"Ugh!" Ann ejaculated, with a shudder. "I wonder what’s the matter with me." She went back to bed, lay down and drew her feet up under the sheets and shuddered. "To think I’d have a dream of that sort, and about _that woman’s_ child!" IX It was the first Sunday in June. Mrs. Waycroft came along the stony hill-side road that slanted gently down from her house to Ann Boyd’s. It was a dry, breezeless morning under an unclouded sun, and but for the earliness of the hour it would have been hot. "I was just wondering," she said to Ann, whom she found in the back-yard lowering a pail of butter into the well to keep it cool—"I was just wondering if you’d heard that a new man is to preach to-day. He’s a Mr. Calhoun, from Marietta, a pretty good talker, I’ve heard." "No, I didn’t know it," said Ann, as she let the hemp rope slowly glide through her fingers, till, with a soft sound, the pail struck the dark surface of the water forty feet below. "How am I to hear such things? Through the whole week, unless you happen along, I only have a pack of negroes about me, and they have their own meetings and shindigs to go to." Mrs. Waycroft put her hand on the smooth, wooden windlass and peered down into the well. "This is a better place, Ann, to keep milk and butter cool than a spring-house, if you can just make folks careful about letting the bucket down. I got my well filled with milk from a busted jug once, when one of the hands, in a big hurry, pushed the bucket in and let it fall to the water." "Nobody draws water here but me," said Ann. She had fixed her friend with a steady, penetrating stare. She was silent for a moment, then she said, abruptly: "You’ve got something else to say besides that about the new preacher; I have got so I read you like a book. I watched you coming along the road. I could see you over the roof of the house when you was high up in the edge of the timber, and I knew by your step you had something unusual on your mind. Besides, you know good and well that I’d never darken the door of that house again, not if forty new preachers held forth there. No, you didn’t come all the way here so early for that." The other woman smiled sheepishly under her gingham bonnet. "I’m not going to meeting myself," she said, "and I reckon I was just talking to hear myself run on. I’m that away, you know." "You might learn not to beat the Old Nick around a stump with a woman like me," said Ann, firmly. "You know I go straight at a thing. I’ve found that it pays in business and everything else." "Well, then, I’ve come to tell you that I’m going over to Gilmer to-morrow to see my brother and his wife." "Ah, you say you are!" Ann showed surprise against her will. "Gilmer?"