out in her pink dress, the basket in her hand, he looked
at her with surprise. "Where you going to?" he asked.

"Why--Mr. Harney's starting earlier than usual today," she answered.

"Mr. Harney, Mr. Harney? Ain't Mr. Harney learned how to drive a horse
yet?"

She made no answer, and he sat tilted back in his chair, drumming on the
rail of the porch. It was the first time he had ever spoken of the young
man in that tone, and Charity felt a faint chill of apprehension. After
a moment he stood up and walked away toward the bit of ground behind the
house, where the hired man was hoeing.

The air was cool and clear, with the autumnal sparkle that a north wind
brings to the hills in early summer, and the night had been so still
that the dew hung on everything, not as a lingering moisture, but in
separate beads that glittered like diamonds on the ferns and grasses. It
was a long drive to the foot of Porcupine: first across the valley, with
blue hills bounding the open slopes; then down into the beech-woods,
following the course of the Creston, a brown brook leaping over velvet
ledges; then out again onto the farm-lands about Creston Lake, and
gradually up the ridges of the Eagle Range. At last they reached the
yoke of the hills, and before them opened another valley, green and
wild, and beyond it more blue heights eddying away to the sky like the
waves of a receding tide.

Harney tied the horse to a tree-stump, and they unpacked their basket
under an aged walnut with a riven trunk out of which bumblebees darted.
The sun had grown hot, and behind them was the noonday murmur of
the forest. Summer insects danced on the air, and a flock of white
butterflies fanned the mobile tips of the crimson fireweed. In the
valley below not a house was visible; it seemed as if Charity Royall and
young Harney were the only living beings in the great hollow of earth
and sky.

Charity's spirits flagged and disquieting thoughts stole back on her.
Young Harney had grown silent, and as he lay beside her, his arms under
his head, his eyes on the network of leaves above him, she wondered if
he were musing on what Mr. Royall had told him, and if it had really
debased her in his thoughts. She wished he had not asked her to take him
that day to the brown house; she did not want him to see the people she
came from while the story of her birth was fresh in his mind. More than
once she had been on the point of suggesting that they should follow the