yed, efficient damsel, more than a little pretty,
and with much repose of manner. Link Ferris, from the first, eyed her
with a certain awe. When a mystic growing attraction was added to this
and when it in turn merged into love, the sense of awe was not lost.
Rather it was strengthened.

In all his thirty-one lean and lonely years Link had never before
fallen in love. At the age when most youths are sighing over some
wonder girl, he had been too busy fighting off bankruptcy and
starvation to have time or thought for such things.

Wherefore, when love at last smote him it smote him hard. And it found
him woefully unprepared for the battle.

He knew nothing of women. He did not know, for example, what the
average youth finds out in his teens--that grave eyes and silent
aloofness and lofty self-will and icy pietism in a maiden do not always
signify that she is a saint and that she must be worshiped as such.
Ferris had no one to tell him that far oftener these signs point merely
to stupid narrowness and to lack of ideas.

Dorcas was clever at housework. She was quietly self-assured. She was
good to look upon. She was not like any of the few girls Link had met.
Wherefore he built for her a sacred shrine in his innermost heart; and
he knelt before her image there.

If Ferris found her different from the other Hampton girls, Dorcas
found him equally different from the local swains she knew. She
recognized his hidden strength. The maternal element in her nature
sympathized with his loneliness and with the marks it had left upon his
soul.

For the rest--he was neither a village cut-up like Con Skerly, nor a
solemn mass of conceit like Royal Crews; nor patronizing like young
Lawyer Wetherell; nor vaguely repulsive like old Cap'n Baldy Todd, who
came furtively a-courting her. Link was different. And she liked him.
She liked him more and more.

Once her parents took Dorcas and her five-year-old sister, Olive, on a
Sunday afternoon ramble, which led eventually to the Ferris farm. Link
welcomed the chance callers gladly, and showed them over the place.
Dorcas's housewifely eye rejoiced in the well-kept house, even while
she frowned inwardly at its thousand signs of bachelor inefficiency.
The stock and the crops, too, spoke of solid industry.

But she shrank back in sudden revolt as a huge tawny collie came
bounding toward her from the fold where he had just marshaled the sheep
for the night. The dog was beautiful. And he me