Before drawing on her lace "half-hand" mitts, she held out her hands, and asked him to pour water from the gourd upon them. Then she drew from the swinging pocket at her belt a tiny embroidered square, but before she could use it, Abner rescued it, and, substituting his own handkerchief, dried her hands himself. Her loose sleeves fell back to the dimpled elbows, and as he lingered over his task, he noted the delicate tracery of blue veins along the inner curve of her white arms. He saw, too, the freckles upon her rounded wrists, and that her well-formed hands were sun-browned and hardened by work. "Are you counting the freckles?" she asked demurely, smiling at him from the depths of her white bonnet. "I fear you will not have time to make a complete inventory of all the freckles, needle-pricks and bruises; besides, it is some time since I heard voices, and we are far from the meeting-house. Uncle Hiram would think it no light offense to be late at afternoon service--and there is Betsy yonder by the big oak on the hill, waving and beckoning frantically. Let us join her at once." "Yes, we must hasten," assented Dudley, consulting his big silver watch, after thrusting his wet handkerchief into the bosom of his coat. David Purviance, a young licentiate awaiting ordination at the next session of presbytery, preached the afternoon sermon, and handled his theme, "The Final Perseverance of the Saints," in a masterly manner. But Abner Dudley gave little heed to the discourse; for his thoughts, stirred by the vision of the beautiful girl across the aisle, were wandering in an earthly paradise. Through the deepening twilight he rode home alone that evening in a tumult of bewildered feeling, scarcely able to realize that only that morning he had been on that same road with Henry and Susan; for in the interim he seemed to have entered an entirely new world of thought and feeling. CHAPTER IV. WINTER SCHOOL-DAYS Soon beautiful, misty Indian summer had vanished before the stern approach of winter. The chestnut burs had all opened; the wild grapevines, clinging to fence rails along the roadside and twining in drooping profusion over the trees in wood and thicket, had long ago been robbed of their glistening, dark clusters of frost-ripened fruit. The squirrels had laid in their supply of nuts; the birds had given their last Kentucky concert of the season and had departed to fill their winter engagements in the Southland; and the forest trees waved their bare arms and bowed their heads to the wind that wailed a mournful requiem for departed summer. By this time the wheat had been sown, and the last shock of corn gathered. The school forces were, therefore, augmented by the advent of a dozen or more larger boys and young men, eager to gain all the learning that could be compassed in the months which intervened before early spring plowing and seeding would call them again to the fields.