my heart was stilled for the
night, and I could as usual take Pan into my prayer arms and ask God to
keep him safe. I wonder how many women would really pray if there weren't
men in the world to furnish them the theme!

Also I wonder how it is possible for me to write about that following first
week of May when I had to feel the chant die out of my heart and still
live and help a lot of other live creatures, both people and animals, to go
on breathing also.

Each day Uncle Cradd failed to bring me a letter from the post-office, and
after a week I ceased to look for one. I knew that Evan Adam Baldwin was on
the high seas and that if he had not written before he sailed he never
intended to write. My common sense kindly and plainly spoke this truth to
my aching heart: Pan had been simply having a word adventure with me in
character.

CHAPTER XI

The beginning of the twentieth century has witnessed many startling
inventions, reforms, evolutions, and revolutions, but mankind generally is
not aware that the most remarkable result of many combined new forces is a
woman whose intellect can go on functioning at the same time that her heart
is aching with either requited or unrequited love. Just ten days after I
had been jilted, instead of lying in a darkened room in hysterics, I went
into a light corner of the barn, sat down on an upturned seed-bucket, took
my farm-book on my knee, wet my pencil between my lips, and began to figure
up the account between Evan Adam Baldwin and myself. First, I sat still for
a long second and tried to set a price on myself the hour before I had
first encountered him out on the Riverfield ribbon on the day I had made
my entry into rural life. And think as hard as I could I couldn't think up
a single thing I had done worth while to my race; so I had to write a great
cipher against myself. Then in another column I set down the word "assets,"
and after it I wrote, "The Golden Bird and family, eight hundred dollars."
Then I thought intently back into the past and into the haircloth trunk and
wrote, "Clothes, one hundred and fifty dollars."

Then I sat for another long time and looked out the door to the Paradise
Ridge across the Harpeth Valley, after which I smoothed the page, dated it,
and again began to take stock of myself and the business. I listed the
original investment of Mr. G. Bird and the ladies Leghorn, one of which was
at that moment picking wheat from my pocket, on through the