rs. Instead of being outshone by more
brilliant-hued women, Miss Northrop had always had the effect of
making them look chromo-like. So, too, a certain nobility and
self-forgetfulness of manner made the more elaborate manners of others
seem the crude device of inferiority. It was a good deal due to
her eyes; she had most wonderful eyes, and I doubt if any man or
many women ever met them in a full look without feeling a little
stir of pulse--whether it was in the lashes, or in the sweet
straightforwardness of look, utterly devoid of coquetry, or in the
depth of the gray, or in what; certain it is that no one ever saw Miss
Northrop without talking of her beautiful eyes.

"A lady to see him?" The word in Green's Ferry defined only the sex.
Some one with a notice of a flock of sheep for sale, which she wanted
to get in as a local; or with an ill-spelled poem; or--by George,
yes--that school-mistress. Lucky she had not met Garvey there--poor
girl! Strong laid his pencil down, and came out from behind the screen
good-naturedly enough--and stopped short. What a thing to happen to a
man, that he should live and move and have his being for a dozen years
in the thought of one woman, should count a world worth living in
because she was somewhere on it, and a pitiful human race worth
working for because they were her fellow-creatures--and should come
out from behind his screen, and see her before his eyes--on his dingy
work-room floor--out of her four thousand miles' distance!

They had been four years schoolmates in a New England High School.
Will was a farmer's lad, from an outlying, rocky village, who worked
for his board while he went to school. He came of an unschooled,
hard-working, God-fearing yeoman race. Winifred could look up every
line of her descent, through vista of governors, college-presidents,
and ministers, back to Colonial aristocracy and gentry beyond sea.
Her great-grandfathers had carried swords in Revolutionary battles,
where Will's had followed with muskets. Winifred herself was
one of those flowers into which excellent family trees break
occasionally--flowers so lovely that no excellence of the tree seems
enough to account for them. If she had any core of aristocratic
coldness, it was so overlaid by a sweet humaneness, a frank generosity
of impulse, that no one would have known it. If she had been a man, to
have a valet, she would have been a hero to him.

Even in the democracy of school, Will Strong knew