“What you doin’ with them clo’se on?” she asked again. “I--I----” he began, stammering as her suspicion dawned on him. “You’re a deserter!” she said, coldly, leaning forward, her hands clenched, her face white, her eyes contracted. “A what!” he asked aghast, his brain not wholly taking in her words. “You’re a deserter!” she said again--“and--a coward!” All the blood in him seemed to surge to his head and leave his heart like ice. He seized her arm with a grip like steel. “Vashti Mills,” he said, with his face white, “don’t you say that to me--if yer were a man I’d kill yer right here where yer stan’!” He tossed her hand from him, and turned on his heel. The next instant she was standing alone, and when she reached the point in the path where she could see the crossing, Darby was already on the other side of the swamp, striding knee-deep through the water as if he were on dry land. She could not have made him hear if she had wished it; for on a sudden a great rushing wind swept through the pines, bending them down like grass and blowing the water in the bottom into white waves, and the thunder which had been rumbling in the distance suddenly broke with a great peal just overhead. In a few minutes the rain came; but the girl did not mind it. She stood looking across the bottom until it came in sheets, wetting her to the skin and shutting out everything a few yards away. The thunder-storm passed, but all that night the rain came down, and all the next day, and when it held up a little in the evening the bottom was a sea. The rain had not prevented Darby from going out--he was used to it; and he spent most of the day away from home. When he returned he brought his mother a few provisions, as much meal perhaps as a child might carry, and spent the rest of the evening sitting before the fire, silent and motionless, a flame burning back deep in his eyes and a cloud fixed on his brow. He was in his uniform, which he had put on again the night before as soon as he got home, and the steam rose from it as he sat. The other clothes were in a bundle on the floor where he had tossed them the evening before. He never moved except when his mother now and then spoke, and then sat down again as before. Presently he rose and said he must be going; but as he rose to his feet, a pain shot through him like a knife; everything turned black before him and he staggered and fell full length on the floor.