feeling of defeat and the realization that the
prophecy of the girl she hated already had come true, Dr. Harpe sat on
the top step of the caboose, her chin buried in her hands, with moody,
malignant eyes watching Crowheart fade as the bleating, ill-smelling
sheep train crept up the grade.

XXX

"THICKER THAN WATER"

Essie Tisdale pulled aside the coarse lace curtains starched to
asbesteroid stiffness which draped the front windows of the upstairs
parlor in the Terriberry House, and looked with growing interest at an
excited and rapidly growing group on the wide sidewalk in front of the
post-office.

Such gatherings in Crowheart nearly always portended a fight, but since
the hub of the fast widening circle appeared to be Mr. Percy Parrott
gesticulating wildly with a newspaper, she concluded that it was merely
a sensational bit of news which had come from the outside world. Yet the
citizens of Crowheart were not given to exhibiting concern over any
happening which did not directly concern themselves, and Dr. Lamb was
running. From a hurried walk he broke into a short-stepped, high-kneed
prance which was like the action of an English cob, while from across
the street dashed Sohmes, the abnormally fat butcher, clasping both
hands over his swaying abdomen to lessen the jar.

She turned from the window, and one of the waves of gladness which kept
rising within her again swept over her as she realized that the affairs
of Crowheart meant nothing to her now. A gulf, invisible as yet, but
real as her own existence, lay between her and the life of which she had
been a part such a little time before.

She looked about her at the cotton plush furniture of dingy red, at the
marble-topped centre table upon whose chilly surface a large,
gilt-edged family Bible reposed--placed there by Mrs. Terriberry in the
serene confidence that its fair margins would never be defiled through
use. Beside the Bible, lay the plush album with its Lombroso-like
villainous gallery of countenances upon which transient vandals had
pencilled mustaches regardless of sex. She looked at the fly-roost of
pampas grass in the sky-blue vase on the shelf from which hung an
old-gold lambriquin that represented the highest art of the Kensington
cult--water lilies on plush--and at the crowning glory of the parlor, a
pier glass in a walnut frame.

It was tawdry and cheap and offended her eye, but it was exclusively her
own and she looked about her with