As she moved about, touching, smoothing this garment and that,
there crossed her memory the Virgilian refrain--

"_Nihil ille deos, nil carmina curat.
Ducite ab urbe domum, mea carmina, ducite Daphnin._"

She murmured it, smiling to herself as she recalled also the dour figure
of Mr. Hichens in the library at Sabines, seated stiffly, listening
while she construed. If only tutors guessed what they taught!

She hummed the lines: "_Nihil ille deos_"--he cared nothing for church
rites; "_nil carmina_"--she needed no incantations.

She never doubted that he would arrive; but, as the day wore on, she
told herself that very likely he had missed his road. He would arrive
hungered, in any event. . . . She stepped out to the cooking-pot, and,
on her way, paused for a long look down the glen. The sun, streaming
its rays over the high pines behind her, made rainbows in the spray of
the fall and cast her shadow far over the hollow at her feet.
The water, plunging past her, shot down the valley in three separate
cascades, lined with slippery rock, in the crevices of which many ferns
had lodged and grew, waving in the incessantly shaken air. From the
pool into which the last cascade tumbled--a stone dislodged by her foot
dropped to it almost plumb--the stream hurtled down the glen, following
the curve of its sides until they overlapped; naked cliffs above,
touched with sunlight, their feet set in peat, up which the forest trees
clambered as if in a race for the top--pines leading, with heather and
scrubby junipers, oaks and hemlocks some way behind; alders, mostly by
the waterside, with maples in swampy patches, and here and there a birch
waving silver against the shadow. The pines kept their funereal plumes,
like undertakers who had made a truce with death by making a business of
it. But these deciduous trees, that had rioted in green through spring
and summer, wrapped themselves in robes to die, the thinner the more
royal; the maples in scarlet, the swamp-oak in purple--bloody purple
where the sun smote on its upper boughs. Already the robes had worn
thin, and their ribs showed. Leaves strewed the flat rock where Ruth
stood, looking down.

She was not thinking of the leaves, nor of the fall of the year.
She was thinking that her lord would be hungered. She went back to her
cooking-pot under the cliff overhung with heath and juniper.

Herself fearless--or less fearful than other women--she did not for so