Mrs. Purvine, her ill-humor evaporating in the successful exploiting of her little plan, gazed after them with a benignant smile illuminating her features, as they creaked off in the slow little ox-cart, its wheels now leaning outward and now bending inward, as the loose linch-pin or some obstruction in the road might impel. She noted, however, that the old slouch hat and the brown sun-bonnet, with its coy tress of golden hair showing beneath its curtain, were seldom turned toward each other, and there was evidently little disposition for conversation between the two young people. “Bluff hev got mos’ o’ the brains in that thar comp’ny,” she said to herself with indignation because of their mutual indifference. “But Lethe Ann Sayles air mighty diffe’nt from some wimmin, ef she kin hold her jaw fur twenty year, an’ keep that thar dead-an’-gin-out look on her face fur Mink Lorey. He can’t git back ’fore then. An’ Jerry’s got ez good a chance ez Ben Doaks. But it’s mighty hard on a pore old woman like me, ez hed trouble enough marryin’ herself off thirty year ago, a-runnin’ away an’ sech, ter gin herself ter studyin’ ’bout sech foolishness in her old age ez love-makin’, an’ onsettlin’ her mind, ’kase they hain’t got enough sense ter do thar courtin’ ’thout help.” But this unique grievance was so inadequate that Mrs. Purvine gave up the effort to eke out thereby her ill-humor, and gazed about with placid complacence at the spring landscape, tossing all the bags of seed together into a splint basket, to be sorted at some more propitious day. In Bluff’s slow progress along the red clay road, the gradual unfolding of the scene, the vernal peace, the benedictory sunshine, had their benignant effect on Alethea. Absorbed as she had been, in descending the mountain, by her anxiety for the specious aunt Dely’s illness, she had not noted until now how far the spring was advanced in the sheltered depths of the cove, how loath to climb to the sterile fastnesses of Wild-Cat Hollow.