clared two fifty
liberal. A surrey was hitched with two horses. Warham opened the
awkward door to the rear seat and ordered Susan to jump in. She
obeyed; he put the bundle on the floor beside her. He sat with
the driver--the proprietor himself. The horses set off at a
round pace over the smooth turnpike. It was evening, and a
beautiful coolness issued from the woods on either side. They
skimmed over the long level stretches; they climbed hills, they
raced down into valleys. Warham and the ragged, rawboned old
proprietor kept up a kind of conversation--about crops and
politics, about the ownership, value, and fertility of the farms
they were passing. Susan sat quiet, motionless most of the time.

The last daylight faded; the stars came out; the road wound in
and out, up and down, amid cool dark silence and mysterious
fascinating shadows. The moon appeared above the tree tops
straight ahead--a big moon, with a lower arc of the rim clipped
off. The turnpike ended; they were making equally rapid progress
over the dirt road which was in perfect condition as there had
been no rain for several days. The beat of the flying hoofs was
soft now; the two men's voices, fell into a lower key; the moon
marked out the line of the road clearly, made strange spectral
minglings of light and darkness in the woods, glorified the open
fields and gave the occasional groups of farm buildings an
ancient beauty and dignity. The girl slept.

At nine o'clock the twenty-mile drive ended in a long, slow
climb up a road so washed out, so full of holes and bowlders,
that it was no road at all but simply a weather-beaten hillside.
A mile of this, with the liveryman's curses--"dod rot it" and
"gosh dang it" and similar modifications of profanity for
Christian use and for the presence of "the sex"--ringing out at
every step. Susan soon awakened, rather because the surrey was
pitching so wildly than because of Goslin's denunciations. A
brief level stretch and they stopped for Warham to open the
outer gate into his brother Zeke's big farm. A quarter of a mile
through wheat to the tops of the wheels and they reached the
second gate. A descent into a valley, a crossing of a creek, an
ascent of a steep hill, and they were at the third gate--between
pasture and barnyard. Now they came into view of the house, set
upon a slope where a spring bubbled out. The house was white and
a white picket fence cut off its lawn from the barnyard. A do