MARCIA HADDON’S lawyers wrote with greater and greater insistence from New York, asking her return to care for the matters of the estate of James Haddon, but she still shrank from the thought of going back to the old associations. A strange apathy encompassed her, a leaden indifference to life, as though all were ended for her as well as for the unfortunate lying yonder on the hill. She found nothing in life to interest her, to offer her any hope, to excite in her any ambition. “I’m useless, useless!” said she to herself more than once. She held her own life in review now, day after day, feeling herself unworthy and forsaken, herself too merciless a critic of herself. Joslin she saw frequently. His visits were quiet, unobtrusive, almost apologetic. He was very sad, and always taciturn, but she often looked forward to his coming with something to ask him, something to discuss. “I feel so worthless here!” she broke out, suddenly, to him one evening, as she sat in her chair, looking out across the blue hills of the valley below them. “It’s time for me to be going home, I suppose—— But I don’t think there ever was a woman so worthless in all the world, nor one so much alone. I don’t want to go back. Granny Williams——” He sat silent, looking across the forests as they lay in the twilight. “Some day,” he said slowly, after a time, “will you ride out with me, Mrs. Haddon, into these hills, with one of our women here? I’ll show you things, Ma’am, you never thought could exist in all the world. “Do you know what I’ve been doing, Ma’am?” he went on. “I mean since I came back here? At night, when I have time, I’m teaching school—I’ve begun already.” He smiled at her with his wide, pleasant smile. “My first scholar, Ma’am, is old Absalom Gannt. He’s the man that killed my father—or made him kill himself. He’s the leader of the Gannt faction. There’s been war between the Gannts and Joslins long as anybody can remember in these mountains. Well, Absalom was my first scholar!” She only looked at him quietly. “What made him come?” said she at length. “You measure your own ignorance of these people by that question,” said he. “I’ve got a night class of twenty people, every one of them over forty-five—men and women both—some women with babies in their arms. They don’t know how to read or write. They’re learning their letters, Ma’am—like little children! What’s the difference whether we’re happy or not? It’s no consequence if we’ve got something to do. Don’t you think there’s much to be done, here?” “Children?” said Marcia Haddon vaguely—“Old Granny Williams said——” “I had two children. I was glad they died. But I’m trying to make ways for other children to grow up fit to live.” She sat for a long time, her hands idly in her lap, her pale face turned steadily out toward the enigma of these hills. “Spartan!” she exclaimed. “All Spartans! And I had so much! They tell me my husband’s estate will be about two million dollars.”