nowledge was bearing its fruit of humiliation and
chagrin. The evident liberality of Forrester's course in deeding her a
share of the canon, greater, it was said, than the loss occasioned by
the drying up of Flutterwheel Spring, had struck at the root of hatreds
and preconceptions that were far more vital to her than the mere
proprietorship of the water right. She felt hampered and defrauded by
the circumstances that forbade her to turn and fling the gift back in
his face. To this grim, gray-haired tyrant, dying of thirst seemed sweet
compared with the daily bitterness of hearing her enemy praised for his
generosity. She sat in the doorway fanning herself with her apron, and
made no reply to her daughter's anxious observation.

"I calc'lated to rub out a few things this mornin'," continued Mrs.
Sproul, "but somehow I don't feel like settlin' down to washin' or
anythin'; an' the baby's cross, bein' all broke out with the heat. I
wonder what's become of M'lissy."

"She's up in the oak-tree out at the barn," called William T. Sherman,
who with other fraternal generals was holding a council of war over a
gopher caught in a trap. "Letterlone; she's as cross as Sam Patch."

"M'lissy takes her paw's death harder 'n I calc'lated she'd do,"
commented Minerva, virtuously conventional; "she's a good deal upset."

The old woman sniffed audibly.

"I reckon you'll all live through it," she said frostily.

Melissa, swinging her bare feet from a branch of the dense live oak in
the barnyard, had watched Lysander's departure with wistful eagerness,
entirely unaware that he had divined her secret, and was mannishly
averse to having the "women folks" of his family mixed up in a murder
trial. Now that he was really gone, and she was left to the dreariness
of her own reflections, she grew wan and white with misery.

"I had ought to 'a' told it," she moaned. "If they don't hang 'im, they
may put 'im in jail, and that's awful." She thought of him, so straight
and lithe and gay, grown pale and wretched; manacled, according to
Ulysses's graphic description, with iron chains so heavy that he could
not rise; kept feebly alive on bread and water, and presided over by a
jailer whose ingenious cruelty knew no limit but the liveliness of the
boy's fiendish imagination.

"A year or two," Lysander had said, as if it were a trifle. She looked
back a year, and tried to measure the time, losing herself in the hazy
monotony of her past, and consciou