he wonted philter to bring
sleep, the face of my vision being unaccountably the face of the true
Little Miss before she had evolved into Miss Lansdale of the threatening
self-possession. I refused to bother about the absurdity of this, for
the sake of bringing sleep the sooner.

I was privileged to observe the following day that my neighbor's
daughter was still of a dusky whiteness, the baffling, shaded whiteness
of soft new snow in a cedar thicket. Incidentally she partook of another
quality of soft new snow--one by no means so incommunicable.

And yet in sunlight I incurred the full, close look of her eyes, and no
longer doubted the presence of a Peavey strain in her immediate
ancestry. Far in their incalculable depths I saw a myriad of lights,
brown-gold, that smouldered, ominously, even promisingly. It might never
meet this young woman's caprice to be flagrantly a Peavey in my
presence, but her capacity for this, if she chose to exercise it, I
detected beyond a doubt. She was patently a daughter of Miss Caroline,
and the cosmic chill had been an afterthought of her own.

She did me the honor, late in the afternoon of this day, to occupy an
easy-chair within my vined porch. She went farther. She affected a
polite interest in myself. But her craft was crude. I detected at once
that she had fallen in love with my dog; that she came not to seek me,
but to follow him, who had raced joyously from her at his first
knowledge of my home-coming.

I was secretly proud of the exquisite thoroughness with which he now
ignored her. Again and again he assured me in her very presence that the
woman was nothing, _could_ be nothing, to him. I knew this well
enough--I needed no protestations from him; but I thought it was well
that she should know it. I saw that he had probably consented to receive
her addresses through a long afternoon, had perhaps eaten of her
provender, and even behaved with a complaisance which could have led her
to hope that some day she might be something to him. But I knew that he
had not persistently faced the peril of being trampled to death by me in
his pulpy infancy--so great his fear of our separation--to let a mere
woman come between us at this day. And it was well that he should now
tell her this in the plainest of words.

The woman seemed to view me with an increased respect from that very
moment. She tried first to bring Jim to her side by a soft call that
almost made me tremble for his integrity.