All the same she looked round apprehensively and with wildly beating heart before she allowed Methusalem to lift the latch of the familiar gate, and she had somehow expected so great a transformation in the farmhouse under its new and sinister activities, and was conscious of so vast a change in herself since she had last seen it, that its primitive black front almost startled her, so unchanged did it appear. True, the ferrets’ cages were gone, but their absence only made it more its old self, and the moan of the doves was as reassuring as the singing of the kettle on her own hearth. Caleb’s red shirt-sleeves looked for once in keeping with the scene, arising as they did out of yellow flame-tinged clouds from the rubbish-heap which he was burning, and the pleasant pungent smell of which filled her eyes with tears, half smoke, half emotion. Even in that glow the homely hair-circled face was capable of a new illumination. “Gracious goodness, there’s Jinny!” He ran to the house-door. “Mother! Mother!” he cried in jubilant agitation. Martha emerged at a hobbling run, apron-girded. Despite the glow, _her_ face darkened. “You give a body a turn,” she grumbled. “I almost thought ’twas the Golden City coming down.” “’Tis nigh as good,” he retorted boldly, “bein’ as Jinny was same as gone there. And bless me, ef she don’t look ghosty!” “Good morning, Jinny!” said Martha coldly. “We don’t need a carrier now—with our coach to get everything.” Jinny’s cheeks turned far from “ghosty.” “I haven’t come to you—only to Mr. Flippance.” “But he gets everything, too, through Willie.” “I know that—I merely want to speak to him.” “You can’t now.” “The missus means he’s abed,” Caleb explained, rushing to Jinny’s relief, and indeed the information brought a smile back to her twitching lips. “Minds me of a great old tortoise, diggin’ hisself into his blankets. Do him good to be up with the sun, same as when Oi was a scarecrow, soon as the wheat was sown.” “You don’t want to tell everybody you began as a scarecrow,” said Martha frigidly. “Ef we’re rich now, dear heart, and can ride in our own coach, ’tis the Lord’s hand, not ours. Oi watched over wheat and winter beans, and ’arly peas, and winter oats, and then spring barley, but all the time the Lord was watchin’ over me.” “Not as a scarecrow,” said Martha severely. “Oi warn’t a scarecrow ploughin’-time, bein’ set on the middle hoss to flick the whip, and chance times when ’twas too frosty to plough Oi went to Dame Pippler’s to school.” “I never heard that before,” said Martha. “Dedn’t like to tell ye,” he confessed, “being as ’twas too cowld to howd the slate-pencil, and the book-larnin’ leaked out ’twixt the frosts. ’Twas a penny a week wasted.” Martha saw their visitor was amused at this revelation after fifty years of wedlock. “Jinny wants to be going on,” she observed testily. “Look at all her boxes.”