was older than all.

Some far back ancestor and early settler had built it--the beginning of
it--before Kinnicutt had even become a town; and--rare exception to the
changes elsewhere--generation after generation of the same name and line
had inhabited it until now. Aunt Faith, exultingly, told each curious
visitor that it had been built precisely two hundred and ten years. Out
in the back kitchen, or lean-to, was hung to a rafter the identical gun
with which the "old settler" had ranged the forest that stretched then
from the very door; and higher up, across a frame contrived for it, was
the "wooden saddle" fabricated for the back of the placid, slow-moving
ox, in the time when horses were as yet rare in the new country, and
used with pillions, to transport I can't definitely say how many of the
family to "meeting."

Between these--the best room and the out-kitchen--the labyrinth of
sitting room, bedrooms, kitchen proper, milk room, and pantry,
partitioned off, or added on, many of them since the primary date of the
main structure, would defy the pencil of modern architect.

In one of these irregularly clustered apartments that opened out on
different aspects, unexpectedly, from their conglomerate center, Faith
sat, some fifteen minutes after her entrance into the house, at a little
round table between two corner windows that looked northwest and
southwest, and together took in the full radiance of the evening sky.

Opposite sat her aunt, taking care of her as regarded tea, toast, and
plain country loaf cake, and watching somewhat curiously, also, her
face.

Faith's face had changed a little since Aunt Henderson had seen her
last. It was not the careless girl's face she had known. There was a
thought in it now. A thought that seemed to go quite out from, and
forget the self from which it came.

Aunt Henderson wondered greatly what sudden whim or inward purpose had
brought her grandniece hither.

When Faith absolutely declined any more tea or cake, Miss Henderson's
tap on the table leaf brought in Glory McWhirk.

A tall, well-grown girl of eighteen was Glory, now--quite another Glory
than had lightened, long ago, the dull little house in Budd Street, and
filled it with her bright, untutored dreams. The luminous tresses had
had their way since then; that is, with certain comfortable bounds
prescribed; and rippled themselves backward from a clear, contented
face, into the net that held them tidily.

Faith looked