The Project Gutenberg eBook ofAzalea's Silver Web

The Project Gutenberg eBook ofAzalea's Silver WebThis ebook is for the use of anyone anywhere in the United States and most other parts of the world at no cost and with almost no restrictions whatsoever. You may copy it, give it away or re-use it under the terms of the Project Gutenberg License included with this ebook or online atwww.gutenberg.org. If you are not located in the United States, you will have to check the laws of the country where you are located before using this eBook.Title: Azalea's Silver WebAuthor: Elia Wilkinson PeattieIllustrator: E. R. KirkbrideRelease date: August 8, 2017 [eBook #55304]Language: EnglishCredits: This etext was transcribed by Les Bowler*** START OF THE PROJECT GUTENBERG EBOOK AZALEA'S SILVER WEB ***

This ebook is for the use of anyone anywhere in the United States and most other parts of the world at no cost and with almost no restrictions whatsoever. You may copy it, give it away or re-use it under the terms of the Project Gutenberg License included with this ebook or online atwww.gutenberg.org. If you are not located in the United States, you will have to check the laws of the country where you are located before using this eBook.

Title: Azalea's Silver WebAuthor: Elia Wilkinson PeattieIllustrator: E. R. KirkbrideRelease date: August 8, 2017 [eBook #55304]Language: EnglishCredits: This etext was transcribed by Les Bowler

Title: Azalea's Silver Web

Author: Elia Wilkinson PeattieIllustrator: E. R. Kirkbride

Author: Elia Wilkinson Peattie

Illustrator: E. R. Kirkbride

Release date: August 8, 2017 [eBook #55304]

Language: English

Credits: This etext was transcribed by Les Bowler

*** START OF THE PROJECT GUTENBERG EBOOK AZALEA'S SILVER WEB ***

This etext was transcribed by Les Bowler.

Being thrown by Paprika

BYELIA W. PEATTIEAuthor of Azalea; Annie Laurie and Azalea;Azalea at Sunset Gap, etc.

Illustrations byE. R. Kirkbride

Publisher logo

The Reilly & Britton Co.Chicago

CHAPTER

PAGE

Grown Girls

New Relations

III

Own Folk

Madam Grandmother

Mallowbanks

My Ball

101

VII

Getting Settled

120

VIII

The Portrait

139

Grandmother’s Story

158

“The Waters of Quiet”

177

A Friend

195

XII

A Travel Log

212

XIII

Crossroads

231

XIV

“Where There Is a Will”

250

“Ring,Happy Bells”

267

So, in a moment more I felt myself—I who had never been thrown in my life—going over Paprika’s head

Frontispiece

We stepped back in the shrubbery and kept very still while they passed. Grandmother was weeping like a hurt child

Azalea’s Coming Out Party

114

It was Keefe O’Connor who stood there holding out his hands to me

276

Tennyson Mountain, N. C.,October 6.

Carin,dear and far:

So you are back at your beloved Vassar! Does it seem as wonderful as it did last year? Or more so? More so, I expect. You were a little lonely and strange last year, you know. But now it will be different. The girls will seem like old friends to you now that you are coming back to them. But, Carin, girl, they cannotpossiblybe such old friends as I am, or as Annie Laurie is. Don’t dare to like one of them better than you like us. I can imagine, and really spend too much time imagining, just how lovely and cultivated and surprising some of them are. But, please, aren’t some of them quite stupid, too? I hope so.Annie Laurie hopes so. We want still to be the brightest stars in your sky.

Lest you should think we are not, we keep polishing ourselves. Annie Laurie, when she is not attending to her dairy, will take university extension work. And I, your own ever adoring, ever grateful Azalea, will keep hammering away at the books that dear Barbara Summers lends, and Keefe O’Connor sends down from New York, and those that your own library at the Shoals furnishes.

I have the heart to read, Carin, but not the time. That’s the truth. Or, come to think of it, perhaps it is a matter of eyelids. I have a queer, self-closing pair. If they would stay up after nine o’clock at night I could learn something. But, no, they appear to be attached to a wheel or a ratchet in the clock, and when nine strikes, down they go and down they stay.

What can I do?

Nothing, except kiss dearest Mother McBirney good night, trying not to yawn in her face as I do it, and after paying my respects to Father McBirney and “brother” Jim, slip away up to my darling loft.

Now, there, Carin! You see I’m nicer thanyour other friends, more unusual and surprising. (You told me the last time I saw you that you liked your friends to be unusual and surprising.) Well, have you any other friend who goes up to her bedroom by means of an outside pair of stairs and who sleeps in a loft, with a tame bat for company? You have not, Carin Carson, and you know it. And, Oh, how I love it! Shall I ever have another room I love so well? The soft noises of the night come purling down into it like a stream. The stars of the northern sky shine into it. The mountain-side is like a green curtain hanging before it. When I get up in that little room, my doors and windows wide to old Mount Tennyson’s whispering side, I seem to find my real self. Everything slips away from me except the night and myself and—and God.

Dearest Carin, I am feeling rather serious. It is because of something that I have just come to realize. Do you remember how, at the end of our school-teaching up at Sunset Gap three years ago, your father and mother offered to send me away to school, and I—thanking them more than I could possibly make them understand—refused? I said I wanted it to beAzalea for herself. That I meant to spin my own little web, and that I hoped it would be a silver one.

Since then, as you know, I have tried my best. I decided that I would become a teacher of the mountain handicrafts; I hoped that some day when good Mrs. Kitchell resigned her position as head of the Mountain Industries which your father and mother established, that I could take her place. What is more, I wanted to develop the Industries so that they would become much, much more useful and inspiring and important than they are now. I wanted, too, to fit myself to meet all the people who come to Lee—all the charming, gracious people. You know how I have worked for all this. Haystack Thompson, the best basket-maker in the country, has taught me to make baskets. Mrs. Kitchell, the cleverest little weaver of all the weavers, has instructed me in the weaving of woolen and linen and cotton cloth, and in the making of counterpanes, as well as the knotting of fringe and the looping of fancy edges. Mother McBirney has taught me knitting and lace making and crocheting. I can do a little wood carving. Ican make mats. I can weave carpets. Even, if put to it, I can turn a jug. Then I have read and studied and thought. And in doing all that I have grown vain and foolish.

I’ll tell you how I found out.

Dear Father McBirney isn’t well. I think I spoke about this to you the other day. But he’s been getting rapidly worse, and now he can hardly move from his chair. It is rheumatism; and it’s likely to stay with him for a long, long time. He cannot help about the farm at all, and so all of the farm work falls on Jim. He can’t even go about the country to collect the chairs the mountaineers make for the Mountain Industries, as he promised your father he would.

Oh, Carin, do you remember the day you and your father and mother came up to our cabin to ask my foster-parents to go down and take charge of the Industries? And do you remember how Pa and Ma looked about at the darling cabin with its wistaria and trumpet vine, and its Pride of India tree with the graves of their little Molly and my own dear mama beneath it, and how they would not go? And then do you recall how Father McBirneypromised to “beat up trade” for the Industries, and so we all stayed in the cabin with its nice open room in between the closed ones, and its own queer little smithy, and its beehives on the south slope, and its martin houses by the door? Oh, the dear, dear little house!

Well, there has been such a demand for the mountain chairs from the visitors to Lee, that the chair-makers have been making a good profit and Father McBirney has been enjoying a nice commission. This winter he quite depended on it, because, owing to his bad health, he hadn’t been able to do as much with the farm as usual. But now he isn’t well enough to go over the mountains arranging about the chairs, or getting them together, so even that little profit is denied us.

What are we to do? Jim may be able to do some hauling for people; there’s wood to be carted, and some work to do for the miller, but it’s very irregular.

And this is where I come in. This is where I am shown up as a person with much vanity and little common sense. For, of course, it should be my part to make ready money for the family. And I can’t. I don’t know how.I have been thinking I was so capable, and now I see I’m just as useless as—as most girls!

Of course I could go away somewhere else and perhaps find some other place where the mountain industries are being developed. But ought I to leave home now? I seem to be very much needed. As you know, sometimes our sweet, unselfish Mother McBirney gets melancholy. She has lived so long away up here on the mountain that her thoughts get to turning inward, and she remembers about Molly’s death, and then for days she is silent and brooding, and we all tremble for her. She looks far, far away and pays almost no attention to what we say to her. This is a very real danger, and if I were not here to shake her out of these moods, who knows what might happen?

So there I am, I who wanted to do such wonderful independent things, I who thought I had learned so much, about as useless as anyone could be. At least, as a money-earner. Of course I am not sitting about, beating my breast and throwing dust on my head. I hope you don’t think that. No, I have Mother McBirney’s loom in good working order, and have set it up not too far away from thefireplace, and I am throwing that shuttle like mad, weaving some perfectly fascinating counterpanes. You ought to see the one in red and black in the Tudor rose pattern. Truly, it’s a beauty. I know I can sell it easily enough, and I’m going to charge a good price for it, too. I’m a greedy pig.

But you see, Imusthave money.

By rights, Father McBirney ought to have a change. He should go down to Bethal Springs. The waters there are said to cure some terrible cases of rheumatism. But he couldn’t go without Mother; and Mother wouldn’t go without Jim. So there you are. Such a puzzle!

Jim is dreadfully on my mind, too. What do you think has happened to him? He has “got religion.” Yes, I know you are laughing. Jim, the tease of the world, Jim with freckles and warts and funny words, and the verydickensin him. But it is true. Mr. Summers did it—talked to him in the woods, and Jim “saw the light.” And now he wants to be a preacher like Mr. Summers. You ought to hear him preaching to the horses when he combs them down. I listen. Perhaps I ought not to. I don’t do it to make fun, you maybe sure. I do it because the poor boy is so earnest and surprising. You can’t think what beautiful things he says. Nights he studies the Bible and some books Mr. Summers gives him. He drives away to town once every week to help with the Epworth League meeting, and he has got up some sort of a society among the boys, and has induced the members to pledge themselves not to drink whiskey or chew tobacco, or use profane words, or do any other horrid thing.

Our Jim!

Carin, we’re all growing up, aren’t we?

You with your long dresses and touch-me-not air, and Annie Laurie, one of our leading business persons! And Sam Disbrow buying stock in Annie Laurie’s dairy, and Hi Kitchell doing draying, and Dick Heller going in the bank, and Keefe O’Connor sending me the catalogue of his “Autumn Exhibit.” You can fancy how Keefe played up Sunset Gap in his pictures! I could tell from the names where he had painted about half of them. I’ll send you the catalogue. But return it, won’t you? It seems like a memento of that queer, wild, happy summer at the Gap.

That was the last summer we really spent together. To be sure I have had glimpses of you, but usually you have been away on your wonderful journeys with your father and mother, and I have had to go about the mountain roads alone. But I haven’t minded, Carin, and you mustn’t think that I have. I tried to picture the beautiful places you were in, and the parties you were going to, and the pictures and palaces you were seeing, and I knew that if I was thinking of you, that you were thinking of me, too. It kept my heart warm; it peopled the lonely mountain roads.

I’ll tell you this, my Carin: Next to a well-loved human face, a well-loved road is the best thing. The sight of a familiar clump of grass can be as dear as a threshold. Twists of tree trunks, odd embankments, colors of the road, above all, the turns of a road, get to be like a part of one’s life. The little smells that come up from earth and grass and flower, rising over and over again from the same place, affect one almost like the voices of “home folk.” Even the wind on the face, though the wind is so wild and strange a thing, makes one feel at ease in one’s world; and the burst of thesun over a hill, or the going down of it at the close of a busy day—busy both for you and the sun—can make you realize as few things can, that you are the child of God—of the great Father, so silent, so unknowable, who has made suns and birds, mountains and little friendly crickets.

Oh, beautiful, beautiful life! In spite of trouble and sickness, perplexity and poverty, beautiful, beautiful life!

Dear Carin, don’t laugh at me if my letter has been a bit too ecstatic. You are surrounded all the time with fine teachers and brilliant friends, and moving, shifting life. I am just here by myself, so to speak. Yes, yes, dear, I know my own McBirneys are beside me. I have no desire deeper than the desire to help them. Yet, Carin, are they my kind of people? You know they are not; they know it. We try to be alike, but we cannot be, really.

I am the granddaughter of Colonel Atherton on one side; the granddaughter of some other proud old gentleman on the other side. For it was pride that made my grandfather Knox turn his son, my father, adrift. True, the McBirneys took me, a little ragged wanderer,orphaned and desolate, from a traveling show; but that was an accident in my life. It cannot change the fact that I have the tastes of the Athertons and the Knoxes, who have loved beauty and hospitality and other gracious things.

Oh, me, am I insinuating that Mother McBirney is not hospitable or that she does not love beauty? If so, shame on me. Her door stands open to every wanderer. It stood open to me. The flowers about her walls, and the purple valley below her hill, delight her. Yes, she is a true lover of beauty. May we never lose sight of each other, and to the last may I feel her hand waiting to grasp mine in whatever darkness she or I may have to walk through. I only say I wish I might, sometimes, have someone like you, my Carin, to talk with. Of course, there is Barbara Summers. But she is in the valley and I on the mountain.

Equally of course, there are Keefe O’Connor’s letters. And there are yours. Be sure you send me one soon.

Do not mind my changing moods. I am, after all, always the same old

Azalea.

P. S. This is the evening of the same day.

Who do you think called?

Mrs. Kitchell, Hi’s little brown mother, all in new clothes, with white cotton gloves on her hands—the hands that used to be so hard and scratched and battered with work. She had a red rose on her new fall hat, and her shoes were blacked. And you know what shoes are at Lee! The standard is low, owing to red mud and lack of elbow activity. But Mrs. Kitchell was grand. There is no other word for it.

This, however, is not the most exciting part of what I have to tell. Haystack Thompson was with her, and he actually wore a hat. Yes, he did too, Carin Carson. What is more, his hair had been cut—a little. But you could get seven crops a year of his hair, just as you can of alfalfa. He, too, was wonderful. He wore a collar. It was of celluloid, and it shone like Mother McBirney’s best milk pan. He did not bring his fiddle, and that made me feel sad. If he wants to court Hi’s “ma,” why let him, but is that any reason why he should turn his back on his faithful Betsy, his fiddle?

I felt like saying to him: “Haystack,Haystack, can any woman understand you, answer you, listen to you, rejoice with you, as your fiddle did? Will any woman cost you so little? Ask so few questions? Be such a companion on rainy and sunshiny days?”

But of course I didn’t say anything of the kind. Little Mrs. Kitchell is a brave creature, and Haystack is a lonely one. So if they decide to marry, I and everyone else ought to be glad. The only thing that really troubles me is how they are going to live. Dear Haystack never earns any money, except in little driblets, making baskets or playing at dances. Do you suppose that after that little beaver, Mrs. Kitchell, has reared a family of four, alone and unaided, that she’ll turn in and support Haystack in his old age? Wouldn’t that be odd of her? Still, perhaps she might like it. Hi, as I say, is “draying.” He has a pair of claybank mules and he is a proud man, I can tell you. He works quite as hard as anybody in Lee—harder than most. But he doesn’t like to be “driv.” You know he wouldn’t.

“When will that trunk be up to the house, expressman?” the Northerners say, not so much as looking at him.

Then you ought to hear Hi drawl. You know his drawl! But it’s grown worse.

“Sometime along in the forenoon, I reckon, ma’am.”

“Aren’t you sure of it? Because if you aren’t, I shall get another man to bring it up.”

“Yessum. Only I’m the only one in town jest now that does trunk haulin’. But don’t you worry, ma’am. I feel tollable sure that there trunk will git up to you-all’s house some time before evenin’.”

You can just hear the Northerners pant when he says that.

I know you and your people are Northerners, Carin, dear, but you’re not the snap-turtle variety.

I do wish you’d been down here this summer. I had so much to tell you. The Shoals looked very lonely with none of you in it. Was it so lovely up there in Maine that you forgot our purple mountains? I know it must be beautiful up there. I look at the map, and follow all the queer little inlets and outlets, and think how bright the water must be as it breaks on the rocks.

Well, we have had wonderful things to lookat ourselves. Why, only to-day the mountains looked like gigantic plums, with rich purple bloom all over them; and the sky went to the trouble to try to match them. But I’d have enjoyed it more if I hadn’t been so poor. Not that I’m any poorer than usual, but I feel poorer because I see that at last it is “up to me” to be the money-maker. And I don’t know how to begin.

I have explained to you distinctly a number of times, my dear Carin, that when I write this way I do it to ease my feelings. I want your advice. But that is all I do want of you, except, of course, your love and sympathy. I know you ache to play fairy godmother. You’ve tried to do that many times. But I think you understand pretty well by now that that wouldn’t really help me out. I want my own fight, my own life, my own victories. Just at present I’m terribly puzzled, because I want to help Father and Mother McBirney and Jim.

I can’t write it all to Keefe, because—well because he might be able to think of a way to help me out, but not of a way to help the others. Keefe is terribly impulsive, and he will not realize how young he is. He is disgracefullyyoung. So am I. That extreme youthfulness of ours gets in the way of some of his plans. No, I can’t write him. He isn’t sensible. Perhaps that is one of the reasons he paints so well. Did I tell you he was making rather a specialty of portraits? He sent me one of a young Jewish girl who is in his color class at the Academy of Design. He says her name is Miriam. She fits the name.

Keefe wants to come down here this winter, but I’m not going to let him. There is no reason why he should come to this one place out of all the places in the world. Let him go up to Sunset Gap to his own wonderful little sister, Mary Cecily Rowantree. He says he needs inspiration, but if anyone can give it to him, she can. You see, if he came here, he would be terribly interrupting, and I cannot and will not be interrupted. I’m going to earn the living for the family, though, as I said at the beginning, I don’t know how.

Carin, I go out and sit down beside my dear little mama’s grave and think and think. I tell her how good these people were to her, how good they have been to me ever since that terrible day when I was left alone, and I begher if she is indeed a spirit now, who can see and understand the things that are hidden from us earth-bound ones, that she will put something into my heart to tell me what to do.

I am ready, Carin, to prove myself. Here I am with my strong body, with my heart full to bursting with gratitude and love, with my waiting hands and brain. But I need direction. You couldn’t give me that, could you, dear yellow-headed one?

Yes, I wish you might have come home this summer. It would have helped. Barbara Summers was away, too. She went home to see her people for the first time since she was married. You remember her people didn’t approve of her marriage. She had a very happy time, and all is well between her and them at last. Of Annie Laurie I see little. She is too busy. But we signal each other, she from her roof, I from the “Outlook.”

Good-bye, dear. If I write you too much, forgive me. I need to write. It comforts me. You understand all I say—all I do not say, too.

Lovingly,always,

Azalea.

“Little Windows,” Mount Hebron, N. C.,October 20th.

Dearest Carin:

Yes, the letter is from Azalea, though she is in a place that neither you nor she ever heard of before.

“Little Windows.”

Are you wondering what they are, or what it is?

It is the name of a cottage on the top of Mount Hebron. You have seen Hebron, looking like a cloud, from the top of our own Mount Tennyson.

The cottage belongs to Mr. and Mrs. David Knox, and, Oh, Carin, they—

But I must begin at the beginning.

In my last letter I told you how wretched Father McBirney was feeling. Well, he grew worse and worse, till at last he did not knowa moment when he was free from pain. Jim and I tried to keep things going, but it was hard. We began to grow anxious about money and the bare necessaries. Then I said:

“I’m going out to see about the mountain chairs. I’m going to ride Paprika over the mountains and get up the contracts with the chair-makers. Then, if they’ll not haul them to market, Jim must.”

Mother objected. So did Father. I reminded them how they had always said that a woman was perfectly safe in these mountains. But it was different, it seemed, when the woman was their own girl. However, I overcame their objections, and one rainy morning I set forth on my pony with my saddlebags well packed with food and clothing, and with carefully written directions from Father McBirney in my pocket.

“Stick to them there orders,” said Pa, “and you can’t go wrong, Zalie. Except, maybe at the Trillers. I said for you to go to where the branch turns by the two black gums, but it might so be that Triller has cut down them gums. Seems as if he can’t take no rest while there’s a tree standin’ around his place. Butanyhow, if you follow the branch after it takes a bend—that is to say, after you have taken the right-hand road turning off from the Session’s pike—then you can’t a-miss it.”

“I don’t mean to miss it,” I declared. “Don’t you worry, you two.”

Jim wasn’t at home. I made a point of going while he was down at Lee with some timber. He never would have let me go in peace.

I was not at all afraid. Indeed, I was very happy. I grew up on the road, as you remember, Carin. It isn’t as if I always had been house-bound. The woods were very still and lovely, with gray veils falling in among the trees, and the distance all hidden. The great tree trunks with their green moss and their lichen looked beautiful. I had been feeling a little gray in my mind, and the day just suited me.

By noon, though, I was chilly and rather miserable, though my raincoat kept me dry enough. But I was longing for a house, as you may well imagine, and just then, sure enough, I saw a tiny cabin in a clearing. I slipped off Paprika, and knocked at the door. No one answered. A smell of wood smokecame out from the chimney and I knew there was a fire inside, and I did want awfully to sit by it. Really, my teeth were chattering. So I tried the door. It was not locked, and I went in and crouched before the fire in the great blackened fireplace. It was very homy, with its great kettle of soup hanging over the coals, and its comfortable mountain chairs, thickly padded with cushions covered with butternut homespun. There were braided rugs on the floor, and in the darkest corner, one lofty bedstead with posts and a wonderful pieced bedquilt. I wouldn’t go so far as to say that everything wasoutrageouslyclean, but on the other hand, it was not disagreeably unclean—just an easy medium. Anyway, the fire was a blessing and the soup a temptation.

So what do you think I did?

Yielded to temptation, of course. I dished myself out a good helping of the soup, took some of my own bread from my lunch box, and ate till I was satisfied. Meantime, I had got as warm as toast and felt as if I had lived in that house forever. Then I took a little snapshot picture of myself from my notebook and laid it on the table with some loaf sugar,some coffee and a fine piece of Mother McBirney’s honey cake, and wrote:

This is the picture of the girl who sat by your fire and ate some of your soup.It is the first time she ever helped herself to anything,but she enjoyed it so much that she means to stop again the next time she is passing and see if there is some more of that delicious soup and to ask how it is made.Here are some little presents,which please accept.Azalea McBirney.

Azalea McBirney.

Well, this is just an incident, and I only mention it to show you what a happy time I had at the beginning. I could not dream how things would change with me.

In the early afternoon I visited two of the houses to which I was to go, and arranged about the number and kinds of chairs the men were to furnish. I drew up contracts for them to sign, for I thought that would be businesslike. Anyway, it pleased me to do it, and I think the chair-makers liked it too. It gave both of us a nice efficient feeling. They wanted me to stay at the last house I visited, and there was such a darling little baby there that I almost did, but I decided that I’d better begetting on and try to reach the Triller’s before sundown. Paprika was getting a bit fagged, but I know how quickly she rests up, so I hurried her along, getting, I confess, just a trifle worried as I found myself on strange roads, with the mist settling all about me.

It was very still. The mist seemed to muffle everything. No birds were singing, and I could not hear any creature in the woods, nor any falling water, and as there was no wind, the trees were motionless. Everything rested under a gray enchantment, and it gave me a very strange feeling. Yet I liked it. I felt as if something were going to happen.

And something did. But, Carin, it was not in the least what I would have imagined or wished for. It was as different as it could possibly be.

I have said that everything was very still—Oh, perfectly still. Then came a noise from afar, like a gathering wind, yet not a leaf stirred on the trees. The sound grew louder and louder. It seemed like a tempest. I trembled and so did Paprika. A moment later around the turn of the gray road came a sort of monster—an awful thing, all snout andflaming eyes. I knew in one terrible second what it was, of course.

An automobile—the first I ever had seen, face to face and eye to eye. Paprika, who had not looked at pictures to any great extent—except, perhaps, those on bill boards—did not know at all what it was. She gave one wild scream like a wounded horse and dashed straight up the bank. Then she looked back over her shoulder as if doubting her senses, saw the horrible thing again, heard its roaring and snuffling, and plunged on. There in the thick of the woods, with the mist still gathering, I could not see how to guide her, and anyway, she was beyond management. So, in a moment more I felt myself—I who never had been thrown in my life—going over her head.

And that was all, Carin dear, for four days, so they tell me. Four days.

You will wonder where I was when I opened my eyes. This letter paper will tell you. I was, and I am, at “Little Windows,” which is the name, as I have already explained, of a cottage on the top of Mount Hebron. Of course I can not say for sure that it is theloveliest place in the world, for I have seen but few places, not being like you, Carin, darling, forever going to beautiful spots. But at any rate it is lovely beyond my power to describe, with its great valleys and gulches, and its near acquaintance with stars and sun risings and moon settings.

When first I opened my eyes I was in a quiet bedroom. The walls were silver gray, and of wood. There were no pictures. The little windows were without curtains and looked right out at the wonderful world. It was sunset and from where I lay I could see it, crimson as the banners of a king. I could hear a fire leaping and rejoicing in some room beyond, and voices—two voices. A man and a woman were talking together, rather anxiously, I thought.

“They are talking of me,” I decided. And then I began to remember.

“Is my neck broken?” I asked myself. And I wriggled it. It wriggled in the good old way.

“It’s my back!” I decided. So I tried to sit up. I was pretty dizzy, but my back worked perfectly. I tried both legs and both arms. They were just as active as I could wish. Ipoked my ribs. They appeared to be in their right places. And then I grew frightfully weary. I wanted to cry, yet I felt it would be too much of an effort. It seemed as if I were sinking down, down through gray mist. Everything floated away from before me, and I knew nothing more for a time.

Then somebody brought in a light. It was not a very large or a very bright light, but it managed to reach the queer, shadowy place where I was living, and to make me open my eyes.

“How do you do, ma’am?” I heard myself saying.

The lady who carried the lamp nearly dropped it. But she controlled herself and set it on a table. Then she came and hung over me and said in a voice that trembled:

“I’m very well, thank you. How are you?”

We have both laughed about it since—about our speaking to each other in that queer formal way. But we had to make some sort of a beginning, and perhaps that was as good as any.

“I am all right, thank you, ma’am,” I said. “I tried myself all over a while ago, and there is nothing broken.”

“No,” said the lady, “there is nothing broken.” But she looked at me doubtfully, and with a queer kind of curiosity.

“Do you remember that you were hurt?” she asked. “That you were thrown from your horse and hurt?”

I nodded.

“My pony?” I asked. “Is she well?”

“Oh, yes, she’s all right. She wasn’t hurt. But you were, and my husband—it was his machine that frightened your pony—picked you up and brought you here.”

“Thank you,” I said. Then I began to wish she would go away and leave me alone. I wanted to go back into that queer, gray, silent place of mine again, where sort of shadowy things went by in a long procession, without one of them stopping to bother me with questions. I did think I would enjoy looking at the lady and see what she was like, but I was too lazy and so I decided I would do that another time. Only I could see that she was tall, that her hair was golden, and that she was very thin. That seemed enough for the present; so I closed my eyes.

Then presently I felt someone puttingsomething between my lips. It was soup. And that made me laugh. I thought about the house where I had helped myself to the soup. I had liked it better than this—it had had more flavor.

“What are you laughing about?” asked the lady.

I felt terribly silly. I remembered something from “Alice.”

“Soup of the evening, beautiful soup,” I said. Then I laughed some more. I couldn’t quit. Suddenly I heard a voice roaring:

“Stop that!”

So I stopped and looked to see who had spoken to me that way. It was a tall man—a terribly tall man. The shadow of him ran along the floor for yards and doubled up on the ceiling.

“Who are you?” I asked. I was quite angry.

Then he bowed—and you ought to have seen that shadow bow at the same time. It was the funniest thing, and it nearly set me off again, but I crumpled up the sheet in my hands and squeezed it as hard as I could to keep from giggling.

“David Knox,” said the gentleman, “whowas unfortunate enough to be the cause of all of your trouble.”

“I am glad to meet you,” I said politely. His bow was so nice I forgave him for yelling: “Stop that!”

“Lorena,” he said under his voice, “I think everything is going to be all right.”

Now you wouldn’t think that remark would make me laugh, would you? Oh, Carin, I’m so ashamed of it, now I remember. But I began to sing:

“‘The years roll slowly by, Lorena,’” and then when I couldn’t think of the next line I cried: “Why doesn’t somebody tell me what comes next?”

Well, they told me if I didn’t keep still they would go out and leave me alone. I didn’t want to be left alone, because just then I took a sort of turn and was afraid to sink down into that gray, still place where I had been. So I said:

“Oh, please stay, please stay, and I will tell you why I laughed at the soup.”

So before they could stop me I had told them about it.

“Some day,” I said, “I am going back andcall on that woman. I will give her some patterns for weaving, and maybe she will have some old, old ones that she will give me.”

“Can you weave?” asked the lady. “You are very young and—and not a mountain girl, are you?”

“Oh, I’m a mountain girl,” I said, remembering back just as far as dear Mother McBirney and the cabin with my bedroom in the loft. “I’m Azalea McBirney of Tennyson Mountain, and I’m—I’m a weaver.”

“Azalea,” murmured the lady. “That was the name of poor Jack’s wife, wasn’t it? I always thought it a sweet name.”

Something shot through my brain. It was like a stroke of lightning. It was the strangest thing that ever happened to me. In a second, by some power I can’t explain, I began to know things. I saw them as if they were a vision. I sat right up in bed, and pushed my hair back from my face. I recollect that I kept pushing it back and pushing it back, as if it got in between me and what I wanted to understand.

“What Jack? What Jack?” I demanded.

“Jack Knox, my dead brother,” said the mansoothingly. “No one you know I am sure, my dear. Don’t excite yourself, please.”

“Jack Knox! Jack Knox!” I said. “That was the man that married my little mama and left her to care for me alone. Jack Knox! No, I don’t know him. I don’t remember him at all. And I’m glad of it. Jack Knox! Jack Knox!”

You know it isn’t like me, Carin, to feel angry at anyone. But my mind seemed to have no resistance. Whatever idea got into it insisted on raging around in it. I couldn’t stop it. I was ashamed, and yet I couldn’t manage myself.

I felt the lady, Mrs. Knox, taking hold of me with those long, soft, cool hands of hers and forcing me back on the bed.

“Lie still,” she begged. “Do lie still, Miss Azalea. You mustn’t care about anything. No one shall do you any harm, and we’ll not even let troublesome ideas come near you if we can help it.”

“Did you not say,” said the gentleman, “that your name was McBirney?”

“Yes, yes, McBirney. Don’t you know Ma and Pa McBirney? Why, everyone knows them. They take orphans in. At least theytook me in. They would have taken my little mama in, only she was dead, so they put her beneath the Pride of India tree beside their own Molly. You can go see for yourself. You will know the house by the Pride of India tree and the gourds before the door. The gourds are for the martins—dozens and dozens of martins. The martins will show you the way if you like. Or the bees—thousands of bees.”

“Hush, hush,” whispered the lady. “David, go and take the light. Hush, Azalea, hush. It is all right. Your little mama would want you to hush.”

She began singing the song with her own name in it.

“The years roll slowly by, Lorena.”

I went to sleep. But this time it was different. I did not seem to be sinking into that chilly gray place where the visions were. I just went to sleep the way I ought.

The next morning when I awoke I was quite sensible and calm. I saw the world as it was, and remembered all my life, and knew that I had come by a strange, strange chance, among my dead father’s people. David Knox was hiselder brother, and Lorena Knox, with her yellow hair and her long cool hands, was David’s wife. It made me deeply satisfied—not exactly happy, but deeply satisfied.

I ate the breakfast they brought me, and after a while I was taken out into the sitting room. It was a beautiful room, large and square and quiet, with a great fireplace of gray stone, and more little uncurtained windows looking out at the green and purple world. So then I sat up and looked at these people.

“I have never before seen anyone save my little poor mama who belonged to me,” I said. “It is very strange, to be here with you.”

“Do you like it?” asked Mrs. Knox.

“I am a little afraid,” I said.

“Why?”

“Because I want you to like me and I am afraid you may not.”

“Oh, but why? We already do!”

“Do you? Oh, I’m glad. Life has been—”

“How has it been?”

“Lonesome, sometimes. Interesting, of course, and nice, but lonesome. I was always taking favors from other people. I had no one of my own. There was only—only the Prideof India tree with mama under it. I used to go out and talk to it, but—”

“Hush,” said the lady. “Do not weep, Azalea. Save all your strength for our sakes. I cannot doubt that what you tell me is true. I want you to see something.”

She brought me a little album open at the face of a young man. Carin, darling, when I looked at it, I knew it was the face of my father. It was like my own face, only a man’s and bolder. And yet, so like!

“My father!” I said. “I never saw his face before.”

“It is wonderfully like your own,” said Mr. Knox. “And now you must call me your Uncle David, Azalea; and you must call my dear wife your Aunt Lorena. Remember, you must never feel lonely any more.”

Then I suddenly thought of Mother McBirney waiting for me, and watching and watching the road, and praying and wondering, and I cried out:

“Oh, my dear Mother McBirney! I can never leave her—never!”

“But someone else has a claim on you now,” said my Uncle David. Carin, think of havinga right really to write that: “My Uncle David!”

“Yes, I know, but—”

“I do not mean your Aunt Lorena and myself,” he said. “I mean that you have a grandmother and that it will be the happiest hour of her old age when she takes the daughter of her favorite son in her arms.”

“Not a grandmother? A grandmother of my own?”

“Indeed you have, and a very wonderful and proud old lady she is. The grief of her life was the waywardness of her son. She cannot realize that he is dead. We have to watch her lest she steal out to meet him in secret as she did in the old days when his father turned him from home. She used to creep from the house to meet him and to take him money, for she lived in the light of his handsome countenance. So it is your duty, Azalea, to go to her.”

“A grandmother,” I said, “of my very own!”

It seemed wonderful—like having a mother, only more majestic. I can’t explain what I felt.

And I can’t write any more just now, darling Carin. My aunt has kept warning me that I must put my pen down. So I obey. Another day you shall know the rest.

As always,

Azalea.

“Little Windows,” Mount Hebron,October 22nd.

Carin dear:

I was not quite so well after writing you. Aunt Lorena says I mustn’t write so much at one time again till I am stronger. This is just to say that Mother McBirney has been sent for, though I can’t see how she is to leave home. Who will look after the men? Oh, how I am needed in that little house! And here I lie in this beautiful room, idle, of no use to anyone. And so sleepy! I never dreamed anyone could be so sleepy.

When I dream now, it is all about my grandmother. To think of an own grandmother! In my dreams she comes creeping softly into the room and strokes my hair. I do not believe a word they say about her being proud. I am sure she is gentle. At least, her dream-hand on my head is so.

I am writing to Mary Cecily Rowantree, and she can send the letter on to Keefe O’Connor—to “brother” as she always calls him. Have you noticed that she almost never speaks his name? That is, I suppose, because he does not bear the one that was given him when he was christened. What a strange story is his!

Good-bye,yellow-haired one,

Azalea.

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