d for his sake, and fain
to beat her breast and to heap ashes on her head. Poor, poor, "pretty
Polly Hopkins!"

Cheering news of her, however, now and again came from the mountains. The
noted oculist, after his final visit to her, stopped over in Glaston to
report to Mrs. Royston the complete success of the treatment, knowing the
gratification the details would afford. He brought, too, the intelligence
that she was free of her old torture from rheumatism, which had been of
the muscular sort, resulting from exposure and deprivation, and had
yielded to the comforts of the trig, close house that Mrs. Royston had
built for her, and the abundance of warm furnishings and nutritious food,
a degree of luxury indeed which was hardly known elsewhere in the
Boundary. Her prosperity had evolved the equivocal advantage of restoring
her prestige as a sibyl, and she had entered upon a new lease of the
practice of the dark arts of fortune-telling and working charms and
spells. He gave a humorous account of her expressions of gratitude to him
for the restoration of her sight, which facetiousness Bayne, who chanced
to be present, perceived did not add to Mrs. Royston's pleasure; for she
regarded "Polly Hopkins" very seriously indeed. Before the physician
quitted the "Boundary," the old squaw bestowed upon him, through the
interpreter, certain secret magic formulae for working enchantments on his
city patients, and thereby effecting rapid cures and filling his coffers.
Knowing of Bayne's hobby for linguistics, the oculist jocularly turned
these archaic curios over to him. In that connection Bayne recounted that
after the child had departed with his mother from the mountains, he
himself being detained by final arrangements with the authorities, his
interest in researches into the arcana of old Cherokee customs had been
revived by seeing the sibyl seated on the ground, swaying and wailing and
moaning, and casting ashes on her head as if making her mourning for the
dead. At the time he had marked the parity of the observance with the
Hebraic usage, and he intended to make an examination into the origin of
the curious tradition of the identity of the American Indians with the
lost tribes of Israel.

Train-time forced the oculist to a hasty leave-taking, and it was only
after he was gone that Bayne noticed the evidence of restrained emotion
in Lillian's face. Bayne had been about to conclude his own call, which
concerned a matter of business,