"Does this buggy secrete distance, Jim? Go 'long with you, man." Before the Doctor could reply, around the corner of the house, bringing little Kenyon Adams in his best bib and tucker, came the lofty figure of Mrs. Nesbit. With her came her daughter. Then up spoke Mrs. Bedelia Satterthwaite Nesbit of the Maryland Satterthwaites, "Look here, Amos Adams--I don't care what you say, I'm going to take this baby." There was strong emphasis upon the "I'm," and she went on: "You can have him every night, and Grant can take care of the child after supper when he comes home from work. But every morning at eight I'm going to have this baby." Further emphasis upon the first person. "I'm not going to see a child turned over to a hired girl all day and me with a big house and no baby and a daughter about to marry and leave me and a houseful of help, if I needed it, which thank Heavens I don't." She put her lips together sternly, and, "Not a word, Amos Adams," she said to Amos, who had not opened his mouth. "Not another word. Kenyon will be home at six o'clock." She put the child into the Doctor's submissive arms--helped her daughter into the buggy, and when she had climbed in herself, she glared triumphantly over her glasses and above her Roman nose, as she said: "Now, Amos--have some sense. Doctor,--go on." And in a moment the buggy was spinning up the hill toward the town. Thus it was that every day, rain or shine, until the day of her wedding, Laura Nesbit drove her dog cart to the Adamses before the men went to their work and took little Kenyon home with her and brought him back in the evening. And always she took him from the arms of Grant--Grant, red-headed, freckled, blue-eyed, who was hardening into manhood and premature maturity so fast that he did not realize the change that it made in his face. It grew set, but not hard, a woman's tenderness crept into the features, and with that tenderness came at times a look of petulant impatience. It was a sad face--a sadly fanatic face--yet one that lighted with human feeling under a smile. Little by little, meeting daily--often meeting morning and evening, Grant and Laura established a homely, wholesome, comfortable relation. One evening while Laura was waiting for Tom Van Dorn and Grant was waiting for Kenyon she and Grant sitting upon the veranda steps of the Nesbit home, looked into the serene, wide lawn that topped the hill above the quiet town. They could look across the white and green of the trees and houses, across the prosperous, solid, red roofs of the stone and brick stores and offices on Market Street, into the black smudge of smoke and the gray, unpainted, sprawling rows of ill-kept tenements around the coal mines, that was South Harvey. They could see even then the sky stains far down the Wahoo Valley, where the villages of Foley and Magnus rose and duplicated the ugliness of South Harvey.