"Not much to look at," said the old lady uncompromisingly. "I don't want to look at a _garden_!" clamored little Mark, outraged at the idea. "I want to be let go up to Aunt Hetty's yattic where the sword and 'pinning-wheel are." "Would all you children like that best?" asked Marise. Their old kinswoman answered for them, "You'd better believe they would. You always did yourself. Run along, now, children, and don't fall on the attic stairs and hurt yourselves on the wool-hetchels." The fox-terrier, who had hung in an anguish of uncertainty and hope and fear on the incomprehensible words passing between little Mark and the grown-ups, perceiving now that the children ran clattering towards the stairs, took a few agitated steps after them, and ran back to Marise, shivering, begging with his eyes, in a wriggling terror lest he be forbidden to follow them into the fun. Marise motioned him along up the stairs, saying with a laughing, indulgent, amused accent, "Yes, yes, poor Medor, you can go along with the children if you want to." The steel sinews of the dog's legs stretched taut on the instant, in a great bound of relief. He whirled with a ludicrous and undignified haste, slipping, his toe-nails clicking on the bare floor, tore across the room and dashed up the stairs, drunk with joy. "If strong emotions are what one wants out of life," commented Marise lightly, to Marsh, "one ought to be born a nervous little dog, given over to the whimsical tyranny of humans." "There are other ways of coming by strong emotions," answered Marsh, not lightly at all. "What in the world are wool-hetchels?" asked Mr. Welles as the grown-ups went along the hall towards the side-door. "Why, when I was a girl, and we spun our own wool yarn . . ." began Cousin Hetty, trotting beside him and turning her old face up to his. Marsh stopped short in the hall-way with a challenging abruptness that brought Marise to a standstill also. The older people went on down the long dusky hail to the door and out into the garden, not noticing that the other two had stopped. The door swung shut behind them. * * * * * Marise felt the man's dark eyes on her, searching, determined. They were far from those first days, she thought, when he had tacitly agreed not to look at her like that, very far from those first days of delicacy and lightness of touch. With a determination as firm as his own, she made her face and eyes opaque, and said on a resolutely gay note, "What's the matter? Can't you stand any more information about early times in Vermont? You must have been having too heavy a dose of Mr. Bayweather. But _I_ like it, you know. I find it awfully interesting to know so in detail about any past period of human life; as much so . . . why not? . . . as researches into which provinces of France used half-timber houses, and how late?" "You like a great many things!" he said impatiently.