set her
forces down before Harvey, and saw the beleaguered city through the
portals of Grant's fine, wide, blue eyes, within an easy day's walk of
her own place in the world. So she hovered over Grant, played her brown
eyes upon him, flattered him, unconsciously as is the way of the female,
when it would win favor, and because she was wise, wiser than even her
own head knew, she cast upon the youth a strange spell.

Those were the days when Margaret Mueller came first to early bloom. They
were the days when her personality was too big for her body, so it
flowed into everything she wore; on the tips of every ribbon at her
neck, she glowed with a kind of electric radiance. A flower in her hair
seemed as much a part of her as the turn of her cleft chin. A bow at her
bosom was vibrant with her. And to Grant even the things she touched,
after she was gone, thrilled him as though they were of her.

Now the pages that are to follow in this chapter are not written for him
who has reached that grand estate where he may feel disdain for the
feverish follies of youth. A lad may be an ass; doubtless he is. A maid
may be as fitful as the west wind, and in the story of the fitfulness
and folly of the man and the maid, there is vast pathos and pain, from
which pathos and pain we may learn wisdom. Now the strange part of this
story is not what befell the youth and the maid; for any tragedy that
befalls a youth and a maid, is natural enough and in the order of
things, as Heaven knows well. The strange part of this story is that
Mary and Amos Adams were, for all their high hopes of the sunrise, like
the rest of us in this world--only human; stricken with that
inexplicable parental blindness that covers our eyes when those we love
are most needing our care.

Yet how could they know that Grant needed their care? Was he not in
their eyes the fairest of ten thousand? They enshrined him in a kind of
holy vision. It seems odd that a strapping, pimple-faced, freckled,
red-headed boy, loudmouthed and husky-voiced, more or less turbulent and
generally in trouble for his insistent defense of his weaker
playmates--it seems odd that such a boy could be the center of such
grand dreams as they dreamed for their boy. Yet there was the boy and
there were the dreams. If he wrote a composition for school that pleased
his parents, they were sure it foretold the future author, and among her
bundle of notes for the Book, his mother has cherished the manus