"The preachers used to scare me to death," she declared. "If I could hear some comfortable religion I might take up with it, but it seems to me that everybody's so sad after they get it. I don't know why." Joe put down the pails again. Early as the day was, it was hot, and he was sweating. He pushed his hat back from his forehead. It was like lifting a shadow from his serious young face. She smiled. "A person generally gets the kind of religion that he hears preached," said he, "and most of it you hear is kind of heavy, like bread without rising. I've never seen a laughing preacher yet." "There must be some, though," she reflected. "I hope so," said Joe. "I'm _glad_ you're not full of that kind of religion," said she. "For a long time I thought you were." "You did? Why?" "Oh, because--" said she. Her cheek was toward him; he saw that it was red, like the first tint of a cherry. She snatched up her bucket then and sped along the path. Joe walked on a little way, stopped, turned, and looked after her. He saw the flick of her skirt as her nimble heels flew up the three steps of the kitchen porch, and he wondered why she was glad that he was not religious, and why she had gone away like that, so fast. The pigs were clamoring, shriller, louder. It was no hour for a youth who had not yet wetted his feet in manhood's stream to stand looking after a pair of heels and try to figure out a thing like that. As Joe had said, he was not religious, according to catechisms and creeds. He could not have qualified in the least exacting of the many faiths. All the religion that he had was of his own making, for his mother's was altogether too ferocious in its punishments and too dun and foggy in its rewards for him. He read the Bible, and he believed most of it. There was as much religion, said he, in the Commandments as a man needed; a man could get on with that much very well. Beyond that he did not trouble. He read the adventures of David and the lamentations of Jeremiah, and the lofty exhortations of Isaiah for the sonority of the phrasing, the poetry and beauty. For he had not been sated by many tales nor blunted by many books. If he could manage to live according to the Commandments, he sometimes told his mother, he would not feel uneasy over a better way to die. But he was not giving this matter much thought as he emptied the swill-pails to the chortling hogs. He was thinking about the red in Ollie's cheeks, like the breast of a bright bird seen through the leaves, and of her quick flight up the path. It was a new Ollie that he had discovered that morning, one unknown and unspoken to before that day. But why had her face grown red that way, he wondered? Why had she run away?