hensions on her back.

Scouring with her eyes the highway ahead of her, shooting hawk's
glances into the forest on each side of her, the wife rode through
the distance all, all day, praying that the day might be long enough,
might equal the distance. The sun set, and night began to fall; but
she and Maid Marion were none the less fresh, except in the heart.

The moon rose straight before them down the road, lighting it and them
through the threatened obscurity. And so they came to trampled earth
and torn grass, and so she uncovered concealed footsteps, and so,
creeping on her hands and knees, she followed traces of blood, through
thicket and glade, into the deep forest, to a hastily piled hillock of
earth, gravel, and leaves. Burrowing with her hands, she came to it,
the naked body of her young husband, cold and stiff, foully murdered.
Maid Marion approached at her call. She wrapped him in her cloak,
and--a young wife of those times alone would do it--put him in the
saddle before her: the good mare Maid Marion alone knows the rest. In
the early gray dawn, from one highway there rode into the town the
baffled pursuers, from the other the grandmother's grandmother,
clasping the corpse of her husband with arms as stiff as his own;
loving him, so the grandmother used to say, with a love which, if ever
love could do so, would have effected a resurrection.

THE OLD LADY'S RESTORATION

The news came out in the papers that the old lady had been restored
to her fortune. She had been deprived of it so long ago that the real
manner of her dispossession had become lost, or at least hidden under
the many versions that had been invented to replace lapses of memory,
or to remedy the unpicturesqueness of the original truth. The face of
truth, like the face of many a good woman, is liable to the accident
of ugliness, and the desire to embellish one as well as the other
need not necessarily proceed from anything more harmful than an
overweighted love of the beautiful.

If the old lady had not been restored to her fortune, her _personalia_
would have remained in the oblivion which, as one might say, had
accumulated upon everything belonging to her. But after that newspaper
paragraph, there was such a flowering of memory around her name as
would have done credit to a whole cemetery on All Saints. It took
three generations to do justice to the old lady, for so long and so
slow had been her descent into poverty that a grandmothe