Rummaging through Fanny’s effects a day or two after her marriage, Mazie discovered a painted fan, a mother-of-pearl card-case, and this breast-pin. She carried the miniature to Odell. “Looks like baby,” she explained, with her care-free laugh. “She’ll be lucky if she favours that pitcher,” said Odell. “But like as not she’ll take after Fanny.” He was wrong in his guess. When Eris was five her resemblance to the miniature had become marked. And Mazie’s boys looked like their mother and father. On Saturday nights, after immersing her own unwilling brunette brats in the weekly bath, Mazie found the slim white body of little Eris an ever-increasing amusement and a pique to her curiosity. The child’s frail yet healthy symmetry, the fine skin, delicate, perfect limbs, lovely little hands and feet, remained perennial sources of mirth and surprise to this robust young woman who was equally healthy, but built on a big, colourful, vigorous plan. Solid and large of limb and haunch, deep-bosomed, ruddy-skinned, the young stepmother always bred true to type. Her sons were sons of the soil from birth. There could be no doubt about her offspring. What wasn’t Lister was Odell. They belonged to the land. But when Mazie looked at her husband and looked at the child, Eris--and when she remembered Fanny--then she wondered and was inclined to smile. And she was content that her sons’ thick, sturdy bodies and slanting, black eyes so plainly advertised the stock they came from. Utility. Health. Strength. Fanny had had a pink nose. Even a Guernsey ought to have one. But the nose of Eris was snow white. To what stock did this child throw back? When Eris was seven she was sent to the village school, leading her eldest stepbrother thither by the hand. Both were scared and tearful. Nobody went with little Eris to mitigate the ordeal; and she was a most sensitive child. * * * * * Hers had been a deathless curiosity since she was old enough to ask her first question. An unquenchable desire for information seemed to possess her. Her eternal, “Will you tell me why?” became a nuisance. “Dang it, send her to school!” shouted Odell at last. And that was how. At her small desk, rigid, bewildered, terribly intent on the first teacher in human form she had ever gazed upon, she found herself on the verge of tears. But, before she could dissolve, her brother forestalled her, bursting into vigorous yells, bawling like a calf; and would not be comforted. Which allowed Eris no time for private grief while wiping his eyes with her pinafore. Noonday recess and lunch baskets and the wildly gyrating horde of children let loose on a sandy playground ended the first encounter between Eris Odell and the great god Education in His Local Temple at White Hills Village. * * * * *