air.

The Judge was talkative and brilliant, glad of a new and apparently
attentive listener. Becky had little to say. She sat with her small feet
set primly on the ground. Her hands were folded in her lap. Dalton was
used to girls who lounged or who hung fatuously on his words, as if they
had set themselves to please him.

But Becky had no arts. She was frank and unaffected, and apparently not
unconscious of Dalton's charms. The whole thing was, he felt, going to
be rather stimulating.

When at last he left them, he asked the Judge if he might come again.
"I'd like to look at those birds by daylight."

Becky, giving him her hand, hoped that he might come. She had been all
the evening in a sort of waking dream. Even when Dalton had been silent,
she had been intensely aware of his presence, and when he had talked, he
had seemed to speak to her alone, although his words were for others.

"I saw you dancing," he said, before he dropped her hand.

"Oh, did you?"

"Yes."

Back of the house the dogs barked.

"Will you dance some time with me?"

"Oh, could I?"

"Why not?"

A moment later he was gone. The light of his motor flashed down the
hills like a falling star.

"I wonder what made the dogs bark," the Judge said as they went in.

"They probably thought it was morning," was Mrs. Beaufort's retort, as
she preceded Becky up the stairs.

IV

The dogs had barked because Randy after a quick drive home had walked
back to Huntersfield.

"Look here," he burst out as he and the Major had stood on the steps of
the Schoolhouse, "do you like him?"

"Who? Dalton?"

"Yes."

"He's not a man's man," the Major said, "and he doesn't care in the
least what you and I think of him."

"Doesn't he?"

"No, and he doesn't care for--stuffed birds--and he doesn't care for the
Judge, and he doesn't care for Mrs. Beaufort----"

"Oh, you needn't rub it in. I know what he's after."

"Do you?"

"Yes----"

The Major whistled softly a lilting tune. He had been called "The
Whistling Major" by his men and they had liked his clear piping.

He stopped abruptly. "Well, you can't build fences around lovely little
ladies----"

"I wish I could. I'd like to shut her up in a tower----"

They left it there. It was really not a thing to be talked about. They
both knew it, and stopped in time.

Randy, climbing the outside stairs, presently, to his bedroom, turned at
the upper landing to survey the scene spread out before him