Canaan was heavy with
loneliness.

With the selfishness natural to man, he did not stop to consider what
such companionship might come to mean to this inexperienced girl
steeped in a life of sordid labor and unbroken monotony.

There came the rustle of Amanda's skirts on the stairs.

Fairchilds clasped Tillie's passive hand. "I feel that I have found a
friend to-night."

Amanda, brilliant in a scarlet frock and pink ribbons, appeared in the
doorway. The vague, almost unseeing look with which the teacher turned
to her was interpreted by the vanity of this buxom damsel to be the
dazzled vision of eyes half blinded by her radiance.

For a long time after they had gone away together, Tillie sat with her
face bowed upon her book, happiness surging through her with every
great throb of her heart.

At last she rose, picked up the lamp and carried it into the kitchen to
the little mirror before which the family combed their hair. Holding
the lamp high, she surveyed her features. As long as her arm would bear
the weight of the uplifted lamp, she gazed at her reflected image.

When presently with trembling arm she set it on the dresser, Tillie,
like Mother Eve of old, had tasted of the Tree of Knowledge. Tillie
knew that she was very fair.

That evening marked another crisis in the girl's inner life. Far into
the night she lay with her eyes wide open, staring into the darkness,
seeing there strange new visions of her own soul, gazing into its
hitherto unsounded depths and seeing there the heaven or the hell--she
scarcely knew which--that possessed all her being.

"Blasphemous to close your nature to the pleasures God has created for
you!" His words burned themselves into her brain. Was it to an abyss of
degradation that her nature was bearing her in a swift and fatal
tide--or to a holy height of blessedness? Alternately her fired
imagination and awakened passion exalted her adoration of him into an
almost religious joy, making her yearn to give herself to him, soul and
body, as to a god; then plunged her into an agony of remorse and terror
at her own idolatry and lawlessness.

A new universe was opened up to her, and all of life appeared changed.
All the poetry and the stories which she had ever read held new and
wonderful meanings. The beauty in Nature, which, even as a child, she
had felt in a way she knew those about her could never have understood,
now spoke to her in a language of infinite significance. The myste