Destiny

geous gowns, or listened to the fervent pleadings of make-believe suitors. But the secret was all her own of how something in her had awakened. This little girl would never again be precisely the same Mary Burton who had started out that Saturday afternoon with a heart full of rebellion and who had come back appeased. And Ham, his mother feared, was finding his burdens too heavy for young shoulders. He had made no complaint, but an expression of settled abstraction had come into his face and at home he was always silent. After the falling of the first heavy snow neither Paul nor Mary ventured out to school, but Ham's avid hunger for education lost no coveted day of the term. When his morning work was ended, wrapped in patched mackinaw and traveling on snowshoes, he made the trip across the white slopes, where only the pines were green, and came back at the day's end for his evening chores. The trip was a bit shortened now because the lake was ice-locked and he could cross between the flag-marked holes of the pickerel-fishers. He had been afraid to speak of those things whichwere burning consumingly in his mind; afraid that if once he let slip the leash of restraint he would be carried away on a tide of passion. But some day he must speak, and, strangely enough, the match that lighted the train of powder was the second coming of the young man who had met Mary on the road. He came near nightfall, on snowshoes, and when he knocked it was the girl who opened ...