The Sins of the Parents

The morning's work finished, Tessibel wrapped up Boy and sent him out to play. She stood for some moments on the porch watching the sturdy little figure arrange the sled at the top of the hill.

How she loved him, and how good he was! Never since the day of his birth had he given her one sorrowful moment. She turned her eyes from Boy to the lake, and allowed them to rest upon the shanty near the shore. A disturbing thought pressed into her mind. They would not be long there now.

Deforrest had told her that his lease of the house expired the first of January, and Waldstricker had refused to renew it. If they moved away, she'd be lonely for the sight of her old friends and all the dear, familiar things that had met her eyes every day since she could remember.

She hoped her new home might be in the Storm Country. She loved the lake in its every mood. Dark and sullen, visitors had called it. But she'd seen it on summer days, a band of burnished blue cementing the harmonies of greens and browns into a picture of perfect beauty. She knew its deep, brooding peace when the light was fading and the evening breeze gently ruffled its surface. She'd skated over its shining bosom in the blinding glare of the unclouded sun and in the soft radiance of the shadow-filled moonlight. She knew the soft spots in the ice caused by flowing springs in the lake-bottom and had drunk their pure, cold water. Her lifelong intimacy had wooed from rockbound lake its inmost secrets. Today the water lay a gleaming jewel, huge by contrast to the myriad sparkles the sunbeams pricked out of the snow. She looked across to East Hill at the frosty veil of a ravine waterfall and sighed.