Jacob Brice still stood leaning against the rails and whittling his pine stick, in no wise angered or dismayed by his host's unceremonious departure, for social etiquette is not very rigid on Old Bear Mountain. He was a tall athletic fellow, clad in a suit of brown jeans, which displayed, besides the ornaments of patches, sundry deep grass stains about the knees. Not that piety induced Brice to spend much time in the lowly attitude of prayer, unless, indeed, Diana might be accounted the goddess of his worship. The green juice was pressed out when kneeling, hidden in some leafy, grassy nook, he heard the infrequent cry of the wild turkey, or his large, intent blue eyes caught a glimpse of the stately head of an antlered buck, moving majestically in the alternate sheen of the sunlight and shadow of the overhanging crags; or while with his deft hunter's hands he dragged himself by slow, noiseless degrees through the ferns and tufts of rank weeds to the water's edge, that he might catch a shot at the feeding wild duck. A leather belt around his waist supported his powder-horn and shot-pouch,--for his accoutrements were exactly such as might have been borne a hundred years ago by a hunter of Old Bear Mountain,--and his gun leaned against the trunk of a chestnut-oak. Although he still stood outside the fence, aimlessly lounging, there was a look on his face of a half-suppressed expectancy, which rendered the features less statuesque than was their wont--an expectancy that showed itself in the furtive lifting of his eyelids now and then, enabling him to survey the doorway without turning his head. Suddenly his face reassumed its habitual, inexpressive mask of immobility, and the furtive eyes were persistently downcast. A flare of color, and Cynthia Hollis was standing in the doorway, leaning against its frame. She was robed, like September, in brilliant yellow. The material and make were of the meanest, but there was a certain appropriateness in the color with her slumberous dark eyes and the curling tendrils of brown hair which fell upon her forehead and were clustered together at the back of her neck. No cuffs and no collar could this costume boast, but she had shown the inclination to finery characteristic of her age and sex by wearing around her throat, where the yellow hue of her dress met the creamy tint of her skin, a row of large black beads, threaded upon a shoe-string in default of an elastic, the brass ends flaunting brazenly enough among them. She held in her hand a string of red pepper, to which she was adding some newly gathered pods. A slow job Cynthia seemed to make of it. She took no more notice of the man under the tree than he accorded to her. There they stood, within twelve feet of each other, in utter silence, and, to all appearance, each entirely unconscious of the other's existence: he whittling his pine stick; she, slowly, slowly stringing the pods of red pepper.