As soon as she was safely out of sight, Will, breathing heavily, slackened his showy pace, and very soon lowered his load altogether and sat down upon it, while he wiped his streaming countenance. The physical relief was great. A lark was singing overhead and his eyes followed it restfully till he couldn’t tell whether the throb was singing or the song throbbing. He must smoke his pipe by this wayside grass after all that scurrying and squabbling. Fumbling for his matches, he felt the bulge of the glove and softened still more. Anyhow he had been victorious over the vixen, and he was resting on his laurels, so to speak. Now that she realized he would never recognize her as a carrier, he could afford to give her one of the Canadian fal-lals he had bought at Moses & Son’s for his mother, and which now reposed in the box arching beneath him. That would make her think he had not forgotten her even in Canada, and anyhow it would show her he bore no malice for the bite or even for her bark. Surveying the landscape, he recognized that by going on a little he would strike the turning to the bridge and “The King of Prussia,” where he might possibly find a trap. The hussy need never know he had broken down. But as he sat there lazily smoking and evoking his boyhood and her part therein, the best part of an hour sped glamorously, and suddenly he saw red. Caleb Flynt, equally coatless, was hastening from the Bradmarsh direction as fast as his aged limbs could carry him. “Hullo, dad!” he cried, startled. “Same old shirt!” Caleb grinned. “Keeps her colour, don’t she?” “But why didn’t you come to meet me?” said Will, recalling his grievance. “Oi did—soon as Jinny come and told us she’d passed you carrying your chest and you might want a hand. Is that the hutch? Dash my buttons, you must ha’ growed up like Samson! Fancy carryin’ that all the way from Chipstone in the strong sun!” Will did not deny the feat—the explanation would really have been too complicated. In his embarrassment, he overlooked that his father had not really answered his question. “And how’s mother?” he said. “Mother’s in a great old state. ’Nation mad with Jinny.” “Why, what’s Jinny done?” “Sow neglectful. ‘Bein’ as you passed him by,’ says mother to she, ‘why dedn’t you stop and pick up the chest?’” He looked uncomfortable. “And what did Jinny say?” “She said she dedn’t reckonize the old you when she dreft by, and besides she was singing-like.” He winced at the reminder of the song, but was grateful to her for telling so truthful a lie: instinctively he felt that his folks having accepted a woman carrier with such brainless acquiescence would fail to enter into the fine shades of his feeling. “Mother hadn’t a right to make a noise with Jinny,” he said.