And lo, now it was suddenly as if the pasture were articulate. The great elliptical tent, the strange gold chariots casually disposed, the air of the hurrying men, so amazingly used to what they were doing--these gave to the place the aspect of having from the first been secretly familiar with more than one had suspected. "Ain't it the divil?" demanded Timothy Toplady, Jr., ecstatically, as the glory of the scene burst upon him. Liva Vesey, in rose-pink cambric, beside him in the buckboard, looked up at his brown Adam's apple--she hardly ever lifted her shy eyes as far as her sweetheart's face--and rejoined:-- "Oh, Timmie! ain't it just what you might say _great_?" "You'd better believe," said Timothy, solemnly, "that it is that." He looked down in her face with a lifting of eyebrows and an honest fatuity of mouth. Liva Vesey knew the look--without ever having met it squarely, she could tell when it was there, and she promptly turned her head, displaying to Timothy's ardent eyes tight coils of beautiful blond crinkly hair, a little ear, and a line of white throat with a silver locket chain. At which Timothy now collapsed with the mien of a man who is unwillingly having second thoughts. "My!" he said. They drove into the meadow, and when the horse had been loosed and cared for, they found a great cottonwood tree, its leaves shimmering and moving like little banners, and there they spread their lunch. The sunny slope was dotted with other lunchers. The look of it all was very gay, partly because the trees were in June green, and among them windmills were whirling like gaunt and acrobatic witches, and partly because it was the season when the women were brave in new hats, very pink and very perishable. The others observed the two good-humouredly from afar, and once or twice a tittering group of girls, unescorted, passed the cottonwood tree, making elaborate detours to avoid it. At which Liva flushed, pretending not to notice; and Timothy looked wistfully in her face to see if she wished that she had not come with him. However, Timothy never dared look at her long enough to find out anything at all; for the moment that she seemed about to meet his look he always dropped his eyes precipitantly to her little round chin and so to the silver chain and locket. And then he was miserable.