little hollows in the cheeks and shy, fanlike wrinkles lurking about the corners of her lambent brown eyes. Nor did her gray hair mar her beauty. It was not old, dry, and withered—a wispy gray. (That is not the way it happened.) It was a new, all-of-a-sudden gray, and in less than a week—so Margaret once told me—bleaching its brown gold to silver. But the gloss remained, and so did the richness of the folds, and the wealth and weight of it.     

       Inside the green-painted door, with its white trim and brass knocker and knobs, there was a narrow hall hung with old portraits, opening into a room literally all fireplace. Here there were gouty sofas, and five or six big easy-chairs ranged in a half-circle, with arms held out as if begging somebody to sit in them; and here, too, was an embroidered worsted fire screen that slid up and down a standard, to shield one’s face from the blazing logs; and there were queer tables and old-gold curtains looped back with brass rosettes—ears really—behind which the tresses of the parted curtains were tucked; and there were more old portraits in dingy frames, and samplers under glass, and a rug which some aunt had made with her own hands from odds and ends; and a huge work-basket spilling       worsteds, and last, and by no manner of means least, a big chintz-covered rocking-chair, the little lady’s very own—its thin ankles and splay feet hidden by a modest frill. There were all these things and a lot more—and yet I still maintain that the room was just one big fireplace. Not alone because of its size (and it certainly was big: many a doubting curly head, losing its faith in Santa Claus, has crawled behind the old fire-dogs, the child’s fingers tight about the Little Gray Lady’s, and been told to look up into the blue—a lesson never forgotten all their lives), but because of the wonderful and never-to-be-told-of things which constantly       took place before its blazing embers.     

       For this fireplace was the Little Gray Lady’s altar. Here she dispensed wisdom and cheer and love. Everybody in Pomford village had sat in one or the other of the chairs grouped about it and had poured out their hearts to her. All sorts of pourings: love affairs, for instance, that were hopeless until she would take the girl’s hand in her own and smooth out the tangle; to-say nothing of bickerings behind closed doors, with two lives pulling apart until her dear arms brought them together.     

       But 

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