like most women's,--long and twisted up on her head. It was short, and
curled back above her ears and across her forehead like flower-petals.
It was the color of the candle-flames. But her face was brown, and her
neck and long hands were brown, as though she had lived a long time in
the sun. Her eyes that were lifted and scarcely watching the work in her
hands, were very quiet and gray.

She was watching and talking to a little girl who was skipping back and
forth between a rough tea-table set near the fire and an open
cupboard-door in the wall. She was carrying dishes to the table, and now
and then stopping to stir something good-smelling which hung over the
fire in a pewter pot, with a strong bent twig for a handle.

The child was strange in a very different way from her mother. The
mother, one could see, was merry in spite of her quiet eyes. But the
child was pale. Her face was pale and little and round. Her hair was
pale, too, the color of ashes, and braided in two smooth little braids
hanging half way down her back. She moved with almost as much swiftness
as the fire-shadows, and as softly too.

Both mother and daughter were dressed in rough brown smocks, with narrow
green belts falling loosely,--strange garments to Eric. And their feet
were bare.

But stranger than the house, stranger than the people in it, was the
fact that the mother was talking to the little girl just as people of
the same age talk to each other; and though Eric was shaking with cold
and aching with hunger, he could still wonder deeply at that.

"It's a long way 'round by the big pine," she was saying; "but you see I