There was the cabin, too; the little cabin where I was born, with its back to the big mountain, and filled with the handiwork of my mother as she had left it when she died.

And my father too used to laugh and sing there--he had a clear voice that would roll half-way up the mountain; and as I grew older the miracle at times stirred me with a strange fear, so real to my father did my dead mother seem when he was home.

But you look frightened, Miss Standish! Oh, it may seem weird and ghostly now, but it was _true_--so true that I have lain awake nights thinking of it and wishing that it had never been so!" "Then you have wished a great sin," said the girl in a voice that seemed scarcely to whisper between her parted lips.

"I hope someone will feel toward me--some day--like that." "But it was this which brought the tragedy, the thing you have asked me to tell you about," he said, unclenching his hands slowly, and then tightening them again until the blood ebbed from their veins.

"Interests were coming in; the tentacles of power and greed were reaching out, encroaching steadily a little nearer to our cup at the foot of the mountain.