“He be a powerful obejient chile!” Marcella remarked, with a little satiric laugh. “He’s young yit,” returned Jepson, flustered and mortified. “Whenst he gits a leetle older he’ll do better. Bob, I’ll let ye tote my shot-pouch, like ye love ter do.” But Bob, with a soul above bribes, circled as before. Marcella, with an arch sidelong glance, turned from him to Jepson. “How mean ye must treat him! How ’feard o’ you-uns he do be!” she exclaimed with laughing irony. A flush rose suddenly to his brow, and she saw anew how deeply wounded he had been by the ignoble and odious accusation. Little wonder, since he felt it so, that he had declared he would never forgive her. “I furgot he hed a stepmother,” she faltered by way of excuse. “I never said nuthin’ agin his stepmother,” he rejoined sternly, darkly frowning. Bob was beginning to show signs of exhaustion. As Jepson turned toward him again Marcella gave a sudden start. She felt she had done him a grievous injustice and she repented it. With some vague apologetic intention she sought to detain him on some pretext,—on any pretext,—and she spoke upon the impulse of the moment. “Mus’ I tell the folks at home ez ye never wunst thunk ter inquire arter them?” Her eyes were dewy and bright; a faint flush was in her cheek; the tender curves of her red lips wore a half-smiling sweetness; as she lifted her head upward to look at him, the hair curling on her shoulders fell still farther down over the dangling yellow sun-bonnet. He turned a changed face. “I war ’feard ter ax, Marcelly,” he said, in his low melancholy drawl. “I know ye feel so hard ter me ’bout’n Eli—an’ I never kin forgive myself, though I never went ter do no harm. I hear ’bout Eli constant—’thout hevin’ ter harry yer feelin’s by axin’ ye arter him.” The girl felt a certain reassurance, a satisfaction that in this at least he had not changed. Since he had wrought so grievous an injury to Eli Strobe, remorse was the meet sequence. But her alert intuition presently apprehended a tone not altogether applicable to the past. “He air thrivin’ toler’ble, now,” she observed. He glanced at her with the keen suspense of an unexpected hope shining in his eyes. “Then what they say at the Settlemint ain’t true!” She felt a sudden fear clutch at her heart. Her face paled—her eyes dilated. “What air they sayin’ agin him at the Settlemint?” she asked, trembling, yet roused into instant defiance. “’Tain’t faultin’ Eli noways,” he explained anxiously. “They ’low, though, ez his ailment hev streck his brain, an’ he hev gone deranged.”