Mrs. Jane Hemingway, Ann Boyd’s long and persistent enemy, sat in the passage which connected the two parts of her house, a big, earthernware churn between her sharp knees, firmly raising and lowering the bespattered dasher with her bony hands. She was a woman past fifty; her neck was long and slender, and the cords under the parchment-like skin had a way of tightening, like ropes in the seams of a tent, when she swallowed or spoke. Her dark, smoothly brushed hair was done up in the tightest of balls behind her head, and her brown eyes were easily kindled to suspicion, fear, or anger. Her brother-in-law, Sam Hemingway, called "Hem" by his intimates, slouched in from the broad glare of the mid-day sun and threw his coat on a chair. Then he went to the shelf behind the widow, and, pouring some water into a tin pan from a pail, he noisily bathed his perspiring face and big, red hands. As he was drying himself on the towel which hung on a wooden roller on the weather-boarding of the wall, Virginia Hemingway, his niece, came in from the field bringing a pail of freshly gathered dewberries. In appearance she was all that George Wilson had claimed for her. Slightly past eighteen, she had a wonderful complexion, a fine, graceful figure, big, dreamy, hazel eyes, and golden-brown hair, and, which was rare in one of her station, she was tastily dressed. She smiled as she showed her uncle the berries and playfully "tickled" him under the chin. "See there!" she chuckled. "Pies?" he said, with an unctuous grin, as he peered down into her pail. "I thought of you while I was gathering them," she nodded. "I’m going to try to make them just as you like them, with red, candied bars criss-crossing." "Nothing in the pie-line can hold a candle to the dewberry unless it’s the cherry," he chuckled. "The stones of the cherries sorter hold a fellow back, but I manage to make out. I et a pie once over at Darley without a stone in it, and you bet your life it was a daisy." He went into his room for his tobacco, and Virginia sat down to stem her berries. He returned in a moment, leaning in the doorway, drawing lazily at his pipe. The widow glanced up at him, and rested her dasher on the bottom of the churn. "I reckon folks are still talking about Ann Boyd and her flouncing out of meeting like she did," the widow remarked. "Well, that _was_ funny, but what was the old thing to do? It would take a more brazen-faced woman than she is, if such a thing exists, to sit still and hear all he said."