“I’m not hurting them.” The ants were, in fact, already using the rod as a causeway. “Why, they’re like you, Jinny!” “Like me?” “All carriers and all busy.” She laughed, and followed their movements with a new sympathy, though she was rather disgusted by those that carried dead flies or dead ants. “Those are not carriers—those are undertakers,” she insisted. They sat down at last on a mound of spongy moss, free from formic activity, and there was a silence. The little purling stream was too far off to break it, but they heard a chaffinch and the peep-bo-playing cuckoo, with that golden human note that floats through the warm, brooding May. And then the irrepressible and unbasketable Nip came rushing and tearing, not making straight for them, but appearing and disappearing like a giant fungus in the rich masses of blues or greens or yellows. He made an opening for conversation, and presently when he came snuggling into Jinny’s arms—poor scotched creature!—an opportunity for joint patting and petting: a process in which hands do not always succeed in partitioning out the pattable and pettable surface rigidly, but graze and brush each other, and even lie passively in abstracted contact. “Why shouldn’t I buy this wood?” said Will, after one of these sustained manual juxtapositions. “Wouldn’t that be lovely?” said Jinny. “Yes—I must settle something soon. Those aspens, though, I’d cut ’em down. They’re only a weed. And yonder ashlings weren’t planted quite close enough—you’ve got to make ’em fight for air if you want ’em straight enough to sell.” Jinny was vaguely disappointed at the turn of this conversation; not following the romantic dream vaguely underlying it. “But could you afford to buy such a big wood?” she murmured. “Big wood? Why, in Canada you get forever of land for nothing!” “Then why didn’t you stay there?” she asked. “This is better than America,” and his hand touched Jinny’s too consciously. “Why, what was the matter with America?” she murmured, withdrawing the hand from Nip’s flank with a little blush.