Best of all he liked going in where the water-wheel hung dripping in its dark cave, and quivering streaks of sunlight came in through the cracks to play on the green slime and the spotted jewel-weed growing in the shale.  The mill was a place of sharp contrasts; bright sun and deep shade, roaring sound and heavy, dripping silence.  He remembered how astonished he was one day, when he found Mr. Royce in gloves and goggles, cleaning the millstones, and discovered what harmless looking things they were.  The miller picked away at them with a sharp hammer until the sparks flew, and Claude still had on his hand a blue spot where a chip of flint went under the skin when he got too near.

Jason Royce must have kept his mill going out of sentiment, for there was not much money in it now.  But milling had been his first business, and he had not found many things in life to be sentimental about.  Sometimes one still came upon him in dusty miller’s clothes, giving his man a day off.  He had long ago ceased to depend on the risings and fallings of Lovely Creek for his power, and had put in a gasoline engine.  The old dam now lay “like a holler tooth,” as one of his men said, grown up with weeds and willow-brush.

Mr. Royce’s family affairs had never gone as well as his business.  He had not been blessed with a son, and out of five daughters he had succeeded in bringing up only two.  People thought the mill house damp and unwholesome.  Until he built a tenant’s cottage and got a married man to take charge of the mill, Mr. Royce was never able to keep his millers long.  They complained of the gloom of the house, and said they could not get enough to eat.  Mrs. Royce went every summer to a vegetarian sanatorium in Michigan, where she learned to live on nuts and toasted cereals.  She gave her family nourishment, to be sure, but there was never during the day a meal that a man could look forward to with pleasure, or sit down to with satisfaction.  Mr. Royce usually dined at the hotel in town.  Nevertheless, his wife was distinguished for certain brilliant culinary accomplishments.  Her bread was faultless.  When a church supper was toward, she was always called upon for her wonderful mayonnaise dressing, or her angel-food cake,—­sure to be the lightest and spongiest in any assemblage of cakes.

A deep preoccupation about her health made Mrs. Royce like a woman who has a hidden grief, or is preyed upon by a consuming regret.  It wrapped her in a kind of insensibility.  She lived differently from other people, and that fact made her distrustful and reserved.  Only when she was at the sanatorium, under the care of her idolized doctors, did she feel that she was understood and surrounded by sympathy.