Now and again the gourd in her hand was nudged by the soft nozzle of a sheep, and she would once more bethink herself to cast a handful of salt down upon the rock as the flock pressed about her. There was no other stir in all the broad spaces she overlooked save the vibrations of the wind in the bare boughs that clashed together with a dull rattling sound, and the rustling shiver through the tawny tufts of broomsedge. She gave a great start when her eyes were abruptly concentrated upon an object in the midst of its tall growth half-way down the hill, beginning slowly to move, to rise. It seemed to her suddenly recalled attention, still dazed by the transition from the world of thought to the more exigent material sphere, as if it were some gigantic mushroom toiling up the ascent, having just come in sight above a projecting knoll of earth. Beneath the broad bent hat she presently discerned a chubby dark-eyed face, and the rest of the person of a fat young fellow-creature of the age of four, perhaps, arrayed in a short, stout homespun skirt and a straight waist tightly encircling a singularly round body, was revealed to view. So unexpected was this apparition, despite its simplicity, that as she gazed she was not aware that a man had ascended the hill farther to the right, and stood leaning on a long rifle silently contemplating her. Not until he spoke did she turn. “Ain’t ye goin’ ter gin me nare word, Marcelly?” said Teck Jepson. She flushed deeply. Surprised and taken thus at a disadvantage, she forgot for a moment her anger toward him. “I never seen ye—howdy,” she said meekly. Her flush was instantly reflected on his face as the red glow of a sunset irradiates the alien eastern sky. There was a new light in his eyes. She detected in his voice something of the impetus of the false hope that lured him, although he only said casually, as if seeking to formally acquit her of any discourtesy,— “I seen ye war noticin’ Bob, thar,—he air a mighty s’prisin’ sight down in the Cove, I know.” Even so slight a pleasantry seemed odd from him, so exacting a gravity he bore in his daily walk and conversation. She subtly understood it as the outgushing happiness of the mistake under which he had fallen; so trifling a hope, so slight a relenting counted for much in the depths of despair into which he had sunk. She would have been glad to undeceive him, but she was still agitated and confused by the sudden severance of her troubled and absorbed train of thought, and the abrupt surprise of his presence here. She merely said, “Air that leetle Bob Bowles, yer nevy?” He nodded, his face relaxing into its infrequent smile as he looked down at the plodding plumpness approaching through the broomsedge. “He air visitin’ ye, then, I reckon.” “Not edzac’ly; he hev runned away from home.”