“Hates you! For what?” I asked, and after some hesitancy she replied, “I don’t mind telling you that Sam is carrying me now more than the other boys.” I did not quite know what carrying her meant, but ventured to guess in my mind, and she went on—“and he comes here pretty often, and his father don’t like it and is crosser than a bear when Sam takes me out with Black Beauty, and once, when he found us in the McPherson pines sitting on a log he threatened to horsewhip Sam if he found him there again philandering with me. Sam squared up to him and said, ‘Come on and try it, if you dare.’ He didn’t dare; I should think not! He whip Sam! I’d laugh!” She did laugh a little bitterly, and, reminded, by her mention of the McPherson pines of Nannie’s Well, I asked her about it and heard much the same story Sam had told me, with a few more details concerning the superstition attaching to the well, and the number of young people who had tried the trick at noonday—some with success, they pretended, and more with none. “I don’t believe in it, of course,” Lottie said, “but sometime I mean to try it just for fun. If those two girls come maybe they’ll try it, too. I don’t s’pose you’d care to, you are too——” She stopped abruptly, not wishing to say “You are too old,” but I understood her and answered, “Yes, too old to be looking into a well at noon to find my future husband.” Then I questioned her about the girls who might be my neighbors. “They are cousins,” she said, “and their name is Burdick; one of them, we suppose, is the girl old Sandy McPherson wanted Mr. Reginald Travers to marry. It is the same name and she lives in New York with her aunt Mrs. Graham, and has just got home from Europe, and when mother asked Mr. McPherson if it wasn’t the one, he said he wouldn’t wonder, and laughed. I can’t imagine why she is coming here unless she wants to see what kind of man Mr. Travers is. I should suppose she’d let him go after her, wouldn’t you?”