"Take both!" Jan-an was nodding her willingness to obey. And Mary-Clare took her prayer-book with her. Mary-Clare had the quiet Forest to herself apparently, for on the way to the Point she met no one. On ahead she traced, she believed, Larry's footprints, but when she turned on the trail to the Point, they were not there. All along her way Mary-Clare went over in her thought the story of Philander Sniff and Peneluna. It was the romance and mystery of the sordid Point. Years before, when Mary-Clare was a little child, Philander had drifted, from no one knew where, to the mines and the Point. He lived in one of the ramshackle huts; gave promise of paying for it, did, in fact, pay a few dollars to old Doctor Rivers, and then became a squatter. He was injured at the mines and could do no more work and at that juncture Peneluna had arrived upon the scene from the same unknown quarter apparently whence Philander had hailed. She took the empty cottage next Philander's and paid for it by service in Doctor Rivers's home. She was clean, thrifty, and strangely silent. When Philander first beheld her he was shaken, for a moment, out of his glum silence. "God Almighty!" he confided to Twombly who had worked in the mines with him and had looked after him in his illness; "yer can't shake some women even when it's for their good." That was all. Through the following years the two shacks became the only clean and orderly ones on the Point. When Philander hobbled from his quarters, Peneluna went in and scrubbed and scoured. After a time she cooked for the old man and left the food on his back steps. He took it in, ate it, and had the grace to wash the dishes before setting them back. "Some mightn't," poor Peneluna had said to Aunt Polly in defence of Sniff. As far as any one knew the crabbed old man never spoke to his devoted neighbour, but she had never complained. "I wonder what happened before they came here?" After all the years of taking the strange condition for granted, it sprang into quickened life. Mary-Clare was soon to know and it had a bearing upon her own highly sensitive state. She made her way to the far end of the Point, passing wide-eyed children at play and curious women in doorways. "Philander's dead!" The words were like an accompaniment, passing from lip to lip. "An' she won't let a soul in." This was added. "She will presently," Mary-Clare reassured them. "She'll need you all, later." There was a little plot of grass between Peneluna's shack and Philander's and a few scraggy autumn flowers edged a well-worn path from one back door to the other! At Philander's front door Mary-Clare knocked and Peneluna responded at once. She was dressed as Jan-an had described, and for a moment Mary-Clare had difficulty in stifling her inclination to laugh.