"Ah, ha!" she exclaimed, under her breath, and, falling back into the bushes which bordered the roadside, she stood tingling from head to foot with a new and unexpected sensation, her eager eyes on the loitering pair. "So _that’s_ it, is it? The young scamp has picked _her_ out, devil that he is by blood and birth. Well, I might have known it. Who could know better than me what a new generation of that cursed stock would be up to? Right now he’s the living image of what his father was at the same age. He’s lying to her, too, with tongue, eyes, voice, and very bend of body. Great God, isn’t she pretty? I never, in my best day, saw the minute that I could have held a candle to her, and yet they all said—but that makes no difference. I wonder why I never thought before that he’d pick her out. As much as I hate her mammy, and her, too, I must acknowledge she’s sweet-looking. She’s pure-minded, too—as pure of thought as I was away back there when I wore my hair in a plait. But that man will crush your purity, you little, blind kitten, crush it like a fresh violet under a horse’s hoof; _he’ll_ teach you what life is. That’s the business the Chesters are good at. But, look! I do believe she’s holding off from him." Ann crept onward through the bushes to keep pace with the couple, now and then stretching her neck or rising to her full height on tiptoe. "He hasn’t been on her track very long," she mused, "but he has won the biggest part of his battle—he’s got her to meet him privately. A sight of this would lay her old mammy out stiff as a board, but she’ll be kept in the dark. That scamp will see to that part of the affair. But she’ll know in the end. Somebody will tell her the truth. Maybe the girl will herself, when the awful, lonely pinch comes and there is no other friend in sight. _Then_, Jane Hemingway, it will all come home to you. Then you’ll look back on the long, blood-hound hunt you’ve given another woman in the same plight. The Almighty is doing it. He’s working it out for Jane Hemingway’s life-portion. The girl is the very apple of her eye; she has often said she was the image of herself, and that, as her own marriage and life had come to nothing, she was going to see to it that her only child’s path was strewn with roses. Well, Langdon Chester is strewing the roses thick enough. Ha, ha, ha!" the peering woman chuckled. "Jane can come along an’ pick ’em up when they are withered and crumble like powder at the slightest touch. Now I really will have something to occupy me. I’ll watch this thing take root, and bud, and leave, and bloom, and die. Maybe I’ll be the first to carry the news to headquarters. I’d love it more than anything this life could give me. I’d like to shake the truth in Jane Hemingway’s old, blinking eyes and see her unable to believe it. I’d like to stand shaking it in her teeth till she knew it was so, and then I honestly believe I’d fall right down in front of her and roll over and over laughing.