Later on, when death swooped again and her mother was gone, Julie, frightened and alone, nevertheless rebuilt her life once more, and went on spinning her web of existence, supported by dressmaking and millinery which she had established in her father’s old shop, and protected from being quite alone by Aunt Sadie Johnson who rented one half of the house, and who was not Julie’s aunt at all, but was so old a friend of her mother’s that Julie had always called her so. This is the thread of Julie Rose’s life, running on narrow and timorous lines back into the past to her birth in Hart’s Run, and forward into the future, at the command of existence; and all along its pathway of the past and future one may see her small figure faring forth, as she weaves her strand in the pattern of humanity. All of it is of interest and of value in that pattern, but for the sake of winding some of the thread into a ball of narrative, one must pick it up definitely at one point and break off at another; therefore, to begin, let us pick it up on a June night in the summer of 1918, the year that Julie was thirty-two. II It was a soft and gracious evening early in the month. The dusk, drenched by dew, which brought out the fragrance of locust blossoms, of peonies, roses, and cut grass in the dooryards up and down the street, fell over Hart’s Run in breath after breath of oncoming darkness, obliterating the sordid aspect of the village--except where the electric lights glaringly defied it--so that the cheap lines of the new garage were gathered into obscurity, the telegraph poles disappeared, and looking up one saw the wide, tumbled outline of mountains, with a remote young moon sailing the sky. Some of the night’s fragrance drifted in through Julie’s back door, but she was unconscious of its appeal, having gone into her shop to see if everything was in order and safely locked up, before she started out for the week-night prayer-meeting.