ook a step forward and his jaw shot out--"because that shadow of his,
that wife of his, broke a champagne-glass when I said Geoffrey
Boisselier Bewsher; broke her champagne-glass and, I've no doubt, cried
out loud in her heart. Power can't buy love--no; but power can stamp to
death anything that won't love it. That's Masters. I can tell a
timber-wolf far off. Can you see him now in his motor? He'll have turned
the lights out, and she--his wife--will be looking out of the window at
the snow. All you can see of him would be his nose and his beard and the
glow of his cigar--except his smile. You could see that when the car
passed a corner lamp, couldn't you?"

"I don't believe it yet," said Mrs. Malcolm. "It's too preposterous."

LONELY PLACES[5]

[Note 5: Copyright, 1917, by The Pictorial Review Company.
Copyright, 1918, by Francis Buzzell.]

BY FRANCIS BUZZELL

From _The Pictorial Review_

She was not quite forty years old, but so aged was she in appearance
that another twenty-five years would not find her perceptibly older. And
to the people of Almont she was still Abbie Snover, or "that Snover
girl." Age in Almont is not reckoned in years, but by marriage, and by
children, and grandchildren.

Nearly all the young men of Abbie's generation had gone to the City,
returning only in after years, with the intention of staying a week or
two weeks, and leaving at the end of a day, or two days. So Abbie never
married.

It had never occurred to Abbie to leave Almont because all the young men
had gone away. She had been born in the big house at the foot of Tillson
Street; she had never lived anywhere else; she had never slept anywhere
but in the black walnut bed in the South bedroom.

At the age of twenty-five, Abbie inherited the big house, and with it
hired-man Chris. He was part of her inheritance. Her memory of him, like
her memory of the big house, went back as far as her memory of herself.

Every Winter evening, between seven and eight o'clock, Abbie lighted the
glass-handled lamp, placed it on the marble-topped table in the parlor
window, and sat down beside it. The faint light of this lamp, gleaming
through the snow-hung, shelving evergreens, was the only sign that the
big house was there, and occupied. When the wind blew from the West she
could occasionally hear a burst of laughter from the boys and girls
sliding down Giddings's Hill; the song of some young farmer driving
home. She thought of the Spri