THE HOUSE OF HELEN CORRA HARRIS THE HOUSE OF HELEN BY CORRA HARRIS AUTHOR OF “A DAUGHTER OF ADAM,” “THE EYES OF LOVE,” “MY SON,” “HAPPILY MARRIED,” “A CIRCUIT RIDER’S WIFE,” “THE RECORDING ANGEL,” ETC. AND IN COLLABORATION WITH FAITH HARRIS LEECH: “FROM SUNUP TO SUNDOWN” [Illustration] NEW YORK GEORGE H. DORAN COMPANY COPYRIGHT, 1923, BY GEORGE H. DORAN COMPANY [Illustration] COPYRIGHT, 1922, 1923, BY THE CURTIS PUBLISHING COMPANY THE HOUSE OF HELEN. II PRINTED IN THE UNITED STATES OF AMERICA PART ONE THE HOUSE OF HELEN PART ONE CHAPTER I The town of Shannon lay like a wreath flung wide upon the hills above one of those long, green, fertile valleys to be seen everywhere below the Blue Ridge Mountains in North Georgia. It was nothing like a city, merely a neat, little town built by thrifty people since the Civil War. Therefore, there were no colonial residences in it to remind you of the strutting, magnificent past, but the houses in it were smaller, painted any color that pleased the fancy, ruffled from end to end, with spindle-legged porches and scalloped gables. White church spires stuck up out of it like the forefingers of faith in God. There was a town square, around which business was done comfortably and leisurely on a credit basis. The red-brick courthouse stood in this square, with a long, wide flight of white cement steps to it, showing like the teeth of the law; not that any one minded these teeth. The dome of this courthouse was covered with galvanized tin. It shone above the tufted trees on bright days like an immense silver helmet. And beneath this helmet there was the town clock, a good, old man with a plain, round face with only the wrinkles that marked the hours on it. Half the men in Shannon who carried watch chains carried no watches because this clock was so infallibly faithful to the sun. At the time of which I write no one in Shannon called the narrow or even the wide spaces, which separated their respective homes from the street, a lawn. It was the “front yard,” and usually divided with a picket fence from the back yard, where the hens attended to business. Flowers, of the kind in service to “ladies” who wear aprons and do their own work and have an artless affection for blooming things, inhabited these front yards, regardless of law and order in the matter of background or perspective. The forsythia, syringas, roses and altheas had been planted with reference to their health in relation to the sun, and, whatever happened, they bloomed. Only the smaller plants, like annuals, were sternly disciplined. They stood up in beds or along the graveled walks, like spelling classes in a properly graded school, every one of them reciting a bloom after the manner of its kind.