Mrs. Sanders wore a disaffected air. All her interest in the events of the evening had evaporated in the prospect of a wrangle among the young men. She was of pacific principles, although her practices were not such as always tended to preserve the peace of the neighborhood, since she arrogated the prerogative of censorship in many particulars, and earnestly resented the right of reciprocation. If angry words were to be spoken, she liked them best of her own framing, and zealously and fearlessly applied them. But she sincerely deprecated a quarrel that was not of her own making, and her second yawn as candidly denoted that she was bored as her first. “Ef ye boys air a-goin’ ter take ter quar’lin’, I be a-goin’ home,” she remarked, as if this were a threat. There was no direct reply, but the stranger looked at her with covert alarm and shame and entreaty contending in his eyes. It humiliated him to be so definitely conscious of the fact, but her presence here was a protection to him in some sort, and he leaned even upon so slight a thing as the prepossession in his favor with which he had inspired her. She did not notice, or she did not interpret, the protest in his eyes, as she and little Silas took their way through the broad open door, and into that night of moonlight and shadow. Not all of pensive mystery, not all of melancholy magic, were these ethereal elements of contrast. Some elvish spirit informed a phase with fine-spun mirth, that failed not though none was there to see; a tricksy fantasy cut the leaves into grotesque shapes; with a delicate twanging note snapped a twig to test the acoustic properties of the crystalline silence; furnished the skulking fox with a nimble and crafty double to pursue him, at which he glanced over his shoulder askance; sprang up behind Mrs. Sanders and little Silas, following them in their own likeness to see them home through the woods,—the silhouette of her long, gaunt figure, with its grotesque sun-bonnet, and Silas’s small bifurcated image, with a slouched hat and a big head. The stranger did not watch them out of sight, for he became aware the next instant that Jepson had moved. The mountaineer had left the door, and was slowly advancing upon the two as they stood at the anvil. His face was quite unmoved, placid and dispassionate in its expression, but there was something in his eye which the stranger felt it might be well to note. Jepson paused, putting one hand upon the anvil, and looking full and searchingly into the intruder’s face he said,— “What mought be yer name, stranger?” “Rathburn,—Eugene Rathburn.” Both mountaineers pondered upon this silently for a time. “Ye ’lowed ye war a doctor?” said Jepson. “Certainly I am,” replied Rathburn. “That’s how I happened to know Baintree. I attended him when he was ill in prison.” “Waal,”—Jepson tapped the pickaxe significantly,—“ain’t this a powerful cur’ous bizness fur sech?”