Euphemia, coming out suddenly with a pan of peas to shell for dinner, and seeking a respite from the heat of the fire, caught sight of Royce with a radiant look of delight to which for his life he could not respond. She was pallid and limp with the work of preparing dinner, and even in the poetic entanglements of her curling shining hair she brought that most persistent aroma of the frying-pan. The coarse florid calico, the misshapen little brogans which she adjusted on the rung of her chair as she tilted it back against the wall with the pan in her lap, her drawling voice, the lapses of her ignorant speech, her utter lack of all the graces of training and culture, impressed him anew with the urgency of a fresh discovery. “What air it ez ails you-uns?” she demanded, with a certain anxiety in her eyes. “Ye hev acted sorter cur’ous all this week. Do you-uns feel sick ennywhars?” “Lord, no!” exclaimed the juggler irritably; “there’s nothing the matter with me.” She looked at him in amazement for a moment; he had had no words for her of late but honeyed praise. The change was sudden and bitter. There was an appealing protest in her frightened eyes, and the color rushed to her face. He had no affinities for the rôle of fickle-minded lover, and he was hardly likely to seek to palliate the cruelty of inconstancy. He took extreme pride in being a man of his word. The sense of honor, which was all the religion he had and chiefly active commercially, was evident too in his personal affairs. Was it her fault, he argued, his poor little love, that she was so hopelessly rustic? Had he not sought her when she was averse to him, and won her heart from a man she loved, who would never have thought himself too good for her? He would not apologize, however. He would not let her think that he had been vexed into hasty speech by the mere sight of her, the sound of her voice. “You just keep that up,” he said, conserving an expression of animosity before which she visibly quaked, “and you’ll have Mrs. Sims brewing her infernal herb teas for me in about three minutes and a quarter. I want you to stop talking about my being ill, short off.” As she gazed at him she burst into a little trill of treble laughter, that had nevertheless the suggestion of tears ready to be shed, in the extremity of her relief. “I have walked twenty miles to-day, and it’s a goodish tramp in the heat of the day,--over to New Helvetia and back; and I’m fagged out, that’s all.” Her equilibrium was restored once more, and her eyes were radiant with the joy of loving and being loved. Yet she paused suddenly, her hand--he winced that he should notice how rough and large it was, the nails blunt and short and broad--resting motionless on the edge of the pan, as she said, “I wisht ye would gin up goin’ ter that thar hotel. Ye look strange ter-day,”--her eyes searched his face as if for an interpretation of something troublous, daunting,--“so strange! so strange!”