and used their fingers. Poor June quivered with a vague newborn
disgust. Ah, had she not changed--in ways they could not see!

June helped clear away the dishes--the old woman did not object to
that--listening to the gossip of the mountains--courtships, marriages,
births, deaths, the growing hostility in the feud, the random killing of
this man or that--Hale's doings in Lonesome Cove.

"He's comin' over hyeh agin next Saturday," said the old woman.

"Is he?" said Loretta in a way that made June turn sharply from her
dishes toward her. She knew Hale was not coming, but she said nothing.
The old woman was lighting her pipe.

"Yes--you better be over hyeh in yo' best bib and tucker."

"Pshaw," said Loretta, but June saw two bright spots come into her
pretty cheeks, and she herself burned inwardly. The old woman was
looking at her.

"'Pears like you air mighty quiet, June."

"That's so," said Loretta, looking at her, too.

June, still silent, turned back to her dishes. They were beginning to
take notice after all, for the girl hardly knew that she had not opened
her lips.

Once only Dave spoke to her, and that was when Loretta said she must
go. June was out in the porch looking at the already beloved garden, and
hearing his step she turned. He looked her steadily in the eyes. She
saw his gaze drop to the fairy-stone at her throat, and a faint sneer
appeared at his set mouth--a sneer for June's folly and what he thought
was uppishness in "furriners" like Hale.

"So you ain't good enough fer him jest as ye air--air ye?" he said
slowly. "He's got to make ye all over agin--so's you'll be fitten fer
him."

He turned away without looking to see how deep his barbed shaft went
and, startled, June flushed to her hair. In a few minutes they were
gone--Dave without the exchange of another word with June, and Loretta
with a parting cry that she would come back on Saturday. The old man
went to the cornfield high above the cabin, the old woman, groaning
with pains real and fancied, lay down on a creaking bed, and June,
with Dave's wound rankling, went out with Bub to see the new doings in
Lonesome Cove. The geese cackled before her, the hog-fish darted like
submarine arrows from rock to rock and the willows bent in the same
wistful way toward their shadows in the little stream, but its crystal
depths were there no longer--floating sawdust whirled in eddies on the
surface and the water was black as soot. Here and there the w