“I can understand,” said Miss Chester, “how the doubt must have made it so hard to bear.  And yet you are so cheerful and so ready to make other people’s burdens light.  Good Father Abram!”

“Good Miss Rose!” mimicked the miller, smiling.  “Who thinks of others more than you do?”

A whimsical mood seemed to strike Miss Chester.

“Oh, Father Abram,” she cried, “wouldn’t it be grand if I should prove to be your daughter?  Wouldn’t it be romantic?  And wouldn’t you like to have me for a daughter?”

“Indeed, I would,” said the miller, heartily.  “If Aglaia had lived I could wish for nothing better than for her to have grown up to be just such a little woman as you are.  Maybe you are Aglaia,” he continued, falling in with her playful mood; “can’t you remember when we lived at the mill?”

Miss Chester fell swiftly into serious meditation.  Her large eyes were fixed vaguely upon something in the distance.  Father Abram was amused at her quick return to seriousness.  She sat thus for a long time before she spoke.

“No,” she said at length, with a long sigh, “I can’t remember anything at all about a mill.  I don’t think that I ever saw a flour mill in my life until I saw your funny little church.  And if I were your little girl I would remember it, wouldn’t I?  I’m so sorry, Father Abram.”

“So am I,” said Father Abram, humouring her.  “But if you cannot remember that you are my little girl, Miss Rose, surely you can recollect being some one else’s.  You remember your own parents, of course.”

“Oh, yes; I remember them very well—­especially my father.  He wasn’t a bit like you, Father Abram.  Oh, I was only making believe:  Come, now, you’ve rested long enough.  You promised to show me the pool where you can see the trout playing, this afternoon.  I never saw a trout.”

Late one afternoon Father Abram set out for the old mill alone.  He often went to sit and think of the old days when he lived in the cottage across the road.  Time had smoothed away the sharpness of his grief until he no longer found the memory of those times painful.  But whenever Abram Strong sat in the melancholy September afternoons on the spot where “Dums” used to run in every day with her yellow curls flying, the smile that Lakelands always saw upon his face was not there.

The miller made his way slowly up the winding, steep road.  The trees crowded so close to the edge of it that he walked in their shade, with his hat in his hand.  Squirrels ran playfully upon the old rail fence at his right.  Quails were calling to their young broods in the wheat stubble.  The low sun sent a torrent of pale gold up the ravine that opened to the west.  Early September!—­it was within a few days only of the anniversary of Aglaia’s disappearance.

The old overshot-wheel, half covered with mountain ivy, caught patches of the warm sunlight filtering through the trees.  The cottage across the road was still standing, but it would doubtless go down before the next winter’s mountain blasts.  It was overrun with morning glory and wild gourd vines, and the door hung by one hinge.