rm place in her heart in his baby days with his
earliest efforts to speak her name. "Espey" had been the result of his
first attack on the formidable name of "Experience," and "Aunt Espey"
she had been to him ever since.

Her father, Hosea Jewett, was a hale, hearty man of upward of seventy,
hard and unyielding as the granite ledges cropping out along the
hill-sides of his farm, and with a face gnarled and weather-beaten as
the oaks before his door. He was scrupulously honest, but exacting,
relentless, unforgiving.

He was not easily reconciled to the new order of things, but for his
daughter's sake he held his peace. Then, too, though he never forgave
John Britton for having married his daughter, yet John Britton as a man
whose wealth exceeded even his own was an altogether different person
from the ambitious but impecunious lover of thirty years before. He had
never forgiven Darrell for being John Britton's son, but mingled with
his long-cherished animosity was a secret pride in the splendid physical
and intellectual manhood of this sole representative of his own line.

Between the sisters there had been few points of resemblance. Patience
Jewett had been of an ardent, emotional nature, passionately fond of
music, a great reader, and with little taste for the household tasks in
which her more practical sister delighted. Having a more delicate
constitution, she had little share in the busy routine of farm life, but
was allowed to follow her own inclinations. She was still absorbed in
her music and studies when Love found her, and the woman within her
awoke at his call.

After Darrell's birth her health was seriously impaired. It seemed as
though her faith in her husband, her belief that he would one day
return, and her love for her son were the only ties holding soul and
body together, and, with her natural religious tendencies, the spiritual
nature developed at the expense of the physical. Since Darrell's strange
disappearance she had failed rapidly.

With the return of her husband and son she seemed temporarily to renew
her hold on life, appearing stronger than for many months. For the first
few days much of her time was spent at her piano, singing with her
husband the old songs of their early love, but oftenest a favorite of
his which she had sung during the years of his absence, and which
Darrell had sung on that night at The Pines following his discovery of
the violin,--"Loyal to Love and Thee."

Her deligh