Upon the side of the pool there sat a woman--as still as a picture in a gold frame. She was clad with such sobriety that one might have thought her a stone; but she moved and her sunbonnet shone as she flung it off and then wiped her hot forehead with the fall of it. For a moment she thought of the legends of Crazywell and cast back in her memory for the evidence of their truth. Here was a haunt of mystery and a water of power. Voices murmured in this hollow once a year, and if none of late had heard them, doubtless that was because none permitted himself or herself to do so. A spirit neither malignant nor benign, but wondrously informed, dwelt here--a sentient thing, a nether gnome, from whom was not hidden the future of men--a being who once a year could cry aloud with human voice and tell the names of those whose race was run. All dreaded the sortilege of the unknown thing that haunted Crazywell; but since its power was restricted to Christmas Eve, little general sense of horror or mystery hung over the pool. For Margaret Bowden, however, it had always possessed a sort of charm not wholly pleasant. She avoided the place of set purpose and was beside it to-day by appointment only. Another had named Crazywell as a tryst, and she lacked sufficient self-assertion to refuse. Now she blinked in the direct sunlight and longed for shade where no shade was. She envied the kine below, and being in a mood a little morbid, by reason of private concerns, she cast her thought further than the cattle and pictured the peace and silence beneath the heart of the water. A long sleep there seemed not the hardest fate that could fall on human life. There was a man--and Margaret had known him--who drowned himself in Crazywell. By night he ended a troublous life, and joined the spirit of the pool for a season. Then he floated into light of day again, and was found by his fellows. They drew him out and called him mad, and buried him in the earth with Christian burial, that his wife’s feelings might be saved a pang. Yet nobody knew better than the coroner’s jury that this man was very sane, and had shortened his own life for sound reasons. Margaret remembered that at the time, she had blamed him much, but her mother had not blamed him. And she herself, having been married nearly a year, no longer blamed him. Who was she to judge? If she, a happy wife, could look without horror at Crazywell in this unclouded hour, was it strange that an unhappy man might do more than look, and rest his head there? "A happy wife--so happy as any woman ever can hope to be, who--who--" Her thought broke off. She envied the mare at water’s edge. The pot-bellied old matron stood still, and only moved her tail backwards and forwards to keep off the flies. The foal galloped around her--playing as children will. "So happy as any wife can hope to be, who has no child."