She was silent during the serving of supper, carrying her head high, with her cheeks flushed and her eyes alight. Royce’s glance forbore to follow her. He ate little, and with a downcast, thoughtful mien he found his pipe after supper and took it out upon the rocky slope that led to the river. The moon was up; long, glamourous slants of light lay athwart the Cove; the shadows of the pines were dense along the slope, but through their fringed branches the light filtered like a shower of molten silver. The river was here touched with a crystalline glitter, and here a lustrous darkness told of its shaded depths. Looking across the levels of the Cove, one had a sense of the dew in the glister and sparkle of the humid leaves. Above all rose the encompassing mountains, imposing, dark, and stern. The little log cabin with the swaying hopvines and the window flaringly alight, and the glittering reflection so far in the swift current below, had its idyllic suggestions in the moonlight, but he was not alive to the interests of the picturesque in humble environment, and had no fibre that responded to the enthusiasm of the _genre_ painter. He looked toward the house not to mark how the silver-gray hue of its weathered logs was heightened by the smooth effect of the moonbeams. He did not even feign to care that one of the clay-and-stick chimneys leaning from the wall was so awry against the sky as to give a positive value of individuality in composing; what it did in regard to the proper emission of smoke was of no consequence, since it so served the airy designs of the possible painter. He approved of the cant of the roof no more than if he had been an architectural precisian. He looked with all his eyes for what he presently saw,--a shadowy figure stole out and sat down on the step of the passage and gazed disconsolately, as he fancied, up at the moon. “Euphemia, come down here,” he called in a low voice. She started, stared out into the mingled shadow and sheen with dilated eyes; then, as he advanced she rose and went down toward him. As they stood there together, the girl looked out from the shadow of the tree above them at the blended dew and glimmer, and he looked imperiously down at her. “See here, Phemie, why is that man coming to see you to-morrow?” “I dunno,” she responded vaguely. “Ah, but you guess;” he caught both her hands. “Tell me why you think he is coming.” She lifted her eyes to his, which had a constraining quality for her. “He be kemin’ ter see me--’bout--’bout Owen Haines--him--him ez prayed fur the power--I reckon. They be mighty close friends.” He gave a short laugh of ridicule.