She remembered the “houseful,” the pinching poverty, the prison, the destruction of the still. She rose reluctantly and turned to the left. Her eyes were bright; her cheeks were flushed; her red lips parted. She listened intently from time to time: not a sound but her own slow, light footfall. She had thought to hear the dogs barking, for the place was now near at hand. When she saw a rail-fence terminating the vista her heart gave a great bound; she paused, looking at it with dilated eyes. Then she went on, up and up, till the house came in view,—a forlorn little cabin, with a clay and stick chimney, smokeless! She stared at it amazed. There was no creature in the hog-pen, which was large for the pretensions of the place,—the distillery refuse explained its phenomenal size, perhaps; the door of the house swung loose in the wind. There were several slats nailed across the entrance low down, evidently intended to keep certain vagrant juveniles from falling out of the door. No need for this now. The place was deserted. Alethea walked up to the fence,—the bars lay upon the ground,—and stepped over the slats into the empty room. The ashes had been dead for days in the deep chimney-place; a few rags in a corner fluttered in the drafts from crannies; the whole place had that indescribable mournfulness of a deserted human habitation that had so pathetically appealed to her in the little house at Boke’s Spring. Here it pierced her heart. It was from fear of her that they had fled,—and whither? A poor home at best, where could they find another? She need not have quaked, she said to herself; they had not sought to still her tongue, lest it should wag against them. They had uprooted their home, and had withdrawn themselves alike from the informer and the law that threatened them. The tears sprang into her eyes. She deprecated their bitter feeling, their saddened lives, their deserted hearth-stone. And yet it was all wrong that they should distill the brush whiskey, and could she say she was to blame? A faint scratching sound struck her attention. It came from behind the closed door of the shed-room. She stood listening for a moment, unable to account for it. Then she went forward and unlatched the door. A starved cat, emaciated and forlorn to the last degree, forgotten in the removal, shut by some accident into the room, crept quivering out. It went through the dumb show of mewing; it could not walk; its bones almost pierced its skin. Its plight served to approximate the date of the flitting. It had been there for days, weeks perhaps. She picked up the creature, and carried it home in her arms. X.