The old deacon couldn't stand such talk. He turned him outdoors, slammed the door in his face, and forbid Faith to speak to him again. She obeyed her Pa and her own conscience; but it seemed to take all the nip out of her life. You see, she loved this young man; and when anyone like Faith loves it hain't for a week or a summer, but for life. He writ to her burnin' words of love and passion, for he loved her too in the old-fashioned way Adam did Eve--no other woman round, you know. And the words he writ wuz, I spoze, enough to melt a slate stun, let alone a heart, tender and true. She never writ a word back, and at last she wouldn't read his letters and sent 'em back onopened. That madded him and he went on from bad to worse, swung right out into wickedness. He seemed to git harder and harder, and finally seein' he could make no more impression on Faith than he could on white clear crystal, he went off west, as fur as Michigan at first, so I hearn, and so on, I don't know where to. [Illustration: "_The old deacon couldn't stand such talk. He turned him outdoors, slammed the door in his face, and forbid Faith to speak to him again._" (_See page 13_)] Well, Faith lived on in the old home, very calm and sweet actin', with a shadder on her pretty face, worryin' dretful about her lover, so it wuz spozed. But at last it seemed to wear off and a clear white light took its place on her gentle forward, as if her trouble had bleached off the earthly in her nature so her white soul could show through plain. Mebby she'd got willin' to trust even _his_ future with the Lord. Dretful good to children and sick folks and them that wuz in trouble, Faith wuz. Good to her Pa, who wuz very disagreable in his last days, findin' fault with his porridge and with sinners, and most of them round him. But she took care on him patient, rubbed his back and soaked his feet, and read the Sams to him, and reconciled him all she could, and finally he went out into the Great Onknown to find out his own mistakes if he had made any, and left Faith alone. The house wuz a big square one with a large front yard with some Pollard willers standin' in a row in front on't, through which the wind come in melancholy sithes into the great front chamber at night where Faith slept, or ruther lay. And the moon fallin' through the willers made mournful reflections on the clean-painted floor, and I spoze Faith looked at 'em and read her past in the white cold rays and her future too. She hired a man and his wife to live in part of the house, and she herself lived on there, a life as cold and colorless as a nun's. But there wuz them that said that she loved that young West to-day jest as well as she did the day they parted, bein' one of the constant naters that can't forgit; that she kep' his birthdays every year, but sarahuptishously, and on the anniversary of the day she parted with him, nobody ever see her from mornin' till night.