until he made out her slim figure leaning against the fence
waiting for him. And every afternoon, after he had pulled the
shuffling horse to a standstill, he bent down from his vantage point
on the high seat to scan her upturned face minutely, almost craftily
at times, for some tell-tale trace of tears on her long lashes, or a
possible quiver of her lips, or a suspicious droop in her boyish
shoulders. And he never discovered either the one or the other.

It was at such moments that his peace of mind suffered, for no sane
man could ever have read, by any stretching of the imagination,
anything akin to sorrow or sadness in the low laugh with which she
invariably met his scrutiny. It fairly bubbled joy. Each day Old Jerry
found her only happy--offensively happy--and where he had been
secretly watching her for one betraying sign he became uneasily
conscious after a time that very often she, too, seemed to be scanning
his own face as if she were trying to penetrate into the inner tumult
of perplexities behind his seamed forehead. Some days he was almost
certain that there was a calculating light in her steady eyes--a hint
of half-hidden delight in something he couldn't understand--and it
worried him. It bothered him almost as much as did the unvaried
formula with which she greeted him every afternoon.

"Have you any news for me today?" she always asked him. "Surely you've
something new to tell me this afternoon--now, haven't you?"

The tone in which she made the query was never anything but disarming;
it was quite childishly wheedling and innocently eager, he thought.
But reiterated from day to day it wore on his nerves after a while.
Added to the something he sometimes thought he caught glimmering in
her tip-tilted eyes, it made him more than a little uncomfortable. He
fell back upon a quibble to dodge the issue.

"Was you expectin' a letter?" he always countered.

This daily veiled tilt of wits might have gone on indefinitely had not
a new development presented itself which threw an entirely different
aspect upon the whole affair.

A fortnight had elapsed since Denny Bolton's mysterious departure from
the village when it happened. As usual, after the day's duties were
completed with his hurried return from the Bolton homestead, Old Jerry
turned off at the crossroads to stop for a moment before the cottage
squatting in its acre of desolate garden. He didn't even straighten up
in his seat that afternoon to gaze ahead o