In the Heart of the Christmas Pines

THROUGH the chill rain of the December twilight a train crept slowly up the valley like a storm-beaten glow-worm its single Pullman passenger a woman youthful and yet mature whose beauty was marred by indefinable shadows in the beautiful gray eyes and hard and bitter lines about the mouth. It had been a long and tiresome journey through a sodden world roofed with a marquee of mist; three days of cloud and rain from her lonely home in Denver to the goal ahead an unfamiliar village of which her hazy mental picture had been inspired by the imagery of a friend.. A ruined mill with dripping eaves a grinding shudder of brakes and the train halted. With quick interest in her eyes the traveler alighted but outside on the sodden village platform her interest fled panic-stricken in an overpowering surge of loneliness and dismay. Surely surely thought Jean Varian a bleak enough goal for her odd caprice! Great wind-beaten trees dripped above the village and the covered bridge; fog-ridden hills towered in the distance like ghostly gables of the valley; and at the head of the street in the old-fashioned hotel to which days before she had whimsically written for rooms only a single unpromising light flickered dully through the wind and rain.