Of exactly what had occurred that night on Whiteface, he could not be sure. He wearied himself, trying to remember what he had said, what he had done. Of one thing he was certain: he had not laid his hands on her. That he should have remembered, and that, he knew, she would not have let pass by as she was letting memory of that night pass. Yet it was the same thing, for he had tried. What, then, exactly, was she thinking? These things he did not cease to turn in his mind. And bit by bit it seemed to him that he understood: for at first, on the mountain, she had needed him. Without him she could not have followed that imperceptible trail. Then, here on the train, she was deeply his debtor, as he had forced her to be. Whatever, in her heart, she was thinking of him, she could not now reveal to him. Indeed how was it possible that she did not despise him? So, as she had sat beside him on the Overland, he had been torturing himself. Yet never once did her gentleness to him fail. There was, in her manner now, as she spoke to him, something of this incomparable care: “Will you do something?” she said, looking away from him. “If it’s for you, I reckon you can reckon on it,” he said. “I donno who it’s for,” she told him. “But will you be just as nice to my uncle as you are to me?” He stared at her. “Be kind of polite to him,” she said. “Don’t pull your revolver on him,” she explained. “I hardly ever pull my revolver,” he defended himself indignantly. “Well, don’t shake him or—or lift him up by the collar for anything,” she suggested. “Oh,” he comprehended. “You want me to trot out my Chicago manners—is that it? He laughed. “All right,” he said. “I’m on.” “Uncle Hiram is good,” she cried earnestly. “He come to see us, once—he’s good! You treat him right—please.” The Inger sunk his chin on his chest and walked, mulling this. So she hadn’t liked his way with folks! He felt vaguely uneasy, and as if he had stumbled on some unsuspected standard of hers. “I don’t know,” she said, troubled, “what Aunt ’Cretia’s goin’ to think. I mean about your coming with me.” He raised his head. “What about me coming with you?” he demanded. Before the clear candor of his eyes, her own fell. “She’ll think the truth,” he blazed, “or I’ll burn the house down!” At this they both laughed, and now it was she who was feeling a dim shame, as if from some high standard of his, she had been the one to vary. At the intersection of two paved roads, whose sidewalks were grass-grown, in their long waiting for footsteps, stood the house which they had been seeking. It was of dullish blue clapboards whose gabled ends were covered with red-brown toothed shingles. The house was too high for its area, and a hideous porch of cement blocks and posts looked like a spreading cow-catcher. On a clothes line, bed blankets and colored quilts were flapping, as if they were rejoicing in their one legitimate liberty from privacy.