One day, coming up from the creek for one of his surreptitious views of the baby, he found its cradle empty, and was about to return to his work, when he heard a laugh rising from a small knoll among the aspens. It was a laugh of the most infectious, fresh sweetness, and made Moreau’s own lips part. He stole in its direction, and as he advanced it sounded again, rippling deliciously on the crystal air. He brushed through the aspens and came on Lucy and her baby. She was holding it in her lap, one hand on the back of its head. Something had touched its unknown sense of the ludicrous, and its lips were parting in a slow but intensely amused smile over its toothless gums. Each smile was answered by its mother with a run of the laughter Moreau had heard. He looked at them for a moment, and then, advancing, his foot cracked a dry branch, and Lucy turned. Her face was flushed, her eyes still full of their past merriment, her smiling lips looked a coral red against the whiteness of her small, even teeth. Her sunbonnet was off and her rich hair glowed like copper in the sun. He had never seen her look like this, and stopped, regarding her with a curious, sudden gravity. The thought was in his heart: “She’s only a girl, and--and--almost beautiful.” Lucy looked confused. “Oh, I was just laughing at the baby,” she said apologetically; “she looked so sorter cute smiling that way.” “I never heard you laugh like that before. Why don’t you do it oftener?” She seemed embarrassed and murmured: “I didn’t think you’d like to hear me.” “I think you’re sometimes afraid of me,” he said; “is that true?” She bent her face over the baby and said very low: “I’m afraid as how you might get mad at me. I don’t know much and--I’m different, and you’ve been more good to me than--” She stopped, her face hidden over the child. Moreau felt a sudden sense of embarrassed discomfort. “Oh, don’t talk that way,” he said, hastily, “or I may get mad. That’s the sort of talk that annoys me. Laugh and be happy--that’s the way I want you to be. Enjoy yourself; that’s the way to please me.” He swung himself down from the knoll into the creek bed and went back to his rocker. He found it hard to collect his thoughts. The music of Lucy’s laugh haunted him. A week, and then two, passed away. The golden days slipped by, still warm, still scented with the healing pine balsam. The nights were white with great stars, which Moreau could see between the pine boughs, for it was still warm enough to sleep on the knoll. His nights’ rests were now often disturbed. A change had come over the situation in the cabin. The peace and serenity of the first days after Fletcher’s departure had gone, leaving a sense of constraint and uneasiness in their stead. Moreau now looked up at the stars not with the calm content of the days when Lucy had first come, but with the trouble of a man who begins to realize menace in what he thought were harmless things.