Old Josiah Cobbs chuckled knowingly, as he sat on the stump of the tree which he most affected and nursed his knee. “The _right one_ ain’t thar,--that’s the hitch! All the gals but one, an’ that one wuth all the rest, hey?” He chuckled once more, thinking he was peculiarly keen-witted to spy out the secret of the juggler’s indifference to prayer and praise. He perceived naught of the subtler significance of the disclosure, and easily quitting the subject he turned his head as if to listen. The sound of the hymning rose suddenly on the breeze. From far away it was, if one must mete out the distance by the windings of the red clay road and the miles of fragrant springtide woods that intervened. But the music came straight through the air like the winged thing it is. And now it soared in solemn jubilance, and now it sank with soft fluctuations, and presently he recognized the tune and fell to humming it in unison with that far-away worship and with that air of soft pleasure in the religious cadences which one may often see in the aged, and which suggests the idea that in growing old hymns become as folk-song on the lips of the returning exile, and in every inflection is the rapture of going home. The others neither heard nor heeded. They reminded Lucien Royce, as they were grouped around him,--some standing, some sitting or reclining on the mossy rocks in the flickering shade, but every eye fixed speculatively on him,--of that fable in many tongues wherein the beasts of the field find a sleeping man and hold a congress to determine the genus of the animal, his capacities and utilities. He looked as inadvertent as he could, and but for the jeopardy of all he held dear he might have discovered in the situation food for mirth. Jack Ormsby, who had not spoken heretofore, sat with a great clasp-knife in his hand whittling into thin slivers a bit of the bird’s-eye maple that lay prone on the ground as if it had no better uses in manufacture than to furnish fuel to burn lime. He suddenly said, regardless of the possible inference and with a certain surly emphasis, “I hev hearn tell ez Euphemia Sims air a-goin’ ter marry Owen Haines.” “I don’t believe it!” cried the juggler. Swift significant glances were exchanged among the others as he pulled himself into a sitting posture and looked with challenging controversy at Ormsby. The young mountaineer seemed surprised at this direct demonstration. “They hev been keepin’ comp’ny cornsider’ble, ennyhow,” he persisted. “Let bygones be bygones,” the juggler said, with his wonted easy flippancy. Old Cobbs rejoiced in the idea of love-making in the abstract. He had not realized who was the girl whose absence apparently rendered the crowded church but a barren desert. He only apprehended that one of the disputants advanced the possibility of a future marriage which the other denied. He sided at once with conjugal bliss. “I reckon it must be true,” he urged. “Thar ain’t nuthin’ ter be said agin it.”