“But why should you _be_ like this? Now, Seth, I know something _has_ happened. What is it? Am I wanted? Can I do anything?” “Let me walk with you to your house,” he said, and they turned together down the path. “Something _has_ happened. I don’t know that I can tell you what it is, but only to be with you like this rests and comforts me.” He was walking in the shadow; the strong light, which only tipped his shoulder occasionally, enveloped her. He watched her furtively as they moved along, and, just in proportion as he found relief and solace in the contemplation of her clear, frank, serene face, he shrank from confiding his own weak woes to her. But, as he said, it was a comfort to be with her. They had walked almost to within sight of the Warren farmhouse before he broke the silence. She had scarcely looked at him since they started, but kept her gray eyes straight ahead, as if viewing some fixed, distant object. Her lips were tightly pressed together--the only sign of emotion on her face--and this proof that she was hard at work thinking tended further to embarrass him. “I truly don’t know how to tell you, Annie,” he said at last. “But Albert and I have--have had words together; in fact--we’ve quarrelled.” Her lips quivered a little. She did not turn her face toward him, but said, nervously: “I have been expecting that.” Seth did not ask himself the cause of his cousin’s anticipatory confidence, but went on gloomily: “Well, it has come. We had it out, this evening, to the very last word. And then, as if that were not enough, the devil himself got hold of me afterward, and tugged and tore at me to--but I can’t tell you _that_. I can scarcely realize myself what I’ve been through this night. Why, I’ve been wandering about here on the hill-side for hours, not knowing where I was going, or even what I was thinking of, like a mad man. You can see how my hands are scratched, and my clothes torn; that is from the berry-bushes, I suppose, up by mother’s grave. I remember being there. I didn’t even know that my head was bare, until just before the wagon came up.” Before this remarkable recital of insane things, Annie was properly silent. Seth added, after a pause, “But it is all over now. And I can’t tell you, you can’t begin to guess, how it brings me to my senses, and soothes and restores me to have met you like this.” As he paused suddenly, they both turned to listen and look. From the knoll to the east, where the turnpike ran through a cutting, there came a curiously muffled sound, like yet unlike the first measured drumming of a partridge. It swelled a second later into something more definite, as they saw a dark horse, the rider crouching low over its neck, galloping like the wind along the high-road toward Thessaly. The pace was something prodigious--the horse had vanished like an apparition before they could look twice. But there had been nothing like a commensurate volume of sound.