Ann had reached the end of the woods now and stopped to compose herself. Her grandfather would not notice that she had been crying, but her Aunt Sue would. She would have to tell of the tragedy in the Mine Banks field; news of that sort had a way of traveling. She would have to say that she had seen what had happened, but not a word of Edward Westmore's talk with her or of Garvin--not even to her Aunt Sue. Sue, in her quiet way, hated the Westmores as bitterly as her grandfather did. Ann's swift liking for these two men who had, each in his own fashion, been nice to her, and her swift determination to be nice in return, was a thing to be carefully concealed. As she had come through the woods, she had looked at the dead chestnut tree in the split crotch of which there had once been a flicker's nest. Garvin had not said so, he would not with the other man standing by, but it probably held a message for her. This was not the best time to get it, however. Some one might see her and wonder. Ann took off her hood and smoothed her hair and pressed her hands to her hot eyes; sat still then and let the wind cool the ache in them, her face settling into its usual wistful expression, eyes dark under drooping lids, lips full but smileless, cheeks and chin so rounded and infantile that they were appealing. Life might make hers a voluptuous face, there was more than a hint of the probability in the desirous mouth and full white throat. It was the straight nose with its slightly disdainful nostrils and the arched and clearly penciled brows that gave her face its real beauty--a nobler promise than was suggested by lips and chin. Through the few intervening trees Ann could see the Penniman barn, a low wide structure with a basement for housing cattle, an arrangement that the sharply sloping ground made possible. The house, a little to the left and beyond, even in winter was obscured by trees. Two tall Lombardy poplars guarded the kitchen entrance and the woodshed, towering high above a steep-pitched roof and the alanthus and locust trees that in summer shaded it. The woods through which Ann had just passed semicircled the upward sloping field that lay between her and the farm buildings. To the right, the slope was crested by an orchard, and to the left, stretching from the house like a long line of melancholy sentinels, was a double row of magnificent cedars, guarding the road that led straight across open country, past the Hunt Club and to the Post-Road. That was the way by which Ann should have come had not the hint of spring tempted her to take the Back Road, through the pastures and the woods.