ight or fitty to kiss that way. It frightens me,
Archelaus."

"Why edn' it right?"

"Because--because we aren't wed," faltered Phoebe.

"Wed!..." In his voice was light laughter and a kindly scorn. "What's
wed but a word? We're men and women on this earth; that's all that
matters to my way of thinken!"

Phoebe was vaguely hurt and insulted, which did duty for being shocked
very well. She opened the door and passed into the passage.

"I'd best be going," she said, still half-wishful to linger--anxious
not to make herself cheap, yet wishing he would start some conversation
which would make it possible to stay without seeming to want to over
much.

"When'll you be out again?" asked Archelaus, his foot in the door.

"I don't know."

"I do. Good-night, lil' thing!" And he withdrew the foot and was off
through the darkness under the elms. Phoebe was left with her awakened
heart-beats.

CHAPTER XIV

A LETTER

Harvest had all been gathered in at Cloom, the threshing was over, the
grain lay in heaps, grey-green and golden, in the barn, or had been sold
and taken away, and the first tang of early autumn was in the air. The
peewits had come down and were mewing in the dappled skies, and on the
telegraph wires the high-shouldered swallows sat in rows preparing for
flight; in the hedgerows the dead hemlocks, brittle as fine shells, were
ready to scatter their pale seeds at a touch, and the blackberries, on
which as the West Country saying has it, the devil had already laid his
finger, were filmed with mildew. It was autumn, but rich, warm autumn,
dropping her leaf and seed into the teeming earth, whose grain was
garnered, but whose womb was already fertile with the future.

Blanche was still at Mrs. Penticost's, and the engagement, though it had
not actually been announced, had leaked out, and Blanche was not at all
satisfied with the results that had followed upon that dissemination of
knowledge. Annie's hostility she could bear, for she knew that, once
married to Ishmael, his mother would be placed somewhere too far removed
for the nuisance of her to be more than occasional; it was not that
which was blowing with so chill a breath over her spirit. It was, as she
phrased it to herself, the whole thing....

Ever since that night upon the boulders above the wood her sureness,
both of the depth of her own feeling for Ishmael and for the country
method of life that went with him, had been declining, as from som