Ann turned back to the fireplace and filled her big delft cup to the brim with strong coffee, and, blowing upon it to cool it, she gulped it down. "Let’s see"—her musings ran on apace—"milching the three cows and feeding the cattle and horses and pigs and chickens will take an hour. I could stretch it out to that by mixing the feed-stuff for to-morrow. Then I could go to the loom and weave up all my yarn; that would be another hour. Then I might walk down to the sugar-mill and see if they are getting it fixed for use when the sorgum’s ripe, but all that wouldn’t throw it later than ten o’clock at latest, and there would still be two hours. Pete McQuill is easy on horses; he’ll drive slow—a regular snail’s pace; it will be twelve when he gets to the store, and then the fool may stop to buy something before he brings her on." The old-fashioned clock on the mantel-piece indicated that it was half-past eleven when Ann had done everything about the house and farm she could think of laying her hands to, and she was about to sit down in the shade of an apple-tree in the yard when she suddenly drew herself up under the inspiration of an idea. Why not start down the road to meet the wagon? No, that would not do. Even to such a close friend as Mrs. Waycroft she could not make such an obvious confession of the impatience which was devouring her. But, and she put the after-thought into action, she would go to the farthest corner of her own land, where her premises touched the main road, and that was fully half a mile. She walked to that point across her own fields rather than run the chance of meeting any one on the road, though the way over ploughed ground, bog, fen, and through riotous growth of thistle and clinging briers was anything but an easy one. Reaching the point to which she had directed her steps, and taking a hasty survey of the road leading gradually up the mountain, she leaned despondently on her rail-fence. "She won’t, she won’t—the girl won’t!" she sighed. "I feel down in my heart of hearts that she won’t. Joe Boyd won’t let her; he’d see how ridiculous it would make him appear, and he’d die rather than give in, and yet Mary Waycroft knows something about human nature, and she said—Mary said—" Far up the road there was a rumble of wheels. Pete McQuill would let his horses go rapidly down-hill, and that, perhaps, was his wagon. It was. She recognized the gaunt, underfed white-and-bay pair through the trees on the mountain-side. Then Ann became all activity. She discovered that one of the rails of the panel of fence near by had quite rotted away, leaving an opening wide enough to admit of the passage of a small pig. To repair such a break she usually took a sound rail from some portion of the fence that was high enough to spare it, and this she now did, and was diligently at work when the wagon finally reached her. She did not look up, although she plainly heard Mrs. Waycroft’s voice as she asked McQuill to stop.