“Well!” said I, in a hardest tone, “admitting that I do not understand; and that I think on men and women she will never meet, and ballrooms she will never enter. Still, the costumes at least I can control, and it will mightily please me if you and Blossom at once attend to the frocks.” “You do not understand!” persisted Anne, with sober gentleness. “Blossom would not wear an evening dress.” “Anne, you grow daft!” I cried. “How should there be aught immodest in dressing like every best woman in town? The question of modesty is a question of custom; it is in the exception one will find the indelicate. I know of no one more immodest than a prude.” “Blossom is asleep,” said Anne, in her patient way. Then taking a bed-candle that burned on a table, she beckoned me. “Come; I will show you what I mean. Make no noise; we must not wake Blossom. She must never know that you have seen. She has held this a secret from you; and I, for her poor sake, have done the same.” Anne opened the door of Blossom's room. My girl was in a gentle slumber. With touch light as down, Anne drew aside the covers from about her neck. “There,” whispered Anne, “there! Look on her throat!” Once, long before, a man had hanged himself, and I was called. I had never forgotten the look of those marks which belted the neck of that self-strangled man. Encircling the lily throat of Blossom, I saw the fellows to those marks--raw and red and livid! There are no words to tell the horror that swallowed me up. I turned ill; my reason stumbled on its feet. Anne led me from the room. “The mark of the rope!” I gasped. “It is the mark of the rope!” CHAPTER XXI--THE REVEREND BRONSON'S REBELLION WHAT should it be?--this gallows-brand to show like a bruised ribbon of evil about the throat of Blossom! Anne gave me the story of it. It was a birthmark; that hangman fear which smote upon the mother when, for the death of Jimmy the Blacksmith, I was thrown into a murderer's cell, had left its hideous trace upon the child. In Blossom's infancy and in her earliest childhood, the mark had lain hidden beneath the skin as seeds lie buried and dormant in the ground. Slowly, yet no less surely, the inveterate years had quickened it and brought it to the surface; it had grown and never stopped--this mark! and with each year it took on added sullenness. The best word that Anne could give me was that it would so continue in its ugly multiplication until the day of Blossom's death. There could be no escape; no curing change, by any argument of medicine or surgery, was to be brought about; there it glared and there it would remain, a mark to shrink from! to the horrid last. And by that token, my plans of a drawing room for Blossom found annihilation. Anne had said the truth; those dreams that my girl should shine, starlike, in the firmament of high society, must be put away.