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60 "Who pricked him, father? Show me the picture," demanded Molly; but, putting her off his knee, the father answered with a short laugh,—

"Never mind, my little maid; never mind. Come now, say thy catechism and the collect for this day."

And so they came to America, and settled near some Old-World neighbors named Hetherford, hard by the village of Falmouth at the beginning of Cape Cod; and here, nourished by the salt Atlantic breeze, and the plenteous freedom of out-door life, as she followed her father around his fields or out in his fishing-boat, Molly Wilder grew from a fragile, lily-white child to a stately maiden, inheriting her father's finely-developed figure and fair English coloring, deepened in the eyes from the honest blue of Wilder's to a deep grey, suiting well with their steadfast and earnest expression, and with the black lashes and brows which nature had capriciously borrowed from the mother's dark face to bestow upon her fair daughter. But Molly's mouth and chin were all her own, resembling neither the somewhat rough-hewn and bovine features of her father, nor the thin-lipped shrewish mouth and pointed chin of her mother; for Molly's chin was wide and soft and creamy-white, with just the faintest depression in its midst, as if Love had been about to set a dimple there, but had been frightened away by the cold purity of the lips above, so bright of tint, so exquisite of moulding, so soft and sweet in their rare smiles, but ordinarily so grave. If Valerie de Rochenbois mouth was made for kisses, surely Mary Wilder's was made for prayer; and if still the kisses