the other Woodford girls and had no
friends of her own age among them. Her uncommon beauty won her many
lovers, but she had never cared for any of them until Stephen Fair,
fifteen years her senior, had come a-wooing to the old, gray,
willow-girdled Phillips homestead.

Amelia and John Phillips never liked him. There was an ancient feud
between the families that had died out among the younger generation,
but was still potent with the older.

From the first Emily had loved Stephen. Indeed, deep down in her
strange, wayward heart, she had cared for him long before the
memorable day when he had first looked at her with seeing eyes and
realized that the quiet, unthought-of child who had been growing up at
the old Phillips place had blossomed out into a woman of strange,
seraph-like beauty and deep grey eyes whose expression was nevermore
to go out of Stephen Fair's remembrance from then till the day of his
death.

John and Amelia Phillips put their own unjustifiable dislike of
Stephen aside when they found that Emily's heart was set on him. The
two were married after a brief courtship and Emily went out from her
girlhood's home to the Fair homestead, two miles away.

Stephen's mother lived with them. Janet Fair had never liked Emily.
She had not been willing for Stephen to marry her. But, apart from
this, the woman had a natural, ineradicable love of making mischief
and took a keen pleasure in it. She loved her son and she had loved
her husband, but nevertheless, when Thomas Fair had been alive she had
fomented continual strife and discontent between him and Stephen. Now
it became her pleasure to make what trouble she could between Stephen
and his wife.

She had the advantage of Emily in that she was always sweet-spoken
and, on the surface, sweet-tempered. Emily, hurt and galled in a score
of petty ways, so subtle that they were beyond a man's courser
comprehension, astonished her husband by her fierce outbursts of anger
that seemed to him for the most part without reason or excuse. He
tried his best to preserve the peace between his wife and mother; and
when he failed, not understanding all that Emily really endured at the
elder woman's merciless hands, he grew to think her capricious and
easily irritated--a spoiled child whose whims must not be taken too
seriously.

To a certain extent he was right. Emily had been spoiled. The unbroken
indulgence which her brother and sister had always accorded her had
fitted her