Beauty for Ashes by Grace Livingston Hill Read Free Book Online Page B

day they went on working north and east, through wooded mountains with narrow dirt roads, deep and dim and silent, where traffic was limited for miles to one farm wagon drawn by an old plow horse, and one ancient flivver. Up and up they climbed till the air grew clearer and colder and the sunshine crisper and lovelier. Gloria began to be interested in all the scenery, a mountain brook rushing musically over great boulders, rambling stone walls that shut in sheep and cows, a glimpse of the sea in the distance, a far city rising picturesquely among the budding spring trees. But they skirted the cities and did not go through them.
    And at last Maine.
    About the middle of the afternoon, Gloria looked up and asked, “Where are we going, Dad?” It seemed to be the first time the thought had occurred to her.
    “Home!” said her father.
    “Home?” said Gloria, a kind of consternation coming into her eyes and a cloud darkening the brightness of her face from which the gloom had been slowly disappearing ever since they had started.
    “To my home,” said her father, “where I lived when I was a child!”
    “Oh, how wonderful!” said the girl. “I would love that. Have you been back? Are you sure it is there yet?”
    “Yes, several times,” said the father gravely. “Once I almost took you and Vanna, but your mother had other plans.”
    “Oh, I wish you had,” said Gloria. “Will it be like the little cottage in the woods where we had lunch yesterday?”
    “No,” said the man thoughtfully, “it is larger. But the little house where I was born is still standing, down in the meadow. It was used for the hired man and his family after we built the big farmhouse nearer to the road, but they are both standing. Ten years ago I put them in good repair. An old friend of Mother’s, Mrs. Weatherby, lives there with her daughter and son-in-law, and another son and his family live in the cottage, but it is all much the same as when I was a child. We are coming to it now. That is the little village in the distance.”
    Gloria looked up, and a white spire showed among the trees. White houses nestled here and there amid spacious distances. And all around, mellow ground lay plowed and ready in various stages for the planting. Some were already beginning to show green in symmetrical rows. Out from the wooded road it did not seem so late. The sky was luminous with a fleck of crimson in the west, and there was still a small rim of the red sun left above the horizon. It cast a glow over the fields and made them look like rare merchandise spread out for customers to view. A single star flashed out as they looked, and a light or two from the village, as they neared it, winked at them. Gloria held her breath and watched the little settlement approach, like a picture of the past, her father’s past! It seemed wonderful to her.
    They had come to the outermost sentinel of the village houses now, white with green blinds and tall plumy pines standing guard. On the right was a cottage quite colonial and tiny. There were lights in some windows of almost every house, though it still did not seem dark in the street.
    There were pleasant odors of coffee and frying ham, and something sweet and spicy like gingerbread just out of the oven. The man drew a deep breath and closed his eyes.
    The picture-book village opened up, house after house.
    “That was where my grandmother lived!” said the man, pointing to a small, neat house with two wings and a marvelous front door. “She and Grandfather used to sit there on the porch afternoons in the summertime and talk, Grandmother with her knitting. And after Grandfather was gone, Grandmother would sit there and look off at the sunset alone.”
    “I wish I could have known them!” said Gloria wistfully. “They died before I was born, didn’t they? I never heard anything about them.”
    “Your mother never knew them,” said the father evasively. “She didn’t like the country and she—never—came up