"Supper's been waitin' more 'n half an hour.

Lor's sake, what's the boy thinkin' on now, I wonder ?" she muttered in an impatient lower tone, as Stephen turned his head slowly.
"Yes, yes, Marty.

Tell my mother I will be there in a moment," replied Stephen, as he walked slowly toward the house; even then noting, with the keen and relentless glance of a beauty-worshipper, how grotesquely ugly the old woman's wrinkled face became, lighted up by the intense cross-light.

Old Marty's face had never looked other than lovingly into Stephen's since he first lay in her arms, twenty-five years ago, when she came, a smooth-cheeked, rosy country-woman of twenty-five, to nurse his mother at the time of his birth.

She had never left the home since.