ever saw," the old inhabitants said. He had come not very long before
Joseph Ware, the father of Hyacinthus, had died. Joseph's wife had
survived him several years. She died quite suddenly of pneumonia when
still a comparatively young woman and when Hyacinthus was a boy. Then a
maternal uncle had come and taken the boy away with him, to live nobody
knew where nor how, until his return a few months since.

There was, of course, much curiosity in Adams concerning him, and the
curiosity was not, generally speaking, of a complimentary tendency. Some
young and marriageable girls esteemed him very handsome, but the
majority of the people said that he was odd and stuck up, as his mother
had been before him. He led a quiet life with his books, and he had a
room on the ground-floor fitted up as a studio. In there he made things
of clay and plaster, as the Adams people said, and curious-looking boxes
were sent away by express. It was rumored that a statue by him had been
exhibited in New York.

Some faces show more plainly in the moonlight, or one imagines so.
Hyacinthus Ware's showed as clearly as if carved in marble. He in
reality looked so like a statue that the girl standing in the enclosure
of box with the background of hollyhocks had for a moment imagined that
he might be one of his own statues. The eyes, either closed in sleep or
appearing to be, heightened the effect.

But the girl was not now in a position to do more than tremble at the
plight into which she had gotten herself. It seemed to her that no girl,
certainly no girl in Adams, had ever done such a thing. Her freedom of
mind now failed her. Another heredity asserted itself. She felt very
much as her mother or her great-grandmother might have felt in a similar
predicament. It was as horrible as dreams she had sometimes had of