encouraged by finding
that she would talk back at him.

"James-Ed A'ki'son," she declared, with emphasis, "if ye think I'm
a-goin' to be beholden to _you_ fer a lift home, ye're mistaken, that's
all."

After this there was silence for some time, broken only by the rattling
and bumping of the cart, and once by the whir of a woodcock that
volleyed across the road. Young Atkinson chewed the cud of gloomy
bewilderment. At length he roused himself to another effort.

"Liz," said he, plaintively, "y' ain't been like ye used to, sence ye
come back from the States."

"Ain't I?" she remarked, indifferently.

"No, Liz, ye ain't," he repeated, with a sort of pathetic emphasis, as
if eager to persuade himself that she had condescended to rebut his
accusation. "Y' ain't been like ye used to at all. Appears like as if ye
thought us folks in the Settlement wasn't good enough fer ye now."

At this the girl tossed her head crossly.

"It appears like as if ye wanted to be back in the States ag'in," he
continued, in a voice of anxious interrogation.

"My lands," exclaimed the girl, "but ye're green!"

To the young man this seemed such an irrelevant remark that he was
silent for some time, striving to fathom its significance. As his head
sank lower and lower, and he seemed to lose himself completely in
joyless revery, the girl shot occasional glances at him out of the
corners of her eyes. She had spent the preceding winter in a factory in
a crude but stirring little New England town, and had come back to Nova
Scotia ill content with the monotony of life in the backwoods seclusion
of Wyer's Settlement. Before she went away she had been, to use the
vernacular of the Settlement, "keepin' company with Jim-Ed A'ki'son;"
and now, to her, the young man seemed to unite and concentrate in his
person all that she had been wont to persuade herself she had outgrown.
To be sure, she not seldom caught herself dropping back comfortably into
the old conditions. But these symptoms stirred in her heart an uneasy
resentment, akin to that which she felt whenever--as would happen at
times--she could not help recognizing that Jim-Ed and his affairs were
not without a passing interest in her eyes.

Now she began to grow particularly angry at him because, as she thought,
"he hadn't nothing to say fer himself." Sadly to his disadvantage, she
compared his simplicity and honest diffidence with the bold
self-assertion and easy familiarity of the young fe