More than any of the other brothers, Otto typified strength and beauty, but in his eyes was never a dream, his brain had mastered nothing.  He was playing idly with the yellow cat, but he stopped at Van Alen’s question.

“Her great-grandfather and yours were neighbors,” the boy said, with his cheeks flushing; “they own the next farm.”

“The Wetherells?” Van Alen inquired.

The boy nodded.  “They ain’t got a cent.  They’re land poor.  That’s why she’s here.  But she don’t need to work.”

“Why not?”

“There’s plenty that wants to marry her round about,” was the boy’s self-conscious summing up.

With a sense of revolt, Van Alen left him, and, undressing in the room with the canopy bed, he called up vaguely the vision of a little girl who had visited them in the city.  She had had green eyes and freckles and red hair.  Beyond that she had made no impression on his callowness.  And her name was Mazie Wetherell.

He threw himself on the couch, and the night winds, coming in through the open window, stirred the curtains of the canopy bed with the light touch of a ghostly hand.

Then dreams came, and through them ran the thread of his hope of seeing Mazie Wetherell in the morning.

But even with such preparation, her beauty seemed to come upon him unawares when he saw her at breakfast.  And again at noon, and again at night.  But it was the third day before he saw her alone.

All that day he had explored the length and breadth of the family estate, finding it barren, finding that the population of the little village at its edge had decreased to a mere handful of laggards, finding that there was no lawyer within miles and but one doctor; gaining a final impression that back here in the hills men would come no more where once men had thronged.

It was almost evening when he followed a furrowed brown road that led westward.  Above the bleak line of the horizon the sun hung, a red gold disk.  There were other reds, too, along the way—­the sumac flaming scarlet against the gray fence-rails; the sweetbrier, crimson-spotted with berries; the creeper, clinging with ruddy fingers to dead tree-trunks; the maple leaves rosy with first frosts.

And into this vividness came the girl who had waited on the table, and her flaming cheeks and copper hair seemed to challenge the glow of the autumn landscape.

She would have passed him with a nod, but he stopped her.

“You must not run away, Mazie Wetherell,” he said; “you used to treat me better than that when you were a little girl.”

She laughed.  “Do you remember my freckles and red hair?”

“I remember your lovely manners.”

“I had to have nice manners.  It is only pretty children who can afford to be bad.”

“And pretty women?” he asked, with his eyes on the color that came and went.

She flung out her hands in a gesture of protest “I have seen so few.”