Next to the colonel's, coming down the big road, was the Gordon place, the largest and best kept in the village. The house was a low rambling structure of logs, whitewashed inside and out. The rooms had been added at random as suited the comfort and convenience of the family. It was not the habit of the Oldfield people to consider appearances. It was not the habit of the widow Gordon to consider anything but her own wishes. It may have been on account of this imperiousness, this open and scornful disregard of everything and everybody except herself and her own comfort, that she was always called "old lady Gordon" behind her back. She lived alone with a large retinue of servants in the comfortable old house, spending her days in a state of mental and physical semi-coma from over-eating and over-sleeping, using both like lethean drugs. Miss Judy alone sometimes thought that old lady Gordon so used them and pitied her. Old lady Gordon, who had a strong keen sense of humor, almost masculine in its robustness, would have laughed at the idea of Miss Judy's pity. She was the richest member of that community in which all living was simple, and in which the extremes of riches and poverty were not known as they are known to the greater world. Most of the Oldfield people dwelt contentedly in the middle estate which the wisest of men prayed for. None was poorer than Miss Judy, who had only a pittance of a pension, the old house, and the scrap of earth; none, that is, except Sidney Wendall, who, although she owned the log cabin which sheltered her family and the bit of garden lying by its side, had not a penny of income for the support of her three children, her husband's brother, and herself. Yet Miss Judy managed to provide for Miss Sophia--and herself also as an afterthought; and Sidney provided for her family without difficulty, though in both cases a steady, strenuous effort was required. Among the few who were really well-to-do, were Tom Watson and Anne his wife. Their house, facing Miss Judy's across the big road, was rather more modern than the rest of the Oldfield houses, and it was better furnished. And yet as Miss Judy looked at its closed blinds she sighed, thinking how little money had to do with happiness, when it could give no relief from pain of mind or body. More than a year had dragged by since the master of that darkened household had been brought home after the accident which had crushed the great, strong, passionate, undisciplined, good-hearted giant into a helpless, hopeless paralytic--as the lightning fells the mighty oak in fullest leaf. The mistress of the stricken home had always been what the Oldfield people called a "still-tongued" woman, and she was now become more silent than ever. The house had never been a cheerful one, save as the noisy master blustered in and out. Now it was sad indeed: now that both husband and wife knew that he could never be any better, never otherwise than he was, although he might live for years.