But Octavia Gentry's pleadings were hushed in her throat--the preacher's tall old gray mule and dilapidated wagon was seen stopping at the gate. He had not been expected, and his arrival brought a sense of apprehension--almost of dismay. Every one dreaded lest the dour old man comment openly and bitterly upon the pitiful state of Callista's affairs. Not often had he been known to spare the "I told you so." Drumright had brought his wife and brood of younger children, and from [225] the moment of their advent the house was vocal with them from end to end. Elvira Drumright inevitably reminded one of a small clucking hen with a train of piping chickens after her. The deep male note was missing in the whiffle of sound that fretted Callista's ear; after unhitching the preacher's mule and turning him in the lot, the men had loitered--no doubt because of a lingering dread of the women's activities in the house--to lean against trees and the fences, talking of neighborhood matters. Some of the elders sauntered over to inspect a wrongly dished wheel on a new wagon, and talked for twenty minutes of this phenomenon alone. They were joined here by Flenton Hands, who came riding down the road, and went so wistfully slow as he passed the place that Kimbro could not forbear to hail him and bid him light and come in. It was a typical summer Sunday at Kimbro Cleaverage's, and did its part at explaining the always cruelly straitened means of the household. Boys were pitching horseshoes in the open space beyond the barn, uncertain whether or not to quit on account of the preacher. The hot, white dust lay in the road; the hot, clear air brooded above the tree-tops. Inside the house, the women in the kitchen compared quilt patterns and talked chickens, combining much gossip with the dinner getting. Finally it became unbearable to Callista to feel that her affairs were being more or less covertly [226] inspected from all the different angles and points of view possible to the visitors. Passing through the kitchen, she possessed herself of the water bucket and slipped off down to the far spring. People did not often bring water from this place. Its clear, cool trickle had a medicinal tang, and there was red iron-rust around the edges of its basin. She sat down in the spring hollow on the cool moss with big ferns coming up about her. Remembrance was strong within her of that black, raw morning in April when she had lingered desperately here, and she looked long at the Judas tree beneath which she had stood. The alders raised a tent over the basin, a tenderly shadowed dome, through the midst of which the little-used spring-path made a bright green vista like a pleached alley. And down this way she was presently aware of Sylvane walking, his head thrown back, his clear whistle coming to her before she got the sound of his feet. She shivered a little. The tune he whistled had in it reminiscences of Lance's "How many years, how many miles?"