The moment he recurred to the suppliant tone her sense of power returned. The implacable, imperative look was again in her face, coming with a rush of color, as if the blood-red glow were the inherent tint of pride. “Ye air about ez fur from jail ez enny man on this yearth, an’ ye air goin’ ter stay so, ef ye kin hev yer way. I don’t keer what ye meant or didn’t mean ter do. I keer fur what ye done! An’ ef ye foller yer will an’ the voice o’ the Sperit, ez ye ’lows leads ye, ye’ll be mighty clar from gittin’ punished, whether ye live in Brumsaidge or the mounting. I don’t keer whar ye live ’n what ye do now.” She had ceased to lean on the hand-rail, and her image had vanished from the water; she stood erect and slender before him, the red kerchief carelessly knotted about her throat, her bonnet hanging on her shoulders, her long, half curling, and thickly waving hair almost hiding it. “I’d be obleeged ter ye ef ye’d git out’n my road. I don’t wanter drown myself in that water, an’ it seems I’ll hev ter ef I try ter pass ye.” He said no more and slowly withdrew, busying himself about his saddle-girth. He glanced, wounded and reproachful, at Marcella as she went by, following the cows, but she gave him no word, and was presently lost in the woods. After she had reached home, she saw him going down the road to the Settlement. “Bold ez brass,” she commented, looking at him from the porch. “I wisht he’d git arrested, somehows.” She marveled as to his mission, but it excited scant attention in the Cove, where his frequent presence since his return from the mountains had become familiar. He took his way toward the store, which combined commercial and postal functions, — a little frame building without a porch, and with only one room. In some seizure of unprecedented energy, the storekeeper had undertaken to whitewash it; his industry had compassed the surface of its front, and then collapsed finally, and thus it had subsequently stood, its dark, weather-stained sides and back in sharp contrast with the white front of the building. His proceedings had been characteristically considered by the mountaineers to be in fault in the first instance, for the effort to furbish up the appearance of the store was esteemed a reprehensible aping of town ways and views. No one animadverted upon his indolence in failing to carry out his design. A mountaineer, whose name is lost to tradition, one day observed that the white-fronted building, as it sat on the slope of the hill, always looked to him like a white-faced bull; and thereafter the owner went by the name of “White-Face Hobbs.” He was upon the doorstep now,—a long, lank fellow, whose lowly posture accented the extreme length of his legs; and as he sat with his knees as high as his chin, the attitude was vaguely suggestive of a grasshopper. He had a cadaverous face, the color of parchment, and he entertained pessimistic views of the intentions, morals, and manners of all the young men in the Cove.