s. That occasional smile which
lurked with its inherent sweetness under his affected sullenness must
mean _something_.

Turner had always been her willing vassal, and "sometime" she had
supposed, though hitherto that had always seemed a vaguely distant
matter like the purple haze on the horizon, they would be avowed
sweethearts.

Yesterday, though, as she walked back from the meeting on the ridge it
had seemed as if she had spent a moment in that languourous land where
the far mists drouse,--and yet the glamour had not faded. She hadn't
sought to analyze then, she had only felt a new thrill in her heart as
she instinctively broke clusters of pink-hearted bloom from the laurel.

She left the woods after a while and as she came out again to the high
road, she heard a voice raised in the high-pitched, almost falsetto,
minors of mountain minstrelsy.

It was not a pleasing voice, nor was the ballad a cheery one. As for
the singer himself, the twisting of the way still concealed him from
view, so that his song proclaimed him like a herald in advance.

"He stobbed her to ther heart an' she fell with a groan.
He threw a leetle dirt _ov_-er her, an' started fer home,"

wailed the dolorous voice of the traveler. There was a splashing of
hoofs in shallow water, then a continuation

"His debt ter ther devil now William must pay,
Fer he fell down an' died afore break of day."

Thus announced, a mule plodded shortly into sight, and upon his back,
perching sidewise, sat a tow-headed lout of a boy with staring, vacant
eyes and a mouth which hung open, even when he desisted from song.

With an access of callow diffidence he halted his mount at sight of
Blossom, staring with a nod and a bashful "Howdy."

"Howdy, Leander," accosted the girl. "How's all your folks?"

Leander White, of Crowfoot Branch, aged fifteen, gulped twice with
prodigious and spasmodic play of his adam's apple, before he eventually
commanded voice to reply:

"They're all well.... I'm obleeged ... ter ye." Then, however,
reassured by the cordial smile on the lips of Blossom Fulkerson, his
power of speech and his hunger for gossip returned to him in unison.

"But old Aunt Lucy Hutton, over acrost ther branch, she fell down
yistiddy an' broke a bone inside of her, though."

"Did she?" demanded the girl, readily sympathetic, and Leander, thus
given sanction as a purveyor of tidings, nodded and gathered
confidence. "Huh-huh, an' Revenuers r