I can see her now as she used to come down the steps of her narrow house between the printer’s office and the little shop of Rinehart, the German cobbler--little, rickety steps, never in too good repair, especially as she grew older and the cost of everything increased and that mysterious money of hers seemed to go less and less far in the business of meeting the necessities of life. It was a house but one room wide, of wood painted a dun colour; the most ordinary and commonplace of houses which a stranger would not even have noticed--yet until yesterday, when they pulled it down, a house invested with a terrific glamour and importance. It was a house of which no one spoke; a house which the Town, in its passionate desire to forget (which was really only a hypocrisy), raised into such importance that one thought of it when one forgot the monuments which had been raised to the leading citizens of the community: to the bankers, to the merchants, to the politicians who had made it (as people said with a curious and non-committal tone which might have meant anything at all) “what it was to-day.” One remembered it even when one forgot the shaft of granite raised in the public square to remind the Town that John Shadwell had been one of its leading citizens. I can see her now--Vergie Winters--an old woman past eighty, coming painfully down those rickety steps, surrounded always by that wall of solitude which appeared to shut out all the world. Old Vergie Winters, whose dark eyes at eighty carried a look of tranquil, defiant victory. Vergie Winters, of whose house no one spoke; whose door had been stoned by boys who knew nothing of her story but sensed dimly that she was the great pariah of the Town. Old Vergie Winters went on and on, long after John Shadwell was in his grave, refusing to give way, living there on the main street of the Town as if she were alone in the vast solitude of a desert. Sometimes she spoke to Rinehart, the cobbler, and sometimes to her neighbour on the other side; and of course in the shops they were forced to sell her things, though in one or two places they had even turned her away--and she had gone without a word, never trying to force her way anywhere. It all began almost a century ago, before the Civil War, when one day in April Vergie Winters, tall and dark, with great, burning dark eyes set in a cool, pale face, opened the door of her father’s house to John Shadwell, tall and handsome and blond, the youngest lawyer in the Town. It happened so long ago that it seems now to have no more reality than a legend, especially when one remembers Vergie only as an immensely old woman coming painfully down her narrow, crooked steps. But it happened; it must have happened to have made of Vergie Winters so great a character in all the community. It must have been the rare sort of love which comes like a stroke of lightning.