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Before her song was finished they were standing at the water's edge. The crimson flush of the Virginia-creeper that climbed a tall cedar behind her was a perfect background for this fair young woman as she stood gazing into the swift stream, catching glimpses of herself whenever, for a second, the water's surface was unruffled. Pleasures come and go as quickly as these reflections of myself, she was thinking, and then she held her face up and looked intently across the stream, but not so much at the wooded slope that on that side hemmed it in, as at the curling smoke that she knew came from the fire in John Bishop's shop. "How could mother get such an idea into her head?" she said to herself, but loud enough for her brothers to hear.

"What has mother got in her head?" asked the younger of the two boys, a persistent, inquisitive lad of eleven summers.