"Howdy, Mr. Mark," the visiting neighbor answered in response to his forcedly cordial greeting. If a man has walked a mile and a half with a picture of a woman handing him a glass of cool milk with a certain lift of black lashes from over deep, black blue eyes it is--disconcerting to have her do it in the presence of another. "I just come over to get a bucket of buttermilk for Granny Satterwhite," he found Mrs. Rucker saying as he forced his attention. "She won't touch mine if there's any of Rose Mary's handy. Looks like she thinks she's drinking some of Rose Mary's petting with every gulp." Everett had just raised the glass Rose Mary had handed him, to his lips, as Mrs. Rucker spoke, and over its edge he regarded the roses that suddenly blushed out in her cheeks, but she refused to raise her lashes the fraction of an inch and went calmly on pressing the milk from the butter she had just taken from the churn. "Granny knows that love can be sent just as well in a glass of buttermilk as in a valentine," she finally said, and as she spoke a roguish smile coaxed at the comer of her mouth. "Don't you suppose a piece of hemp twine would turn into a gold cord if you tied it around a bundle of true love?" she ventured further in a spirit of daring, still with her eyes on the butter. "Now that's something in meaning like my first husband, Mr. Satterwhite, said when we was married," assented Mrs. Rucker with hearty appreciation of the practicality in Rose Mary's sentiment. "He gave me two sows, each with a litter of pigs, for a wedding present and said they'd be a heap more to me than any kind of jimcracks he could er bought for half the money they'd bring. And they was, for, in due course of time, I sold all them hogs and bought the plush furniture in the front room, melojeon and all. Now Mr. Rucker, he give me a ring with a blue set and 'darling' printed inside it that cost fifty cents extra, and Jennie Rucker swallowed that ring before she was a year old. I guess she has got it growed up inside her, for all I know of it, and her Paw is a-setting on Mr. Satterwhite's furniture at present, speaking still. Sometimes it makes me feel sad to think of Mr. Satterwhite when Cal Rucker spells out, _Shall we meet beyond the river_ with two fingers on that melojeon. But then I even up my feelings by remembering how Cal let me name Pete for Mr. Satterwhite, which is a second-husband compliment they don't many men pass; and it pleased Granny so." "Mr. Rucker is always nice to Granny Satterwhite," said Rose Mary with the evident intention of extolling the present incumbent of the husband office to her friend. But at the mention of his name a moment earlier, young Peter, the bond between the past and present, had sidled out the door and proceeded to sit calmly down on the rippling surface of the spring branch. His rescue and retirement necessitated his mother's departure and Everett was left in command of the two-alone situation he desired.