Aunt Polly lifted the sock she was knitting and wiped her eyes. "Mary-Clare just naturally makes you laugh and cry at once," the old voice replied, "remembering her is real diverting. She came from plain, decent stock, but something was grafted onto her while she was young and it made a new kind of girl of Mary-Clare. So loving and loyal." Again Aunt Polly wiped her eyes. "And brave and grateful," Heathcote took up his story, "and terrible far-seeing. I don't hold with Polly that Mary-Clare became something new by grafting. Seems more like she was two girls, both keeping pace and watching out and one standing guard if the other took a time off. I never did feel sure ole Doc was quite fair with Mary-Clare. Without meaning to, he got a stranglehold on that girl. She'd have trotted off to hell for him, or with him. She'd have held her head high and laughed it off, too. I don't suppose any one on God's earth actually knows what the real Mary-Clare thinks about things on her own hook, but you bet she has ideas!" Northrup was more interested than he had been in many a day. The story thrilled him. The girl of the yellow house loomed large upon his vision and he began to understand. He was not one to scoff at things beyond the pale of exact science; his craft was one that took much for granted that could not be reduced to fact. Standing at the door of the little yellow house he had become a victim of suggestion. That accounted for it. The mists were passing. He had not been such an ass, after all. "So! that is your old doctor's place down by the crossroads?" he said with a genuine sense of relief. "It was. Ole Doc died seven years back." "What became of his son--you said he had a boy?" Northrup was gathering the threads in his hands. Nothing must escape him; it was all grist. "Oh! Larry came off and on the scene. There are them as think ole Doc didn't treat Larry fair and square. I don't know, but anyway, just before ole Doc was struck with that stroke that finished him, Larry came home and seemed to be forgiving enough, if there had been any wrong done. He had considerable education; ole Doc had given him that chance, but Larry drifted--allas was, and still is, a drifter. We all stand pat for the feller on account of his father and Mary-Clare. It was a blamed risky thing, though, Larry's marrying Mary-Clare! I allas will hold to that!" Once, when Northrup was a young boy, he had been shocked by electricity. The memory of his experience often recurred to him in moments of stress. He had been standing within a few yards of the tree that had been shattered, and he had fallen unconscious. When he came to, he was vividly aware of the slightest details of sight and sound surrounding him. His senses seemed to have been quickened during the lapse of time. He winced at the light; the flickering of leaves above him hurt; the song of birds beat against his brain with sweet clamour, and he vaguely wondered what had happened to him; where he had been?