ng soul upon the dead face. The
old woman had been hale and hearty when she entered the house, and in
seven days she was dead; it seemed that she had fallen a victim to some
uncanny power. The minister talked in the pulpit with covert severity
against the sin of superstition; still the belief prevailed. Not a
soul in the village but would have chosen the almshouse rather than
that dwelling. No vagrant, if he heard the tale, would seek shelter
beneath that old roof, unhallowed by nearly half a century of
superstitious fear.

There was only one person in the village who had actually known Luella
Miller. That person was a woman well over eighty, but a marvel of
vitality and unextinct youth. Straight as an arrow, with the spring of
one recently let loose from the bow of life, she moved about the
streets, and she always went to church, rain or shine. She had never
married, and had lived alone for years in a house across the road from
Luella Miller's.

This woman had none of the garrulousness of age, but never in all her
life had she ever held her tongue for any will save her own, and she
never spared the truth when she essayed to present it. She it was who
bore testimony to the life, evil, though possibly wittingly or
designedly so, of Luella Miller, and to her personal appearance. When
this old woman spoke--and she had the gift of description, although her
thoughts were clothed in the rude vernacular of her native village--one
could seem to see Luella Miller as she had really looked. According to
this woman, Lydia Anderson by name, Luella Miller had been a beauty of
a type rather unusual in New England. She had been a slight, pliant
sort of creature, as ready with a strong yielding to fate and as
unbreakable as a willow. She had glimmering lengths of straight, fair
hair, which she wore softly looped round a long, lovely face. She had
blue eyes full of soft pleading, little slender, clinging hands, and a
wonderful grace of motion and attitude.

"Luella Miller used to sit in a way nobody else could if they sat up
and studied a week of Sundays," said Lydia Anderson, "and it was a
sight to see her walk. If one of them willows over there on the edge
of the brook could start up and get its roots free of the ground, and
move off, it would go just the way Luella Miller used to. She had a
green shot silk she used to wear, too, and a hat with green ribbon
streamers, and a lace veil blowing across her face and out side