he saw that the room
had been tidied up and that she was cooking supper. The baby was playing
on the floor. She turned at the creak of his footstep on the threshold
and for the first time she spoke.

"Supper'll be ready in a minit."

A few minutes later he was seated at the table alone and the girl, with
the baby on one arm, was waiting on him. By and by he pushed back his
chair, pulled out his pipe, and sat down in the doorway. Dusk was coming.
In the shadowy depths below a wood-thrush was fluting his last notes for
that day. Then for the first time each called the other by name.

"Marthy, the circuit-rider'll be 'roun' two weeks from next Sunday."

"All right, Lum."

THE MARQUISE OF QUEENSBERRY

I

Thus it had happened. Pleasant Trouble was drunk one day and a fly lit
on his knee. He whipped his forty-four from its holster.

"I'll show ye who _you_ air lightin' on!" he swore, and blazed away. Of
course he killed the fly, but incidentally he shattered its lighting-place.
Had he been in a trench anywhere in France, his leg would have been saved,
but he was away out in the Kentucky hills. If he minded the loss of it,
however, no one could see, for with chin up and steady, daredevil eyes he
swung along about as well on his crutch as if it had been a good leg. Down
the road, close to the river's brim, he was swinging now--his voice lifted
in song. Ahead of him and just around the curve of the road, with the sun
of Happy Valley raining its last gold on her golden bare head, walked the
Marquise; but neither Pleasant nor she herself knew she was the Marquise.
A few minutes later the girl heard the crunch of the crutch in the sandy
road behind her, and she turned with a smile:

"How-dye, Pleaz!" The man caught the flapping brim of his slouch-hat and
lifted it--an act of courtesy that he had learned only after Happy Valley
was blessed by the advent of the Mission school: making it, he was always
embarrassed no little.

"How-dye, Miss Mary!"

"Going down to the dance?"

"No'm," he said with vigorous severity, and then with unctuous virtue--"I
hain't nuver run a set or played a play in my life."

The word "dance" is taboo among these Calvinists of the hills. They
"run sets" and "play plays"--and these are against the sterner morals
that prevail--but they do not _dance_. The Mission teacher smiled.
This was a side-light on the complex character of Pleasant Trouble
that she had not known before, and she kn