The child grew much in the same way as grew the houseleeks in the boxes beside the southern door, very slowly and dully. Once or twice she went for a few months to stay with an aunt in the village ten miles away, it being the unanimous opinion of her relatives that as the Welches always had known how to read and write it was proper that something should be done for Ruth's education; and the village school was the only educational means known in the region. The girl pined for home, however, and was never content away from the red house. Perhaps by a strange perversity of circumstance the home-longing of the mother was in the child transformed into a clinging fondness for the place where the former was so lonely and alien. The low, level moors were necessary to Ruth's life; in their colorless monotony she somehow found the complement for her uneventful life. Perhaps the very dulness developed her imagination, as special organs appear in animals whose abnormal conditions of existence render them needful. If this were so, it was no less true that the moors absorbed whatever mental life they stimulated, until the girl seemed hardly less a part of them than the knolls of leathery shrubs, the scattered, shallow pools, the tufts of coarse grass, or the whispering voices of the wind which all night long and every night were hurrying to and fro, concerned with unspeakable tidings which perhaps came from the sea that forever moaned along the moorland's edges. Little conscious imagination had Ruth at nineteen; and it was at nineteen that the single, trifling event of her life occurred. She was a maiden by no means uncomely. She was not educated in any conventional sense of the term; but her life alone with her grandfather and old Bethiah and the great brown moors had bred in her a certain sweet gravity which was not without its charm, had there been but those to see who could appreciate it. Along the front of the house ran a bench, where people seldom sat, since there were none to sit, but where the milk-pans dried in the sun, a gleaming row; and one sunny morning late in September the flash of their shimmer caught the eye of a skipper who in his yacht in the bay studied the horizon with his glass. He was not yet past those years when a man still finds amusement in imitating fate and nature by yielding to his impulses; the gleam suggested pleasant draughts of fresh milk; and without more ado, he headed the trig little craft in which he and a brother artist were skirting the coast of the Gulf of Maine for the little inlet upon which Gran'sir' Welch's red cottage stood. In those days yachts were less common than now, and both Ruth and Bethiah left their work to watch the boat as it ran up to the low wharf, and the snowy sail fell with a musical rattle and clash of metallic rings.