victory over man. For such beauty Ham felt no
answer of pulse or heart.

Of the cabins he passed, most were empty and those quiet vandals,
Weather and Decay, were noiselessly at work wrecking them. Here a door
swung askew; there a chimney teetered. Every such tenantless lodging was
an outpost surrendered on a field scarred with human defeat; a place
where a family had fought poverty and been put to flight. Once he paused
and looked down a long slope to a habitation by the roadside. The
miserable battle was just ending there, and, though he stood a quarter
of a mile away, he stopped to watch the final act. The family that had
dwelt there for two generations was leaving behind everything that it
had known. John Marrow was at that moment nailing a padlock to the front
door, a lock at which the quiet vandals would laugh silently.

In a farm wagon was heaped the litter of household effects. These people
were whipped, starved out, beaten. Ham Burton turned on his heel and
trudged away. His father's farm was little more productive than this
one, but his father had that uncompromising iron in his blood that comes
from Pilgrim forebears. He would hold on to the end--but to what end and
how long?

* * * * *

That Saturday afternoon, Mary was walking along the sandy road that led
to the village. She had no purpose, except to be alone, and she carried
an old fashion paper which she meant to con. This newly discovered
necessity of beauty was a very serious affair, and since she meant to
devote herself to its study she conceived that these pages should give
tidings from the fountain head.

She did not expect to meet anyone, and she was quite content to spend
that Indian-summer afternoon with her companions of the printed page.
These were beautiful ladies, appareled in the splendid vogues of Paris
and Vienna. There were delightful bits of information concerning some
mysterious thing called the _haute monde_ and likewise pictures that
instructed one how to dress one's hair and adorn the coiffure with
circlets of pearls. Mary's sheer delight in such mysteries was not
marred by any suspicion that the text she devoured told of fashions long
extinct and supplanted by newer edicts.

On the great rock which jutted out from the wooded tangle into the
margin of Lake Forsaken, with lesser sentinel rocks about it, she sat
cross-legged until she glanced up at last to see that the west was
kindling, and that s