In the extension of his commercial activity Martin Eckles kept his room at the Greenstream hotel and employed a horse and buggy for his excursions throughout the county. It had become his habit to sit through the evenings with the Stammarks where his flood of conversation never lessened. Lucy scarcely added a phrase to the sum of talk. She rocked in her chair with a slight endless motion, her dreaming gaze fixed on the dim valley. Wilmer Deakon, on the occasion of his first encounter with Eckles at the Stammarks', acknowledged the other's phrase and stood waiting for Lucy to proceed with him to the parlor. But Lucy was apparently unaware of this; she sat calm and remote in her crisp white skirts, while Wilmer fidgeted at the door. Soon, however, she said: “For goodness' sake, Wilmer, whatever's the matter with you? Can't you find a chair that suits you? You make a person nervous.” At the same time she rose ungraciously and followed him into the house. Wilmer came out, Calvin thought, in an astonishingly short time. Courting was nothing like it had been in his day. The young man muttered an unintelligible sentence that, from its connection, might be interpreted as a good night, and strode back to the barn and his horse. Martin Eckles smiled: “The love birds must have been a little ruffled.” And Calvin, with a strong impression of having heard such a thing before, was vaguely uneasy. Eckles sat for a long space; Lucy didn't appear, and at last the visitor rose reluctantly. But Lucy had not gone to bed; she came out on the porch and dropped with a flounce into a chair beside Calvin. “Wilmer's pestering me to get married right away,” she told him; “before ever the house is built. He seems to think I ought to be just crazy to take him and go to that lonely Sugarloaf place.” “It's what you promised for,” Calvin reminded her; “nothing's turned up you didn't know about.” “If I did!” she exclaimed irritably. “What else is a girl to do, I'd like to ask? It's just going from one stove to another, here. Only it'll be worse in my case--you and Aunt Ettie have been lovely to me. I hate to cook!” she cried. “And it makes me sick to put my hands in greasy dishwater! I suppose that's wicked but I can't help it. When I told Wilmer that to-night he acted like I'd denied communion. I can't help it if the whippoorwills make me shiver, can I? Or if I want to see a person go by once in a while. I--I don't want to be bad--or to hurt you or Wilmer. Oh, I'll settle down, there's nothing else to do; I'll marry him and get old before my time, like the others.” Calvin Stammark leaned forward, his hands on his knees, and stared at her in shocked amazement--Hannah in every accent and feeling. The old sense of danger and helplessness flooded him. He thought of Phebe with her dyed hair and cigarette-stained lips, her stories of the stage and life; he thought of Hannah dying alone and dog poor. Now Lucy----