boy I'd catch her and switch her--Allison or no Allison!"

At any other time Sarah would have defended her own sex with much
asperity; instead, there was something oddly wistful in her answer.

"If it were only the way she treats him," she mused, "I wouldn't mind
so much." The sudden outraged glint in her eyes startled Caleb. "That
isn't the reason he doesn't want to play with them. They have been
laughing at him, Cal; they have all been making fun of him,
openly--mocking his speech and--and manners! All of them, that is,
save Garry Devereau."

Caleb's face hardened.

"Did he tell you that?" he demanded, surprised.

"Oh, no," Sarah exclaimed. "And you musn't mention it to him. I just
gathered it from something he let drop the other day. You know, Cal,
he hardly knows one figure from the other, but his reading is truly
marvelous. He can read as fluently, as expressively, as you or I can;
and one day, after he had been reading aloud for me, I asked him why he
didn't talk as--as he read. He didn't know what I meant at first, but
he understood the minute I tried to explain.

"'Do you mean I ought to talk in book language?' he asked.

"I told him that was my meaning, and after a time his blessed little
face began to go red.

"'Do--do they,' and he nodded over yonder, Cal, 'do they all talk--like
books?'

"So you see! And he's been trying ever since to correct his quaint
idioms and funny contractions, but it'll take a long time to correct a
mental process which is habit with him." Sarah's face grew resentful.
"I wish we'd never let him go over there, in the first place. We
should have known! For there isn't a look or a whispered comment,
which he doesn't catch. And, Cal, I doubt if even I have fathomed the
depths of his sensitiveness."

"We'll stop his going," Caleb stated flatly. "We'll keep him away from
them." And under his breath he added something which Sarah had never
heard him say in her presence.

But it needed no word of Caleb's to keep Steve at home. Without some
suggestion to urge him, the latter showed no inclination to leave his
own yard; and yet he would sit, too, for hours upon the top step of the
veranda, staring in the direction of the stucco lodge and listening to
the voices behind the high hedge. More and more often Garry Devereau
came over and joined him instead, and together the pair made almost
daily trips down to the mills. A quick intimacy had grown up between
the two