So once again, amateurs both in sorrow and in gladness, the Partridge Hunter and I fled fast before the Incomprehensible. Out we ran through Amy's frost-blighted rose-garden, _where no gay, shrill young voice challenged our desecration_, out through the senile old apple orchard, _where no suspicious dog came bristling forth to question our innocent intrusion_, up through the green-ribbon roadway, up through the stumbling wood-path, to the safe, sound, tangible, moss-covered pasture-bars, where the warm, brown-fur bossies, sweet-breathed and steaming, came lolling gently down through the gauzy dusk to barter their pleasant milk for a snug night's lodging and a troughful of yellow mush. A dozen mysterious wood-folk crackled close within reach, as though all the little day-animals were laying aside their starched clothes for the night; and the whole earth teemed with the exquisite, sleepy, nestling-down sound of fur and feathers and tired leaves. Out in the forest depths somewhere a belated partridge drummed out his excuses. Across on the nearest stone wall a tawny marauder went hunching his way along. It might have been a fox, it might have been Amy's thrown-away coon-cat. Short and sharp from the house behind us came the fast, furious crash of Alrik's frenzied young energies, chopping wood enough to warm a dozen houses for a dozen winters for a dozen new brides. But high above even the racket of his ax rang the sweet, wild, triumphant resonance of some French Canadian _chanson_. His heart and his lungs seemed fairly to have exploded in relief. And over the little house, and the dark woods, and the mellow pasture, and the brown-fur bossies, broke a little, wee, tiny prick-point of a star, as though some Celestial Being were peeping down whimsically to see just what the Partridge Hunter and I thought of it all. THE AMATEUR LOVER WITH every night piercing her like a new wound, and every morning stinging her like salt in that wound, Ruth Dudley's broken engagement had dragged itself out for four long, hideous months. There's so much fever in a woman's sorrow. At first, to be sure, there had been no special outward and visible sign of heartbreak except the thunderstorm shadows under the girl's blue eyes. Then, gradually, very gradually, those same plucky eyes had dulled and sickened as though every individual thought in her brain was festering. Later, an occasional loosened finger ring had clattered off into her untouched plate or her reeking strong cup of coffee. At the end of the fourth month the family doctor was quite busy attesting that she had no tubercular trouble of any sort. There never yet was any stethoscope invented that could successfully locate consumption of the affections.