"I didn't know you went on the principle that you had to act exactly like a regular married woman," he apologized with meekness. "I do," she said shortly. He rose and went over to where the banjo lay and brought it back to her. It was growing dusk now in the little cabin. "Play for me, and sing, won't you, Marjorie?" he asked abruptly. "I haven't heard you for a long time." In Marjorie's mind there arose the memory of that boyish, loving little note that she had found under the banjo, and for a minute her throat clutched so that she couldn't answer. She had moments of being so intolerably sorry for Francis that it hurt; quite irrational moments, when he seemed to need it not at all. This was one. "Yes," she said, pulling herself together. "That is, if you will take my word for it that I have no designs on poor old Mr. Pennington." "Of course I know you haven't," he said. "It was the other way about that I was afraid of." "His having designs on me?" She laughed aloud as she began tuning her strings. It did seem like the funniest thing she had ever heard. The picture of Pennington, girt with a sack for an apron, with that plump, quaint face of his, and those kindly, fussy ways, drying cups for her and having designs while he did it--it was enough to make even Logan laugh, and _he_ had never been known to be amused by anything that wasn't intellectual humor. "Just a-wearyin' for you," she began, in her soft little sympathetic voice, that wasn't much good for anything but just this sort of thing, but could pull the heartstrings out of you at it, and sang it through. She went on after that without being asked, just because she liked it. She knew where the simple chords were in the dark, and she sang everything she wanted to, forgetting finally Francis, and the woods, and everything else in the world except the music and the old things she was singing. When she had finally done, after an hour or so, and laid the banjo across her lap and leaned back with a little laugh, saying "There! You must be tired by this time!" Francis rose with scarcely a thank-you, and walked out of the door. "I want a turn in the air before I come to bed," he said. Marjorie said nothing. She was sleepy, as usual--would she never get over being sleepy up here?--and she laid the instrument on the floor and stretched out thoughtlessly on the window-seat, instead of going off to bed as she had been intending to do. As for her husband, he walked across the veranda straight into a group of his listening men. The music had drawn them over, and, regardless of mosquitoes, they were sitting about on the steps, liking the concert. "We owe you a vote of thanks for importing that little wife of yours, Ellison," said Pennington, getting up and stretching himself widely in the moonlight. "Maybe if I do some more dishes for her, she'll come and sing for us when she knows it, sometime soon."