So the days slipped past till July hung golden mists on the horizon and filled the woods with that rare stillness and dusky slumbrousness that follows the maturing of the foliage and the coming on of fruit. The cherry trees at Rackenshack had grown ragged and dull, and the birds, excepting a few swallows wheeling about the old chimney tops, had all flown away to the woods and fields. The wheat had been cut and stacked, the corn had received its last ploughing. Still Luke hung about the house annoying Betsy with his pipe and his utter carelessness. That he was "distracted" Betsy did not for a moment doubt. She used every means her small stock of wit could invent to urge him out of his singular mood, but without avail. He took to the few old novels he could find about the house, but sometimes he would gaze blankly at a single paragraph for a whole hour. One morning as he lay on the porch, his head resting upon the back of a chair, reading, or pretending to read an odd volume of "The Scottish Chiefs," a little boy, 'Squire Brown's son, came to bring home a monkey-wrench his father had borrowed some time before. The boy was a bright, rattle-box, say-everything, pop-eyed sort of child, and was not long telling all the news of the neighborhood. Luke gave little attention to what he was saying, till at length he let fall something about a young lady--a fine, rich young lady, staying at Judge Barnett's--a young lady who could outrun him, out jump him, beat him playing marbles and ball, who could climb away up in the June apple tree, who could ride a colt bareback, who could beat Jim Barnett shooting at a mark, who could, in fact, do a half a hundred things to perfection that strict persons would think a young lady should never do at all, but which seemed to make a heroine of her in the narrator's boyish view. "What's the gal's name?" queried Luke in a slow, lazy way, but his eyes shot a gleam of hope. "Hoidy Pearl," replied the lad. Hoiden Pearl! That name had been woven into every sound that had reached Luke's ears for days and nights and nights together, and now, like a sweet tune nearly mastered, it took a deeper, tenderer meaning as the boy pronounced it in his childish way. "Hoidy Pearl is her name," the lad continued. "She's come to stay at the Judge's all summer till the new railroad's finished. Her father's the boss of the road. She's jest the funniest girl, o-o-e! And she likes me, too!" Luke raised himself to a sitting posture and looked at the boy so earnestly that he drew back a pace or two as if afraid. "Boy, you're not lyin', are ye?" said the man in a low, earnest tone. "No I'm not, neither," was the quick reply.