"I won't, son, without I can't help it. You won't care so much now--mother's not bad like she was." "Yas, I will," he mourned. "I reckon I'll have to call you 'baby' again," said his mother. "You're gettin' that babyfied since Cass come back doin' all fer ye. You has a heap o' company. Thar's the cow to keer fer, 'n' ol' Pete hollerin' at ye, an' the chickens tellin' how many aigs they've laid fer ye. Run now. Thar's ol' Frizzle cacklin'. Get the aig, an' we'll send hit to the pore sick man. Thar, Cass," she added, as Hoyle ran out, half ashamed, to do her bidding--"hit's your own fault fer makin' such a baby of him. I 'low you betteh take 'long a few fresh aigs; likely they'll need 'em, so triflin' they be. I don't guess you'll find a thing in the house fer him to eat." Cassandra packed one of her oddly shaped little baskets, as her mother suggested, for the sadly demoralized and distracted family to which they were going, and tucked in with the rest the warm, newly laid egg Hoyle brought her, smiling indulgently, and kissing his upturned face as she took it from him. Toward David she was always entirely simple and natural, except when abashed by his speech, which seemed to her most elaborate and sometimes mystifying. She would pause and gaze on him an instant when he extended to her a courtesy, as if to give it its exact value. Not that she in the least distrusted him, quite the contrary, but that she was wholly unused to hearing phrased courtesies, or enthusiasms expressed in the form of words. She had seen something of it in the bishop's pretty complimentary pleasantries with his wife, but David's manner of handing her a chair, offering her a suggestion--with a "May I be allowed?" was foreign to her, and she accepted such remarks with a moment's hesitation and a certain aloofness hardly understood by him. He found himself treating her with a measure of freedom from the constraint which men often place upon themselves because of the recognition of the personal element which will obtrude between them and femininity in general. He recognized the reason for this in her absolute lack of coquetry toward him, but analyze the phenomenon, as yet, he could not.