anguish of uncertainty and hope and
fear on the incomprehensible words passing between little Mark and the
grown-ups, perceiving now that the children ran clattering towards the
stairs, took a few agitated steps after them, and ran back to Marise,
shivering, begging with his eyes, in a wriggling terror lest he be
forbidden to follow them into the fun. Marise motioned him along up the
stairs, saying with a laughing, indulgent, amused accent, "Yes, yes,
poor Medor, you can go along with the children if you want to."

The steel sinews of the dog's legs stretched taut on the instant, in a
great bound of relief. He whirled with a ludicrous and undignified
haste, slipping, his toe-nails clicking on the bare floor, tore across
the room and dashed up the stairs, drunk with joy.

"If strong emotions are what one wants out of life," commented Marise
lightly, to Marsh, "one ought to be born a nervous little dog, given
over to the whimsical tyranny of humans."

"There are other ways of coming by strong emotions," answered Marsh, not
lightly at all.

"What in the world are wool-hetchels?" asked Mr. Welles as the grown-ups
went along the hall towards the side-door.

"Why, when I was a girl, and we spun our own wool yarn . . ." began Cousin
Hetty, trotting beside him and turning her old face up to his.

Marsh stopped short in the hall-way with a challenging abruptness that
brought Marise to a standstill also. The older people went on down the
long dusky hail to the door and out into the garden, not noticing that
the other two had stopped. The door swung shut behind them.

* * * * *

Marise felt the man's dark eyes on her, searching, determined. They were
far from those first days, she thought, when he had tacitly agreed not
to look at her like that, very far from those first days of delicacy and
lightness of touch.

With a determination as firm as his own, she made her face and eyes
opaque, and said on a resolutely gay note, "What's the matter? Can't you
stand any more information about early times in Vermont? You must have
been having too heavy a dose of Mr. Bayweather. But _I_ like it, you
know. I find it awfully interesting to know so in detail about any past
period of human life; as much so . . . why not? . . . as researches into
which provinces of France used half-timber houses, and how late?"

"You like a great many things!" he said impatiently.

"We must get out into the garden with th