It was a warm morning, and the two girls sat in the doctor's wagon. Lucy was knitting one of the everlasting stockings. In the heat she had unfastened the neck of her blouse and turned the edges in, a triangle of snowy skin visible below her sunburned throat. She looked thin, her arms showing no curve from wrist to elbow, the lines of her body delicately angular under the skimpy dress of faded lilac cotton. The sun blazing through the canvas cast a tempered yellow light over her that toned harmoniously with the brown coating of freckles and the copper burnish of her hair. Her hands, vibrating over her work with little hovering movements like birds about to light, now and then flashing out a needle which she stabbed into her coiffure, were large-boned and dexterous, the strong, unresting hands of the frontierswoman. Susan was lazy, leaning back on the up-piled sacks, watching the quick, competent movements and the darts of light that leaped along the needles. Before they had entered the wagon she had decided to speak to Lucy of what she had overseen. In the first place she felt guilty and wanted to confess. Besides that the need to give advice was strong upon her, and the natural desire to interfere in a matter of the heart was another impelling impulse. So she had determined to speak for conscience, for friendship, for duty, and it is not beyond the bounds of possibility, for curiosity. But it was a hard subject to approach, and she was uncomfortable. Diplomacy had not been one of the gifts the fairies gave her when they gathered at her cradle. Looking at the quivering needles she tried to think of a good beginning, and like most direct and candid people concluded there was no better one than that of the initial fact, before the complicating intrusion of inference: "I woke up in the middle of the night last night." Lucy knit unmoved. "The moonlight was as bright as day. Out beyond the shadow where my tent was I could see the weeds and little bunches of grass." "How could you see them when you were in your tent?" This without stopping her work or raising her head. Susan, feeling more uncomfortable than ever, answered, her voice instinctively dropping, "I got up and looked out of my tent." She kept her eyes on the busy hands and saw that the speed of their movements slackened. "Got up and looked out? What did you do that for?" The time for revelation had come. Susan was a little breathless. "I heard people whispering," she said. The hands came to a stop. But the knitter continued to hold them in the same position, a suspended, waiting expectancy in their attitude. "Whispering?" she said. "Who was it?" "Oh, Lucy, you know." There was a pause. Then Lucy dropped her knitting and, raising her head, looked at the anxious face opposite. Her eyes were quiet and steady, but their look was changed from its usual frankness by a new defiance, hard and wary. "No, I don't know. How should I?"