him to their unpretending
home; she obviously moved to throw Fanny and himself together, and to
disparage such suits as honest Dan Hesa's. He wondered if the older
woman thought he might marry her daughter. And wondering he came to the
conclusion that the other thing would please the mother almost as well.
She had given him to understand that at Fanny's age she would know how
to please any Mr. Howat Penny that chance fortune might bring her.

That some such worldly advice had been poured into Fanny's ears he
could not doubt; and he admired the girl's obvious scorn of such wiles
and surrenders. She sat frankly beside him now, as he finished a
wretched supper, and asked about the country in regions to which she had
not penetrated. "It's a three days' trip," he finished a recital of an
excursion of his own.

"I'd like to go," she returned; "but I suppose I couldn't find it
alone."

He was considering the possibility of such a journey with her--it would
be pleasant in the extreme--when her mother interrupted them from the
foot of the stair.

"A sensible girl," she declared, "would think about seeing the sights of
a city, and of a cherry-derry dress with ribbons, instead of all this
about tramping off through the woods with a ragged skirt about your
naked knees."

Fanny Gilkan's face darkened, and she glanced swiftly at Howat Penny. He
was filling a pipe, unmoved. Such a trip as he had outlined, with Fanny,
was fastening upon his thoughts. It would at once express his entire
attitude toward the world, opinion, and the resentful charcoal burners.

"You wouldn't really go," he said aloud, half consciously.

The girl frowned in an effort of concentration, gazing into the thin
light of the dying fire and two watery tallow dips. Her coarsely spun
dress, coloured with sassafras bark and darker than the yellow hickory
stain, drew about her fine shoulders and full, plastic breast. "I'd like
it," she repeated; "but afterward. There is father--"

She had said father, but Howat Penny determined that she was thinking of
Dan Hesa; Dan was as strong as himself, if heavier; a personable young
man. He would make a good husband. But that, he added, was in the
future; Dan Hesa apparently didn't want to marry Fanny to-morrow, that
week. Meanwhile a trip with him to the headwaters of a creek would not
injure her in the least. His contempt of a world petty and iron-bound in
endless pretence, fanning his smouldering and sullen resentment