Produced by Suzanne Shell, Sam W. and the Online Distributed Proofreading Team at http://www.pgdp.net THE HEART'S COUNTRY BY MARY HEATON VORSE WITH ILLUSTRATIONS BY ALICE BARBER STEPHENS [Illustration] BOSTON AND NEW YORK HOUGHTON MIFFLIN COMPANY The Riverside Press Cambridge 1914 COPYRIGHT, 1913, BY THE CROWELL PUBLISHING COMPANY COPYRIGHT, 1914, BY MARY HEATON O'BRIEN ALL RIGHTS RESERVED _Published April 1914_ [Illustration: YOU MUST COME! (p. 151)] By Mary Heaton Vorse THE HEART'S COUNTRY. Illustrated. THE VERY LITTLE PERSON. Illustrated. THE BREAKING IN OF A YACHTSMAN'S WIFE. Illustrated. HOUGHTON MIFFLIN COMPANY Boston and New York CONTENTS CHAPTER PAGE Prologue 1 I 5 II 17 III 24 IV 30 V 36 VI 43 VII 50 VIII 58 IX 68 X 85 XI 97 XII 112 XIII 119 XIV 128 XV 146 XVI 153 XVII 168 XVIII 187 XIX 195 XX 203 XXI 221 XXII 230 XXIII 248 XXIV 253 XXV 261 XXVI 276 XXVII 282 ILLUSTRATIONS "You must come!" (page 151) _Frontispiece_ "I Hate your Society, anyway! I never did want to be an Old Maid!" 40 "She is very lovely" 108 She towered above Ellen, an Avenging Fate 176 From drawings by Alice Barber Stephens. THE HEART'S COUNTRY PROLOGUE The actors in this drama are dead, or else life has turned them into such different beings that their transformation is hardly less than that of death itself. Their thoughts are scattered to the winds, or live, oddly changed, in the bodies of their children--the girl who brought me the journals and packages of letters smiled up at me with the flashing smile of Ellen. This girl, with a gesture of the hand, opened for me the gates of the past, and when she was gone I walked through them with beating heart, back over the steep path of years. This little package of long-forgotten papers which she had given me, and of whose contents she was ignorant, were a strange legacy, for it was my own youth that I found in them and the youth of Ellen.