He nodded and went on, entering the house before I could answer. But again I had that queer passing impression of another man, a jovial, easy, talkative fellow, fond of a glass and a toast. Perhaps it was his smile. A smile would naturally shorten a man’s face. Perhaps it was the sunlight. Or perhaps it was just a fancy that had taken hold of me. Wilmer, like most Southerners, had humor of a kind, but he was certainly neither jovial nor talkative, and I should not have described him as an easy companion. His wit was of the dry and caustic sort, that leaves the person addressed at a disadvantage. He left home again three days later—to join Davy’s band I gathered; and I had seen so little of him, while he was at the Bluff, that I did not miss him. I was beginning to recover my strength and from day to day I went farther afield. Sometimes I passed the ford and wandered up the pasture, a vast park-like meadow, broken by clumps of oaks and chestnuts, trees that in that country mark good soil as poplars indicate a poor site. Or I might venture into the forest and amid the undergrowth of sweet-scented myrtle and dogwood and honeysuckle—and other shrubs less healthy—I would put up a deer or come on the tracks of a bear; or in the sombre twilight of the pine woods, with their melancholy festoons of gray moss, I would hear the tapping of the Southern woodpecker. Aunt Lyddy made friends with me and talked of Braddock and Washington and Wolfe and the heroes of the last war; and at times would betray by a look of distress and a tremor of the hands that she was conscious that something was amiss in her world and that things did not consort with reality as they should. On these occasions the girl, if she were present, would humor her and reassure her with incredible tact and kindness; and at the same time she would dare me with stormy eyes to come within so much as a mile of explanation. Her patience with Aunt Lyddy was indeed the measure of her impatience with me. And set me far from her. Yet at a distance we were better friends now. She never joined me where I sat on the veranda, but she would sometimes of an afternoon take her seat at the spinning-wheel at the farther end by the old blood hound; and I would, though timidly, wander that way and draw her into unwilling talk; at any rate it seemed to be unwilling on her side and it was certainly jejune. She never asked me to be seated, and seldom, while I was there, looked up from her task; but she would answer, and bit by bit I learned something of her family story. On her mother’s side she was of French blood; it was on that side that she was akin to Marion, and the result was that she spoke French in a way that put me to shame. When she named her mother. “You were greatly attached to her?” I ventured. “She was my mother,” she answered. “And your father?” “He is more to me than anything in the world,” she replied with the same simplicity. “He was my mother’s last charge to me.”