"Hear of me? Why?" she demanded.

The stranger bent forward and coughed, and when the paroxysm had ended
he smiled whimsically again.

"I'll tell you a secret, though God knows it's a perilous thing to feed
a woman's vanity--even a woman of eleven. Did anyone ever tell you that
you are possessed of a marvelous pair of eyes?"

Instinctively little Mary Burton flinched as though she had been struck
and she raised one hand to her face to touch her long lashes. Silent
tears welled up; tears of indignant pain because she thought she was
being cruelly ridiculed.

But the stranger had no such thought. If to the uneducated opinion of
Lake Forsaken, Mary's face was a matter for jest and libel, the
impression made on the young man who had been reared in the capitals of
Europe was quite different. He had been sent, on the verge of manhood,
into the hermit's seclusion with the hermit's opportunity of reflecting
on all he had seen, and digesting his experience into a philosophy
beyond his years.

Perhaps had Mary been born into her own Puritan environment two
centuries earlier, she might have faced even sterner criticism, for
there was without doubt a strange uncommonplaceness about her which the
thought of that day might have charged to the attendance of witches
about her birth. The promise of beauty she had, but a beauty unlike that
of common standards. It was a quality that at first caught the beholder
like the shock of a plunge into cold water, and then set him tingling