Both felt the back of Zeb and were silent for a little. "She blubbers!" Socky exclaimed, with a slight touch of contempt in the way he said it. "Maybe she got her feet wet and Uncle Silas Spanked her." "Big folks don't get spanked," the boy assured Sue. "Do you like her?" He answered quickly, as if the topic were a bore to him, "Purty well." Sue had hoped for greater frankness. Her own opinion of her Aunt Cynthia, while favorable, was unsettled. She thought of a thing in connection with her aunt which had given her some concern. She had been full of wonder as to its hidden potentialities. In a moment Sue broached the subject by saying, "She's got a big mold on her neck." "With a long hair on it," Socky added. "Bet you wouldn't dast pull that hair." Sue squirmed a little. That single hair had, somehow, reminded her of the string on a jumping-jack. She reflected a moment, "I put my finger on it," said she, boastfully. "That's nothing," Socky answered. "Uncle Silas let me feel the shot what he got in his arm. Gee, it was kind o' funny." He squirmed a little and thoughtfully felt his foot. Sue recognized the superior attraction of the buried shot and held her peace a moment. Both had begun to yawn. "Wisht it was t'-morrow," said Sue. "Why?" "'Cause I'm going to see the beautiful lady." "An' the crow, too," Socky whispered. They were, indeed, to see her sooner than they knew--in dreamland. Zeb now retired discreetly to the foot of the bed. After a little silence Sue put her arms about her brother's neck and pressed him close. "Wisht I was in heaven," she said, drowsily, with a little cry of complaint. "Why?" "So I could see my mother." "She's way up a Trillion miles beyond where the hawks fly," said the boy, as he gaped wearily. Thereafter the room was silent, save for the muffled barking of Zeb in his slumber. He, too, was dreaming, no doubt, of things far away. XIV THEY were a timely arrival--those new friends who had found Edith Dunmore. She was no longer satisfied with the narrow world in which her father had imprisoned her, and had begun to wander alone as if in quest of a better one. That hour of revelation on the shore of Birch Cove led quickly to others quite as wonderful. She had no sooner reached home than she told her grandmother of the young man and the children who had come with him to the shore of Catamount and of a strange happiness in her heart. It was then that a sense of duty in the old Scotchwoman broke away from promises to her son which had long suppressed it. As they sat alone, together, the old lady talked to her granddaughter of the mysteries of life and love and death. Much in this talk the girl had gathered for herself, by inference, out of books--mostly fairy tales that her father had brought to her--and out of the evasions which had greeted her questioning and out of her own heart.