Annie Fairchild came suddenly across the line of vision, from the direction of the dead man’s house, and walked straight to the stile at the edge of the thorn row. There was something so curious in the expression of her face, as she advanced, that Samantha scented discovery, and prepared on the instant an exculpatory lie. But Annie passed the one place where discovery was probable, and the hidden girl saw now that the strange look had some other explanation. She crossed the stile, and clung to the fence post, as if for support; glanced up the road, where now the black front of the nearing procession could be discerned; then with a shudder turned her face in profile toward her unsuspected observer, and looked vacantly, piteously up into the afternoon sky. Annie’s face, with its straight, firm outlines, was not one which lent itself to the small facial play of evanescent emotions. Its regular features habitually expressed an intelligent, self-reliant composure, not easily responsive to shades of feeling. To see this calm countenance transfixed now with a helpless stare of anguish was to comprehend that something terrible had happened. She stood at the stile, desperately clinging to the rail at first, then edging into the thorns to be more out of sight, as the ambulance and the little file of friends moved slowly by. She noted nothing of the peculiarities of the procession--that most of the silent followers were strange men, in city dress--but only gazed at Seth, walking along gravely behind the vehicle, beside his brother John. She saw him with eyes distended, fixed--as of one following the unfolding of a hideous nightmare. So long as the party remained in sight, these set, affrighted eyes followed him. Then they closed, and the sufferer reeled as if in a swoon. Samantha’s first and best impulse was to get down and go to the agonized woman’s aid; her second, and controlling, thought, was to stop where she was, and see and hear all that was going. Annie seemed to recover her strength, if not her composure. She wrung her hands wildly and talked with strange incoherence aloud to herself. Once she started, as if to cross the stile again and return to the house of mourning, but drew back. At last, walking straight ahead, like one in a dream, she moved toward her home. Samantha followed at a safe distance, marvelling deeply. CHAPTER XXVIII.--BETWEEN THE BREAD-PAN AND THE CHURN. WELL, I don’ knaow ’s I go’s fur’s Sabriny, ’n’ say ther’s a cuss on th’ fam’ly, ’n’ thet M’tildy Warren put it there, fur after all, three deaths hand-runnin’ in tew years ain’t an onheerd-of thing, but I don’t blame her fur gittin’ daown-hearted over it. Poor ole creetur, she’s be’n a carryin’ the hull load o’ grief on her shoulders sence Sissly died. I shouldn’t wonder if it’d be tew much for her naow.”