Tubal Sims’s blood ran cold. A man sitting daily at his table under the espionage of all the Cove as a murderer! A man sleeping in his best feather-bed--and the way he floundered in its unaccustomed depths nothing but a porpoise could emulate--till the sheriff of the county should come to hale him out to the ignominious quarters of the common jail! Jane Ann Sims--how his heart sank as he thought that had he first taken counsel of her he would not now be in a position to receive his orders from Peter Knowles!--to be in daily friendly association with this strange guest, to be sitting at home now calmly stitching cuffs for a man who might be wearing handcuffs before daylight! Euphemia--when he thought of Euphemia he rose precipitately from the rock on which he was seated. In twenty-four hours Euphemia should be in Buncombe County, North Carolina, where his sister lived. The juggler should never see her; for who knew what lengths Jane Ann Sims’s vicarious love of admiration would carry her? If the man were but on his knees, what cared she what the Cove thought of him? And Euphemia should never see the juggler! Tubal Sims hurried down the darkening way, hearing without heeding the voices of his late comrades, all dispersing homeward by devious paths,--now loud in the still twilight, now veiled and indistinct in the distance. The chirring of the myriad nocturnal insects was rising from every bush, louder, more confident, refreshed by the recent rain, and the frogs chanted by the riverside. He had reached the lower levels at last. He glanced up and saw the first timid palpitant star spring forth with a glitter into the midst of the neutral-tinted ether, and then, as if affrighted at the vast voids of the untenanted skies, disappear so elusively that the eye might not mark the spot where that white crystalline flake had trembled. It was early yet. He strode up to his own house, whence the yellow light glowed from the window. He stopped suddenly, his heart sinking like lead. There on the step of the passage sat Euphemia, her elbow on her knee, her chin in her hand, her eyes pensively fixed on the uncertain kindling of that pioneer star once more blazing out the road in the evening sky. III. Euphemia could hardly have said what it was that had brought her home,--some vague yet potent impulse, some occult, unimagined power of divination, some subjection to her mother’s will constraining her, or simply the intuition that there was some opportunity for mischief unimproved. Tubal Cain Sims shook his head dubiously as he canvassed each theory. He ventured to ask the views of Mrs. Sims, after he had partaken of the supper set aside for him--for the meal was concluded before his return--and had lighted his pipe. “What brung her home? Them stout leetle brogans,--that’s what,” said Mrs. Sims, chuckling between the whiffs of her own pipe.