le I stood looking at her, thinking of nothing so
much as how her head would look against a worn, gold Florentine
background, instead of silhouetted against these flat unchanging
stretches of unbending roads and red barns. It seemed that she and Jim
were saying something to each other. Then just as she turned to go, he
stopped her.

"You'll forgive me, because I'm an old friend of Tom's," he was urging,
"if I ask you to drive to town with Tom and myself for supper."

There was an incongruity in the request that could not have escaped
either of them. I could see the color mounting to her temples and then
ebbing away, leaving her whiter than before. Her lips parted to answer,
but closed again sturdily.

"It couldn't--be arranged. If it could, I should have liked to," she
supplemented stiffly.

It was a stiffness that made me want to cry out to the hilltops in
rebellion.

"But suppose it _could_ be arranged?" suggested Jim.

She looked away from us.

"It couldn't be," she replied in that same inflectionless voice.

It was her voice that cut so sharply. I reflected that it was only in
the very old that we could bear that look of dead desire, that absence
of all seeking, that was settling over her face.

"But you'll try," insisted Jim. "You won't say no now?"

With one reddened hand she smoothed the surface of her dress. "I'll
try," she promised faintly.

Dinner over, prompted perhaps by a desire to look the old place over by
myself, perhaps half inclined to pay a visit to Con, I left Jim in the
library to his own devices, and stepped out alone along the road. The
air was clear now, and the sleet had frozen to a thin crystal layer, a
presage of winter, which glistened under the clear stars and sent them
shivering up at me again. As I neared the mill house, I could hear
voices through its scanty boarding, and decided, for the moment, to go
on, following the bed of the creek, when an intonation, oddly familiar,
brought me up like the crack of a whip. It is strange the power that
sounds have to transport us, and again I saw a withered woman with
straw-colored hair and a small, oblong bundle in a patch-work quilt.
But, as I drew nearer, my thoughts were all for Lisbeth.

"Have my girl in town with that young _puppy_!" Old Con was rasping at
her. "I know these artist-fellows, I tell you and--"

He ripped out an oath that took me bounding up the steps. My hand on the
front door knob, however, I paused, catching sig