ILLUSTRATIONS

Holly Placed Her Hand in His and Leaped Lightly to the Ground 

 Frontispiece

Presently the New Rental Agreement was Signed

The Major Held the Little Bunch of Leaves and Berries over Holly’s Head

Keep Away! You’ve Killed Him

[9]

[9]

HOLLY

I.

Holly’s eighteenth birthday was but a fortnight distant when the quiet stream of her life, which since her father’s death six years before had flowed placidly, with but few events to ripple its tranquil surface, was suddenly disturbed....

To the child of twelve years death, because of its unfamiliarity and mystery, is peculiarly terrible. At that age one has become too wise to find comfort in the vague and beautiful explanations of tearfully-smiling relatives—explanations in which Heaven is pictured as a material region just out of sight beyond the zenith; too selfishly engrossed with one’s own loneliness and terror to be pacified by the contemplation of the radiant peace and beatitude attained by the departed one in that ethereal[10] and invisible suburb. And at twelve one is as yet too lacking in wisdom to realize the beneficence of death.

[10]

Thus it was that when Captain Lamar Wayne died at Waynewood, in his fiftieth year, Holly, left quite alone in a suddenly empty world save for her father’s sister, Miss India Wayne, grieved passionately and rebelliously, giving way so abjectly to her sorrow that Aunt India, fearing gravely for her health, summoned the family physician.

“There 

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