The next morning he found the farmer and his wife very much depressed, but he had no hope of being able to convince them that they had heard nothing supernatural, and thought it best to avoid the subject. He passed the day in calling on some of the neighbors who had asked him to visit them, and returned to the farm-house just before nightfall. He found Rena standing at the door, and, while talking to her, he mentioned his moonlight walk. "I saw what I took to be a stray dog up there," he said. "Perhaps it made the sound we heard." "Was it a black dog, with rough, curly hair?" asked Rena. "I think it was; but I couldn't see it very well. Do you know whose it is?" "No; but this morning when I came out of the dairy a dog that looked like that was standing in the path, a little way off, and I was thinking it might have been the same one." As she looked away again, Brent said, "I didn't tell your father and mother about the dog I saw, because I thought it would be well for them to forget the whole matter as soon as possible." "Thank you," said Rena, turning her face and looking at him gratefully. He had lost the desire to tease her, and treated her as he had never done before. Thinking of this, not long afterward, he wondered whether a presentiment of what was coming had caused the change, or whether it merely arose from a consciousness of the gloom which had already settled on the household. During his call on the Barndollars that morning, he had partly overcome Elsa's unfavorable impression of him by treating her, to some extent, "like a grown-up woman" and showing by his manner that he was not unconscious of the handsome young brunette's personal attractions. On her next visit, a little more than two weeks later, she noticed that he had entirely given up the objectionable teasings; and this removed the last obstacle in the way of her considering him extremely "nice." She had mentally admitted, even at the first view, that he possessed the degree of good looks and stylishness rigorously exacted from the male sex by the canons of boarding school taste, and she now candidly acknowledged to herself that his being an Englishman was, strictly speaking, not his own fault. When she was ready to go, she made her adieux with an agreeable sense of having been both entertaining and instructive. She forgot to take leave of her friend the aged and decrepit mastiff, which was sitting just inside the hall; but he called attention to his presence by three raps of his tail on the floor. Elsa laughed, and went through the form of shaking his huge paw,--an attention which he acknowledged by a prolonged caudal tattoo.