They are not usually the decisions to which we give the most thought that most control our lives, but those to which we give the least; and this city girl glided into her country holiday as unaware as the rest of us are when we cross the little misty space that separates freedom from fate. She was not an extraordinary girl; unless we should consider extraordinary a certain kind of moral beauty to which the delicacy of her face and form gave marked expression. Such beauty she assuredly possessed. Her head had a certain poise never to be found except in women to whom we may apply the beautiful adjective “high-minded.” Her eyes and the curve of her lip bore this out; and she had the quality of voice no more to be copied by a woman of the world than a pure heart is to be imitated by a schemer. She was not an intellectual woman in our modern sense of the word. She was a bright, gentle girl; more devout than her mates who rode with her on picnics from the hotel, but as ready to be happy as the rest; she had a certain sweet merriment, or merry sweetness, peculiar to herself, and of which life and trouble never entirely robbed her. If we add to this that she had the angelic obstinacy sometimes to be found in unobtrusive and amiable people, her story, so far as it concerns us, need not be the enigma that it always remained to many of those who knew her best. In this summer of which we speak, when Miss Worcester had been for a couple of weeks among the hills, it befell that her party, for some cause not important enough to trace, moved into lodgings across the road from the hotel, where they commanded a cottage otherwise occupied only by the proprietor or tenant of the house. The cottage, after the fashion of its kind, was white of surface, green of blinds, and calm of demeanor. Its low front windows swept the great horizon of Bethlehem without obstruction, and when one drew the green-paper shade of the upper chamber in the rear, a tall pine--one of fourscore, the picket of a rich and sombre grove--brushed into one’s face, and eyed one like a grave, superior rustic who knew his worth and one’s own, and was not to be distanced. Mary Worcester, in a white, thin dress, was sitting by this window one July day, looking down on the long fingers of the pine bough, when she was disturbed by a sudden agitation in the green heart of the tree. The boughs shook and parted, and the branch that lay over upon her window-sill trembled, yielded, started, gave a smart, stinging blow upon her bending cheek, and swept aside. She sprang back to save her eyes, and, in doing so, perceived the top round of a ladder rising from the tree.