She would not give herself, of course. The beast's vanity was strong enough to be content with marking, as he believed, the signs of her gradual conversion. She would fence with him and provoke him with a seeming disintegration of purpose. She would dissemble her abhorrence and aversion, refashioning them first into indulgent toleration, then into the grudging admission that she had misjudged him. She would measure her wit against his wit--but she would make Kentucky seem to him too alluring a place to abandon for Virginia! When she rose at dawn her hands clenched themselves at her sides. Her bosom heaved and her face was set to a stern dedication of purpose. "I'll lead him on an' keep him hyar," she whispered in a voice that she would hardly have recognized as her own had she been thinking at all of the sound of voices. "But afore God in Heaven, I'll kill him fer hit atter-ward!" So when Rowlett, who had really gone only on a neighbourhood journey, sauntered idly by the house the next afternoon near sunset, Dorothy was standing by the stile and he paused tentatively in the road. As though the conversation of yesterday had not occurred, the man said: "Howdy, Dorothy," and the girl nodded. She was not fool enough to overplay her hand, so her greeting was still disdainful, but when he tarried she did not send him away. It was, indeed, she who first referred to their previous encounter. "When I come home yistidday, Bas," she said, "I sot down an' thought of what ye said ter me an' I couldn't holp laughing." "Is thet so?" he responded. "Wa'al what seems ridic'lous to one body sometimes seems right sensible ter another." "Hit sounded mighty foolish-like ter me," she insisted, then, as if in after thought, she added, "but I'd hate mightily ter hev ye think I wasn't willin' ter give ye all ther rope ye wants ter hang yoreself with. Come on over, Bas, whenever ye've a mind ter. Ef ye kin convert me, do hit--an' welcome." There was a shade of challenge in the voice such as might have come from the lips of a Carmen, and the man's pulses quickened. Almost every day after that found Bas Rowlett at the house and the evenings found him pondering his fancied progress with a razor-edged zest of self-complacency. "She'll hold out fer a spell," he told himself with large optimism. "But ther time'll come. When an apple gits ripe enough hit draps offen ther limb." * * * * * Over at the small county seat to the east the squat brick "jail-house" sat in the shadow of the larger building. There was a public square at the front where noble shade trees stood naked now, and the hitching racks were empty. Night was falling over the sordid place, and the mountains went abruptly up as though this village itself were walled into a prison shutting it off from outer contacts.