There never was a Peabody Pew in the Tory Hill Meeting-House, and Nancy's
love story and Justin's never happened within its century-old walls; but
I have imagined only one of the many romances that have had their birth
under the shadow of that steeple, did we but realize it.

As you have sat there on open-windowed Sundays, looking across purple
clover-fields to blue distant mountains, watching the palm-leaf fans
swaying to and fro in the warm stillness before sermon time, did not the
place seem full of memories, for has not the life of two villages ebbed
and flowed beneath that ancient roof? You heard the hum of droning bees
and followed the airy wings of butterflies fluttering over the
gravestones in the old churchyard, and underneath almost every moss-grown
tablet some humble romance lies buried and all but forgotten.

If it had not been for you, I should never have written this story, so I
give it back to you tied with a sprig from Ophelia's nosegay; a spring of
"rosemary, that's for remembrance."

K. D. W.

August, 1907




CHAPTER I


Edgewood, like all the other villages along the banks of the Saco, is
full of sunny slopes and leafy hollows. There are little, rounded, green-