ooked mystified, but his companion laughed.

"Oh, is that it? Well, turn some water from the sand-box into the old
flume and run it down to your new ditch until I get back. I presume the
ownership won't affect the taste. It isn't necessary to say anything
about it; that is, unless you think best." He looked toward Melissa
doubtfully.

"M'lissy won't blab," returned her brother-in-law laconically.

The young girl blushed, in the security of her sunbonnet, at the
attention which this delicately turned compliment drew upon her, and
continued to make intaglios of her bare toes in the mud of the ditch.

It occurred to Sterling for the first time that she might represent a
personality. He went around the other two men, who had fallen into some
talk about the flume, and stood in the path beside her.

"I have not seen you since you were up the canon," he said kindly. "I
hope your arm did not pain you."

Melissa shook her head without looking up.

"It was only a scratch; it didn't even swell up. I never said nothin'
about it," she added in a lower tone.

The young man entered into the situation with easy social grace, and
lowered his own voice.

"You didn't want to alarm your mother"--

"M'lissy," interrupted Lysander, "I guess I'll go on up to the sand-box
with Mr. Poindexter and turn on some water. I wish you'd go 'long down
to the orchard and look after the basins till I git back. I won't be
gone but a minute."

Sterling lifted his hat with a winsome smile that seemed to illuminate
the twilight of poor Melissa's wilted sunbonnet, and the three men
started up the canon, the bay that they pushed aside on the path sending
back a sweet, spicy fragrance.

Melissa shouldered her hoe and proceeded homeward.

"He does act awful pullite," she mused, "an' he had on a ring: I didn't
know men folks ever wore rings. I wish I hadn't 'a' been barefooted."

Poor Melissa! Sterling remembered nothing at all about her except a
certain unconsciously graceful turn she had given her brown ankle as she
stood pressing her bare foot in the sand.

V.

On Sunday morning the Withrow establishment wore that air of inactivity
which seems in some households intended to express a mild form of piety.
Mother Withrow, it is true, had not yielded to the general weakness, and
stood at the kitchen table scraping the frying-pan in a resounding way
that might have interfered with the matin hymn of a weaker-lunged man
than Lysander. That stento