one year of perfect happiness, which is always
worth living for, even if the rest of life be a dreary pilgrimage, and
then Old Man Shaw found himself alone again, except for little Blossom.
She was christened Sara, after her dead mother, but she was always
Blossom to her father--the precious little blossom whose plucking had
cost the mother her life.

Sara Glover's people, especially a wealthy aunt in Montreal, had
wanted to take the child, but Old Man Shaw grew almost fierce over the
suggestion. He would give his baby to no one. A woman was hired to look
after the house, but it was the father who cared for the baby in the
main. He was as tender and faithful and deft as a woman. Sara never
missed a mother's care, and she grew up into a creature of life and
light and beauty, a constant delight to all who knew her. She had a way
of embroidering life with stars. She was dowered with all the charming
characteristics of both parents, with a resilient vitality and activity
which had pertained to neither of them. When she was ten years old she
had packed all hirelings off, and kept house for her father for six
delightful years--years in which they were father and daughter, brother
and sister, and "chums." Sara never went to school, but her father saw
to her education after a fashion of his own. When their work was done
they lived in the woods and fields, in the little garden they had made
on the sheltered side of the house, or on the shore, where sunshine and
storm were to them equally lovely and beloved. Never was comradeship
more perfect or more wholly satisfactory.

"Just wrapped up in each other," said White Sands folk, half-enviously,
half-disapprovingly.

When Sara was sixteen Mrs. Adair, the wealthy aunt aforesaid, pounced
down on White Sands in a glamour of fashion and culture and outer
worldliness. She bombarded Old Man Shaw with such arguments that he had
to succumb. It was a shame that a girl like Sara should grow up in a
place like White Sands, "with no advantages and no education," said Mrs.
Adair scornfully, not understanding that wisdom and knowledge are two
entirely different things.

"At least let me give my dear sister's child what I would have given my
own daughter if I had had one," she pleaded tearfully. "Let me take
her with me and send her to a good school for a few years. Then, if she
wishes, she may come back to you, of course."

Privately, Mrs. Adair did not for a moment believe that Sara would