Years before, when gentle Mrs. Leigh turned her back forever upon the beloved Bluegrass town of her youth, and came to spend the remaining years of her life at Storm--for with all her ineffectiveness she was not the woman to leave her daughter alone in disgrace and sorrow--Kate had tried to make the strange country more homelike for her by building an Episcopal church. Meeting-houses of several denominations had been long established there; but to Mrs. Leigh, with Virginia and English antecedents, "church" meant candles on the altar, a vested choir, a rector in robes reading the familiar service of her childhood. She was willing to concede to Methodists, Baptists, Campbellites, other attendants of meeting-houses, a possible place in heaven; but hardly in the best society of heaven; and she was one of the people who cannot worship God comfortably except in the best society. The church Kate built was small and plain--she had found her husband's estate heavily encumbered with debt. But it had its cross, its choir, and its rector, a scholarly old man who persuaded Philip into the ministry and who on his death was succeeded by him. And from the first it had its congregation. The farming people of that section of the State had come, or their immediate forebears had come, almost entirely from Virginia, so that the English service was as much a part of their traditions as of Mrs. Leigh's. The building of the first Episcopal church in that country did more to break down the enmity toward Basil Kildare's young widow than any of her patient efforts to win their friendship; and this despite the fact that she herself rarely entered it. The little edifice stood in a grove of fine beeches between Storm and the crossroads village; a four-square structure of field boulders, with a modest steeple, and a gallery across the back for negroes, in the patriarchal Virginia fashion. The mistress of Storm saw to it that this gallery was well filled. The corner-stone bore an inscription that excited much comment in the community, as Kate intended it should: ERECTED IN MEMORY OF BASIL KILDARE BY HIS TWO CHILDREN It was the first word of her answer to the world, and it had its weight. "It says _his_ two children. She wouldn't dare to tell a lie on stone!" was the current opinion. Near the church was the rectory, one of those log-cabins boarded over and whitewashed, which are still quite common in Kentucky, sturdy mementoes of the sturdy pioneers whom they have outlived and will outlive for many a generation yet to come. Lilac, hollyhock, and hydrangea bloomed in season about this cabin, and it had a door-yard that made women linger enviously and men smile in scorn; for to these rough, hard-working, hard-living farmers it seemed that a young man might find better use for his leisure than the tending of flowers.