Absalom moved mechanically into the doorway. The child, still pensive and silent, and looking tenderly infantile, lay upon the straw. A sudden pang of pity for her pierced his heart: how her own would be desolated! His horse, hitched in a clump of cedars, awaited him ten steps away. It was his only chance--his last chance. And he had been hardly entreated. The child's eyes rested, startled and dilated, upon him; he must be quick. The next instant he turned suddenly, ran hastily through the snow, crashed among the cedars, mounted his horse, and galloped away. It was only a moment that Evelina expected to be at the house, but the gourd of salt which she sought was not in its place. She hurried out with it at last, unprescient of any danger until all at once she saw the footprints of a man in the snow, otherwise untrodden, about the fodder-stack. She still heard the two axes at the wood-pile. Her father, she knew, was at the house. A smothered scream escaped her lips. The steps had evidently gone into the stable, and had come out thence. Her faltering strength could scarcely support her to the door. And then she saw lying in the straw Elnathan Daniel, beginning to babble and gurgle again, and to grow very pink with joy over a new toy--a man's glove, a red woollen glove, accidentally dropped in the straw. She caught it from his hands, and turned it about curiously. She had knit it herself--for Absalom! When she came into the house, beaming with joy, the baby holding the glove in his hands, the men listened to her in dumfounded amaze, and with significant side glances at each other. “He wouldn't take the baby whenst he hed the chance, 'kase he knowed 'twould hurt me so. An' he never wanted ter torment me--I reckon he never _did_ mean ter torment me. An' he did 'low wunst he war sorry he spited dad. Oh! I hev been a heap too quick an' spiteful myself. I hev been so terrible wrong! Look a-hyar; he lef' this glove ter show me he hed been hyar, an' could hev tuk the baby ef he hed hed the heart ter do it. Oh! I'm goin' right up the mounting an' tell him how sorry I be.” “Toler'ble cheap!” grumbled Stephen--“one old glove. An' he'll git Elnathan Daniel an' ye too. A smart fox he be.” They could not dissuade her. And after a time it came to pass that the Quimbey and Kittredge feuds were healed; for how could the heart of a grandfather withstand a toddling spectacle in pink calico that ran away one day some two years later, in company with an adventurous dog, and came down the mountain to the cabin in the Cove, squeezing through the fence rails after the manner of his underfoot world, proceeding thence to the house, where he made himself very merry and very welcome? [Illustration: Old Quimbey and his grandson 151]