“It’s probably nothing at all--a false alarm,” he continued; but seeing that she persisted--and she could be very persistent when she wanted to--he added: “Oh, very well; I’ll go up to the corner of the road, and if it is anything worth seeing, I’ll come back for you.” Left alone, Nellie sat down on the steps of the front piazza and waited. Now that Emmons had gone so meekly, her conscience began to reproach her for her treatment of him throughout the evening. No wonder he disapproved of Bob. He was quite right to do so; she disapproved of him, herself. Yet, the result of a day’s effort to be, as he had asked, a little more civil had rendered him more civil in return. Even if one did disapprove of a man’s morals, one could not help noticing the extraordinary quickness with which he caught one’s ideas and anticipated one’s wishes. He never shut his eyes and repeated the same thing in exactly the same tone of voice--a trick of Emmons’s which for the first time she noticed annoyed her excessively. It was in the small things that Bob was so considerate of her feelings; and yet there was something ludicrous in talking about a man’s consideration for her feelings when he had stolen her patrimony before she had put up her hair. At this point she began to appreciate that Emmons had had more than time not only to run, but to walk, to the corner of the road and back. She went down to the gate, and looked up the road. There was no sign of him. He had been right then. It was only a false alarm. And then to contradict this hypothesis she saw the heavens suddenly lit up with the unmistakable glare of a conflagration. Emmons had played her false. Nellie did not hesitate an instant. She started out by herself. Guided first by the glare in the sky and soon by the sound of shouting, she cut across fields. Before long she came in sight of the fire. It was in the barn of a neighboring farmer. She could see the people crowding about it, and the thick rolling smoke that turned the full moon to a dull reddish brown.