ving you, I cannot help telling you I love you! But you must hear the
truth; you have heard it from others, but perhaps they softened it. If I
marry you, people will always blame me and pity you. You would never ask
me to be your wife if you could see my face; you could not love me an
instant if you were not blind."

"Then I thank God unceasingly for my infirmity," said Anthony Croft, as
he raised her to her feet.

*****

Anthony and Lyddy Croft sat in the apple orchard, one warm day in late
spring.

Anthony's work would have puzzled a casual on-looker. Ten stout wires
were stretched between two trees, fifteen or twenty feet apart, and each
group of five represented the lines of the musical staff. Wooden
bars crossed the wires at regular intervals, dividing the staff into
measures. A box with many compartments sat on a stool beside him, and
this held bits of wood that looked like pegs, but were in reality whole,
half, quarter, and eighth notes, rests, flats, sharps, and the like.
These were cleft in such a way that he could fit them on the wires
almost as rapidly as his musical theme came to him, and Lyddy had
learned to transcribe with pen and ink the music she found in wood and
wire, He could write only simple airs in this way, but when he played
them on the violin they were transported into a loftier region, such
genius lay in the harmony, the arabesque, the delicate lacework of
embroidery with which the tune was inwrought; now high, now low, now
major, now minor, now sad, now gay, with the one thrilling, haunting
cadence recurring again and again, to be watched for, longed for, and
greeted with a throb of delight.

Davy was reading at the window, his curly head buried in a well-worn
Shakespeare opened at Midsummer Night's Dream. Lyddy was sitting under
her favorite pink apple-tree, a mass of fragrant bloom, more beautiful
than Aurora's morning gown. She was sewing; lining with snowy lawn
innumerable pockets in a square basket that she held in her lap. The
pockets were small, the needles were fine, the thread was a length of
cobweb. Everything about the basket was small except the hopes that she
was stitching into it; they were so great that her heart could scarcely
hold them. Nature was stirring everywhere. The seeds were springing in
the warm earth. The hens were clucking to their downy chicks just out of
the egg. The birds were flying hither and thither in the apple boughs,
and there was one little home