er in town, at Christmas time, a pair of white satin
slippers, partly to test the smallness of her feet on which in younger
days he had rallied her, and partly because she had mentioned a possible
white dress. They were a cheap, plain pair but dainty, and they fitted
well.

When the evening came and the students were marching and the teachers,
save Miss Smith, were sitting rather primly apart and commenting, she
entered the room. She was a little late, and a hush greeted her. One
boy, with the inimitable drawl of the race, pushed back his ice-cream
and addressed it with a mournful head-shake:

"Go way, honey, yo' los' yo' tas'e!"

The dress was plain and fitted every curving of a healthy girlish form.
She paused a moment white-bodied and white-limbed but dark and
velvet-armed, her full neck and oval head rising rich and almost black
above, with its deep-lighted eyes and crown of silent darkling hair.

To some, such a revelation of grace and womanliness in this hoyden, the
gentle swelling of lankness to beauty, of lowliness to shy self-poise,
was a sudden joy, to others a mere blindness. Mary Taylor was perplexed
and in some indefinite way amazed; and many of the other teachers saw no
beauty, only a strangeness that brought a smile. They were such as know
beauty by convention only, and find it lip-ringed, hoop-skirted,
tattooed, or corsetted, as time and place decree.

The change in Zora, however, had been neither cataclysmic nor
revolutionary and it was yet far--very far--from complete. She still ran
and romped in the woods, and dreamed her dreams; she still was
passionately independent and "queer." Tendencies merely had become
manifest, some dominant. She would, unhindered, develop to a brilliant,
sumptuous womanhood; proud, conquering, full-blooded, and deep
bosomed--a passionate mother of men. Herein lay all her early wildness
and strangeness. Herein lay, as yet half hidden, dimly sensed and all
unspoken, the power of a mighty all-compelling love for one human soul,
and, through it, for all the souls of men. All this lay growing and
developing; but as yet she was still a girl, with a new shyness and
comeliness and a bold, searching heart.

In the field of the Silver Fleece all her possibilities were beginning
to find expression. These new-born green things hidden far down in the
swamp, begotten in want and mystery, were to her a living wonderful
fairy tale come true. All the latent mother in her brooded over th