“What did the revenuers do when they kem up the mounting?” Marvin asked suddenly. His tone was all alert now with curiosity. He could reserve his rebukes till his craving for gossip should be satisfied. Conversation, a fine art elsewhere, assumes the dignity of a privilege in these sparsely settled wilds, where its opportunities are scant. “They ain’t never kem, ez I knows on,” said Alethea tremulously. They might come yet, and here he was still unwarned and at the mercy of accident. She had climbed the fence, springing lightly down on the other side, and had mechanically begun to assist them in their work,—the usual courtesy of a guest in the mountains who finds the host employed. “Slip-shuck it, Lethe,” he remarked, calling her attention to the fact that the outer husks were left upon the stalks, and the ear, enveloped merely in its inner integuments, was thrown upon the heap. “I hates powerful ter be obleeged ter leave all this hyar good roughness;” he indicated the long rows of shucks upon the stalks. “My cattle would be mighty thankful ter hev sech fedded ter ’em. But the corn itself air about ez much ez I kin haul so fur”— “_Don’t_ ye tell her wharabouts we-uns lives nowadays,” broke out the woman. She was standing near Alethea, and she turned and looked at her. The girl’s fresh and beautiful countenance was only more delicate, more sensitive, with that half-affrighted perturbation on it, that piteous deprecation. The elder woman’s face was furrowed and yellow in contrast; her large, prominent eyes, of a light, hazel color, were full of tears, and had a look as if tears were no unfamiliar visitants. She wiped them away with the curtain of her pink sun-bonnet, and went on pulling the corn. “I dunno whar Sam Marvin lives, myself,” the moonshiner declared, with reckless bravado. “I don’t go by that name no mo’.” He straightened up and set his arms akimbo, as he laughed. “Ye needn’t send no mo’ o’ yer spies, Lethe, arter me,” he declared. “My neighbors way over yander dunno no sech man ez Sam Marvin.” Alethea’s lifted hand paused upon the shuck on the sere stalk. As she turned half round he saw her face in the smoke; her golden hair and fresh cheek, and the saffron kerchief tied beneath the round chin. He was not struck by her beauty; it always seemed a thing apart from her, the slightest incident of her personality, so much more forceful were the impressions of her character, so much more intimately her coercive opinions concerned those with whom she came in contact. But in her clear eyes he detected a surprise which he hardly understood at the moment. And he paused to look at her, wondering if it were only simulated. Her heart throbbed with a dull and heavy pain. So angry were they because she would not promise to keep their secret. She shrank from their rage when she should tell that she had voluntarily disclosed it.