Your faith, beyond the silence and the night,
Your love still close and watching through the years.


MOTHER



CHAPTER I

"Well, we couldn't have much worse weather than this for the last
week of school, could we?" Margaret Paget said in discouragement.
She stood at one of the school windows, her hands thrust deep in
her coat pockets for warmth, her eyes following the whirling course
of the storm that howled outside. The day had commenced with snow,
but now, at twelve o'clock, the rain was falling in sheets, and the
barren schoolhouse yard, and the play-shed roof, ran muddy streams
of water.

Margaret had taught in this schoolroom for nearly four years now,
ever since her seventeenth birthday, and she knew every feature of
the big bare room by heart, and every detail of the length of village
street that the high, uncurtained windows commanded. She had stood
at this window in all weathers: when locust and lilac made even ugly
little Weston enchanting, and all the windows were open to floods of
sweet spring air; when tie dry heat of autumn burned over the world;
when the common little houses and barns, and the bare trees, lay
dazzling and transfigured under the first snowfall, and the wood
crackled in the schoolroom stove; and when, as to-day, midwinter
rains swept drearily past the windows, and the children must have