f your
mother's arms and come out to keep me company, and I know what there is
to know. Some things out here is queer--so queer folks wouldn't believe
'em unless they saw. An' some's so pig-headed they don't believe their
own eyes. As for th' wind, if you lay down flat and squint toward th'
west, you can see it blowin' along near th' ground, like a big ribbon;
an' sometimes it's th' color of air, an' sometimes it's silver an' gold,
an' sometimes, when a storm is comin', it's purple."

"If you got so tired looking at the wind, why didn't you marry some
other girl, Bart, instead of waiting for me?"

Flora was more interested in the first part of Bart's speech than in the
last.

"Oh, come on!" protested Bart, and he picked her up in his arms and
jumped her toward the ceiling of the low shack as if she were a little
girl--but then, to be sure, she wasn't much more.

Of all the things Flora saw when the corn was cut down, nothing
interested her so much as a low cottage, something like her own, which
lay away in the distance. She could not guess how far it might be,
because distances are deceiving out there, where the altitude is high
and the air is as clear as one of those mystic balls of glass in which
the sallow mystics of India see the moving shadows of the future.

She had not known there were neighbors so near, and she wondered for
several days about them before she ventured to say anything to Bart
on the subject. Indeed, for some reason which she did not attempt to
explain to herself, she felt shy about broaching the matter. Perhaps
Bart did not want her to know the people. The thought came to her,
as naughty thoughts will come, even to the best of persons, that some
handsome young men might be "baching" it out there by themselves, and
Bart didn't wish her to make their acquaintance. Bart had flattered her
so much that she had actually begun to think herself beautiful, though
as a matter of fact she was only a nice little girl with a lot of
reddish-brown hair, and a bright pair of reddish-brown eyes in a white
face.

"Bart," she ventured one evening, as the sun, at its fiercest, rushed
toward the great black hollow of the west, "who lives over there in that
shack?"

She turned away from the window where she had been looking at the
incarnadined disk, and she thought she saw Bart turn pale. But then,
her eyes were so blurred with the glory she had been gazing at, that she
might easily have been mistaken.

"I s