"Who is ringing the bell?" Aunt Polly rolled her knitting carefully and set her glasses aslant on the top of her head. Northrup soon learned that the angle and position of Aunt Polly's spectacles were significant. "No human hands are ringing the bell," she remarked quietly. "I hold one notion, Peter another. _I_ say the _bell_ is ha'nted; calling, calling folks, making them remember!" "Now, Polly!" Peter knocked the ashes from his pipe on to Ginger's back. "Don't get to criss-crossing and apple-sassing about that bell." He turned to Northrup and winked. "Women is curious," he admitted. "When things are flat and lacking flavour they put in a pinch of this or that to spice them up. Fact is--there's a change of wind and it ain't sot yet. While it's shifting around it hits, once so often, a chink in the belfry that's got to be mended some day. That's the sum and tee-total of Polly's ha'nted tower." Then, as if the question escaped without his sanction and quite to his consternation, Northrup spoke again: "Who lives in the yellow house by the crossroads?" This was not honest. Northrup knew _who_. What he wanted to say, but had not dared, was: "Tell me about her." "I reckon you mean Mary-Clare." Aunt Polly shook a finger at Ginger. "That dog," she added, "jest naturally hates the bell ringing. Animals sense more than men!" This slur escaped Peter, he was intent upon Northrup's question. "Seen that girl in the yellow house?" he asked. "Great girl, Mary-Clare. Great girl." "I stopped there on my way here to ask directions. Rather unusual looking girl." "She is that!" Peter nodded. Mary-Clare was about the only bit of romance Peter permitted himself. "Remember the night Mary-Clare was born, Polly?" Of course Polly remembered. Northrup felt fully convinced that Polly knew everything in King's Forest and never forgot it. She nodded, drew her spectacles over her eyes, and continued her knitting while Peter hit the high spots of Mary-Clare's past. Somehow the shallows Northrup was filling while he listened. Peter was in his element and drawled on: "The wildest storm you ever saw round these parts--snow and gale; they don't usually hang together long, but they did that night. It was a regular night if there ever was one. Nobody stirring abroad 'less he had to. Ole Doc was out--someone over the mine-way had got mussed up with the machinery. Ole Doc was a minister as well as a doctor. He'd tried both jobs and used to say it came in handy, but he leaned most to medicine as being, what you might say, more practical." "You needn't be sacrilegious, brother," Polly interjected. "The story won't lose anything by holding to reverence."