The daughter of the house of Gentry turned her face resolutely toward respectability and the church, albeit there was no joy in the countenance. Strung out over a quarter of a mile were courting couples bent toward the same destination. To these young hearts it seemed well worth while to have lain under the heel of winter to attain this marvelous summer morning with its green-clothed forest, its wreathing of blossoms where they passed. Clean and cool as a bell's note, the song of a thrush deep in the wood spilled jeweled drops of sound through the trembling branches overhead. A catbird's sonata rippled boldly out upon the very path. A canopy of bloom was woven and flung over the spring by the black, knotty fingers of the laurel. Bees tumbled happily in the bosom of the fairest drooping clusters, their hum nearly drowned by the heavy gurgle of the creek water. Callista drew in her breath sharply. Summer and sun and light and love everywhere--and she was walking up to the church-house with Flenton Hands, while back on some forest by-path, with music at his finger ends and Ola Derf beside him, Lance Cleaverage forgot her with a laugh. CHAPTER II. THE UP-SITTING. GRANNY YEARWOOD--the grandmother of Flenton Hands and his sisters--was dead. The work-hardened old body had parted with its flame of life reluctantly; for nearly a year she had been declining toward the end; and during the last months the family had cared for her almost day and night. They were worn out with the toil of it before she herself wore out. But now it was all over. The first outburst of noisy lamentation, which is fairly conventional in the Southern mountains, was past. The corpse had been decently composed on a rude plank scaffold, while Octavia Gentry and Roxy Griever took charge of the household and began to order things in that curious half-ecclesiastical fashion which follows the footsteps of death.