SHOWS THE WEAKNESS IN STRENGTH When Abel had gone, Sarah folded her grey woollen shawl over her bosom, and ordered the boy with the wheelbarrow to return to the barnyard.

Left alone her eyes followed her son's figure as it divided the broomsedge in the meadow, but from the indifference of her look she might have gazed on the pine tree toward which he was moving.

A little later, when her glance passed to the roof of the mill there was no perceptible change in her expression; and she observed dispassionately that the shingles which caught the drippings from the sycamore were beginning to rot.

While she stood there she was in the throes of one of the bitterest sorrows of her life; yet there was no hint of it either in her quiet face or in the rigid spareness of her figure.

Her sons had resisted her at times, but until to-day not one of them had rebelled openly against her authority in the matter of marriage.