She looked up at the young man with a leer of self-gratulation. He still lingered, but the unsophisticated mother in the mountains can be as much an obstacle to anything in the nature of love-making, when the youth is not approved, as the expert tactician of a drawing-room. He had only the poor consolation of helping Cynthia to carry in the load of stiff, dry clothes to the log cabin, ambushed behind the beech-trees, hard by in the gorge. The house had a very unconfiding aspect; all its belongings seemed huddled about it for safe-keeping. The beehives stood almost under the eaves; the ash-hopper was visible close in the rear; the rain-barrel affiliated with the damp wall; the chickens were going to roost in an althea bush beside the porch; the boughs of the cherry and plum and crab-apple trees were thickly interlaced above the path that led from the rickety rail fence, and among their roots flag-lilies, lark-spur, and devil-in-the-bush mingled in a floral mosaic. The old woman went through the gate first. But even this inadvertence could not profit the loitering young people. "Law, Cynthy," she exclaimed, pointing at a loose-jointed elderly mountaineer, who was seated beneath the hop vines on the little porch, while a gaunt gray mare, with the plow-gear still upon her, cropped the grass close by, "yander is yer daddy, ez empty ez a gourd, I 'll be bound! Hurry an' git supper, child. Time's a-wastin',--time's a-wastin'!" When Evander was half-way up the steep slope, he turned and looked down at the embowered little house, that itself turned its face upward, looking as it were to the mountain's summit. How it nestled there in the gorge! He had seen it often and often before, but whenever he thought of it afterward it was as it appeared to him now: the darkling valley below it, the mountains behind it, the sunset sky still flaring above it, though stars had blossomed out here and there, and the sweet June night seemed full of their fragrance. He could distinguish for a good while the gate, the rickety fence, the path beneath the trees. The vista ended in the open door, with the broad flare of the fire illumining the puncheon floor and the group of boisterous tow-headed children; in the midst was the girl, with her bright hair and light figure, with her round arms bare, and her deft hand stirring the batter for bread in a wooden bowl. She looked the very genius of home, and so he long remembered her.