this girl and not have marked her sooner somewhere in either church or shop or street? The busy day had surged in and he had forgotten the face and thought no more of the girl. But now it all came back with conviction as he read on. He turned to the end of the paper for the name “Joyce Radway.” Somehow it seemed to fit her, and he read on with new interest, noting how she gave interest to the hackneyed themes that had become monotonous through reading over and over the crude, young answers to the same questions. How was it that this young girl was able to give a turn to her sentences that seemed to make any subject a thrilling, throbbing, vital thing? And she did not skim over the answers with the least possible information. She wrote as if she liked to tell what she knew, as if her soul were en rapport with her work, and as if she were writing it for the mere joy of imparting the fact and its thrill to another.

[29]

“Now, there’s a girl that would make a teacher all right,” he said aloud to himself as he finished the paper writing a clear blue “Excellent” upon it with his finest flourish, “I wonder who she is? If she’s the one I saw I’ll vote for her. I must inquire the first thing in the morning. Joyce Radway. What a good name. It fits. She’s the assistant I’d like if I have my way, unless I’m very much mistaken in a human face.”

[30]

CHAPTER III

Joyce had walked a long way on a long gray ribbon of road before it wound up hill and she began to realize where her steps were turning. Up there on the top was the dark outline of the old Hill Church, its spire a black dart against the luminous night sky. A fitful moon gleamed palely and showed it for a moment, still and gray like a little lone dove asleep, and about it clustered the white stones of the graveyard on the side of the hill sloping down toward the valley. One tall shaft showed where lay the dust of the rich, old, good man who gave the land and built the church, and others less pretentious flocked close at hand, a little social clique of the select dead who had clung to the old church through the years of their life, who there had been christened, married and buried.

Joyce

With a catch in her breath like a sob Joyce hurried on, realizing that it was here her heart was longing to go, where she had left all that was mortal of her precious Aunt Mary.

It was not that she had any feeling that the spirit she loved was 

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