nd limped after the deputy;
I only know that she stood looking at them from the door, smiling and
triumphant.

Then she slipped out of the back door again, and ran swiftly to the
barn, fastening on her clean cuffs and collar as she ran. The fugitive
was anxiously awaiting her, with a slight touch of brusqueness in his
eagerness.

"Thought you were never coming!" he said.

She breathlessly explained, and showed him through the half-opened door
the figures of the three men slowly spreading and diverging over the
plain, like the nearly level sun-rays they were following. The sunlight
fell also on her panting bosom, her electrified sandy hair, her red,
half-opened mouth, and short and freckled upper lip. The relieved
fugitive turned from the three remoter figures to the one beside him,
and saw, for the first time, that it was fair. At which he smiled, and
her face flushed and was irradiated.

Then they fell to talk,--he grateful, boastful,--as the distant figures
grew dim; she quickly assenting, but following his expression rather
than his words, with her own girlish face and brightening eyes. But what
he said, or how he explained his position, with what speciousness he
dwelt upon himself, his wrongs, and his manifold manly virtues, is not
necessary for us to know, nor was it, indeed, for her to understand.
Enough for her that she felt she had found the one man of all the world,
and that she was at that moment protecting him against all the world! He
was the unexpected, spontaneous gift to her, the companion her childhood
had never known, the lover she had never dreamed of, even the child of
her unsatisfied maternal yearnings. If she could not comprehend all his
selfish incoherences, she felt it was her own fault; if she could not
follow his ignorant assumptions, she knew it was SHE who was deficient;
if she could not translate his coarse speech, it was because it was the
language of a larger world from which she had been excluded. To this
world belonged the beautiful limbs she gazed on,--a very different
world from that which had produced the rheumatic deformities and useless
mayhem of her husband, or the provincially foppish garments of the
deputy. Sitting in the hayloft together, where she had mounted for
greater security, they forgot themselves in his monologue of cheap
vaporing, broken only by her assenting smiles and her half-checked
sighs. The sharp spices of the heated pine-shingles over their heads
and the fra