"Oh, go on," Laura urged. "I heard your father telling us once that your cousin, on the Darby side, would ride out with you bravely enough, but that you traded horses when you got off the place and you always came back home on the one they were afraid for you to take out and your cousin was afraid to ride back." "She _climbed_ while Cousin Gene _crawled_. I believe she said something there, but she doesn't know it yet; and it's not my business to tell her till she asks me." York shut his lips grimly at the unspoken words. "We'll be back, appetite and sundries, for the best meal the scullery-maid can loot from the village," he said, as they rose from the table. When Jerry came out of the side door, where York was waiting for her, she suggested at once a model for a cover illustration of an outing magazine, an artistic advertisement for well-tailored results, and a type of young American beauty. As they rode back toward the barns and cattle-sheds that belonged to the ranch edging the corporation limits of New Eden, neither one noticed the tall, angular form of Mrs. Stellar Bahrr as she came striding across lots toward the driveway. Stellar lived in a side street. Her back yard bordered a vacant lot on the next side street above her. Crossing this, she could slip over the lawn of a vacant house and down the alley half a block, and on by the United Brethren minister's parsonage. That let her sidle between a little carpenter-shop and a shoe-shop to the rear gateway into an alley that led out to the open ground at the foot of the Macpherson knoll. Stellar preferred this corkscrew route to the "Castle." It gave her several back and side views, with "listening-posts" at certain points. "Oh, good morning, Laury! I'm so glad to find you alone. I'm in a little trouble, an' mebby you can help me out. You are everybody's friend, just like your brother, exactly. Only his bein' that way's bound to get him into trouble sooner or before that. Eh! What's that you're lookin' at?" Laura had gone to the buffet after the riders had started away. She had a singular feeling about that cup appearing so suddenly. She remembered now that Jerry had asked twice about those cups, and had looked at them with such a peculiar expression on each occasion. Laura had not remarked upon it to herself the first time, but the trifling incident at the table just now stayed in her mind. Yet why? The housekeeper often rearranged the dining-room features in her endeavor to keep things free from dust. That would not satisfy the query. That cup and Jerry Swaim were dodging about most singularly in Laura's consciousness, and she could not know that the reason for it lay in the projecting power of the mind of the woman coming across lots at that moment to call on her.