you to
promise me!"

Her voice took the sharp tone, her eyes the frenzy, of a bird guarding
its young.

"Ah, Vesta Kirtland, you did love him! Oh, I promise."

"If you did not, there 's such a feeling toward him, different from the
others, I can't tell; if you did not, and I should ever know, it would
be like I had some little child of my own--yes, like I had some poor
little baby of my own, crying for me, and I did not come--I did not
come!"

Vesty turned. The tide had run so high those wild ocean guards were
covered by the surge.

She led the way to the outskirts of the wood and stood aside for Mrs.
Garrison to pass. The woman would have drawn near her; she waved her
hand, standing aside from her. Mrs. Garrison hesitated. The sight of
Dan Kirtland's low, brown cottage, the squalid babies in the doorway,
the fishing-nets, Vesty's last week's cotton gown swinging on the line,
some humiliating, harsh memories of her own, spurred her on, with a
sigh.

"She is fire, thank God! It will be all right," she said.

Vesty drew back into the woods.

She pressed her forehead hard against the rough bark of a tree. To
"fall down there, and to be found and taken home and put away beside
her own mother in the little home lot by the sea-wall--not to have to
stand up wearily any more, and walk back, dazed and sick, into the
light"--so she yearned--"what was there to stand up for?"

A pitiful little wail, and "Lowizy's" weary voice trying to sing
reached her.

Clouds drifted over the sky. The poplars shivered; no voice of the
thrush now chanting from the wood-depths; but the poplars, that
Christ's cross was made from, what soft voice is this of theirs
falling? "Love, love, love"--this too? sighing with strange rapture.

Vesty pulled her thick hair down over the bruised place on her
forehead. She went out of the woods, toward her father's poor house
and the wailing and the feeble singing.

"Vesty! Vesty!" one of the schoo