Then she arose quickly and gathered her wraps and some clothing to a chair. She shut her fiddle into its case and placed the music in a pile beside it. Then she went below and hung a white cloth on the pillar of the portico, for she thought that the peddler might pass early. In her room again she found a piece of the coarse bread under her pillow and of this she ate sitting wrapped in the blanket of the bed, the room being cold now, the fire almost gone. Without undressing she lay in the bed, ready for her departure, a gladness singing through her thin blood where life still beat. Presently she was aware that it was morning and that she had slept happily. She bathed in the cold water, shaking with cold and joy, and she ate the last of the bread. When the peddler brought his car along the driveway she took her things into her arms and went down to the portico. “I’d be plumb pleased to death,” he said when she asked her favor, although she told him she would have to ask him to wait for his pay. “I wouldn’t charge a young lady e’er a cent to ride along with me. Pay? Don’t say e’er word about pay. Would I charge a young lady to go a-riden with me? Sakes-alive!” When he asked her where she wanted to go she had no answer ready, but she was joyous in her evasions, making questions and replies that kept the destination delicately poised at the brink of an answer. He would go here and stop there, naming farms, and he could come to Spring Run Valley by noon of the day, he said. Then he stopped at a farm, the house near the roadway, and called his wares to the farmer’s wife, who bought. She peered curiously at the front of the truck but she made no comment.