Out in the larger front room, as she hovered over the work spread out before her, the girl, too, was talking aloud to herself, not in the toneless, rambling voice that came from John Anderson's mumbling lips, but in hushed, rapt, broken sentences which were softly tinged with incredulous wonder. The yellow glow of the single lamp, pushed far across the table from her, where the most of its radiance was swallowed up by the gloom of the uncurtained window, flickered unsteadily across her shining, tumbled hair, coloring the faintly blue, thinly penciled lines beneath her tip-tilted eyes with a hint of weariness totally at variance with the firm little sloping shoulders and full lips, pursed in a childish pout over a mouthful of pins. The hours had passed swiftly that day for Dryad Anderson; and the last one of all--the one since she had lighted the single small lamp in the room and set it in the window, so far across the table from her that she had to strain more and more closely over her swift flashing scissors in the thickening dusk--had flown on winged feet, even faster than she knew. Twice, early in the evening she had laid the long shears aside and risen from the matter that engrossed her almost to the exclusion of every other thought, to peer intently out of the window across the valley at the bleak old farmhouse on the crest of the opposite ridge; and each time as she settled herself once more in the chair, hunched boyishly over the table edge, she only nodded her bright head in utter, undisturbed unconsciousness of the passage of time. "He's late getting home tonight," she told herself aloud, after she had searched the outer darkness in vain for any answering signal, but there was not even the faintest trace of troubled worry in her words. She merely smiled with mock severity. "He's later than he ought to be--even if it is his last week back in the hills. Next week I'll have to make him wait----" Her vaguely murmured threat drifted away into nothingness, left unfinished as she rose and stood, hands lightly bracketed upon her hips, scrutinizing the completed work. "There," she went on softly, sighing in deep relief, "there--that's done--if--if it will only fit." She removed the cluster of pins from her mouth and unfastened the long strip of newspaper from the section of the old black skirt which she had ripped apart that afternoon for a pattern. It was far too short--that old skirt--to duplicate the long free lines of the brilliant red and black costume of the dancer beside her elbow on the table, but Dryad Anderson's shears, coasting rapidly around the edge of the worn cloth, had left a wide margin of safety at the hem.