curtain swelled faintly with an unfelt
air.

"Black," he repeated stupidly, "size eight and a half."

She stepped into the room, and faced him; her lips were parted over a
glimmer of teeth. He took her roughly in his arms, and she turned up her
face.

"For the stockings," she said, as he kissed her.

He kissed her again, and she murmured, faintly, "Two pairs."

It enraged him that she was so collected; her body, pressed against him
from knee to shoulder, was without a tremor, her breast was tranquil. She
might have been, from her unstudied, total detachment, a fine, flexible
statue in his straining embrace, under his eager lips. Suddenly, with no
apparent effort, she released herself.

She removed the hat with the blue feather, calmly laid it on the
indistinct bed, and moved to the mirror of a small bureau, where her hands
glided over her smooth hair.

"Men are so--elementary," she observed, "and all alike. I wish I could
feel what you do," she turned to Gordon, "just once."

"What are you made of?" he demanded tensely; "stone?"

"I often wonder."

She crossed the room to the gallery, where she glanced swiftly about. "You
must leave, and I'll go down to supper. Next Sunday I am going to
walk ... in the morning."

"If you go out by the priest's," he suggested, "and turn to the right, you
will find a pretty stream; further down there's an old mill."

She drew back, waiting for him to descend to the ground below.

Simmons' clerk was standing on the platform before the store, and Gordon
drew up. "How's Buckley?" he inquired.

"Bad," the other answered laconically. "They sent to Stenton for help. His
head's cracked. It's funny," he commented, "with a hundred people around
nobody saw that stone thrown 'tall."

"It don't do sometimes to see this and that," Gordon explained, tightening
the reins.

He unhitched the horse in his shedlike stable by the aid of a hand
lantern. He was reluctant to go into the house, and he prolonged the
unbuckling of the familiar straps, the measuring of feed, beyond all
necessity. Outside, he thought he heard General Jackson by the stream, and
he stood whistling softly, but only the first notes of the whippoorwills
responded. "The night's just come down all at once," he said. Finally,
with a rigid assumption of indifference covering an uneasy heart, he went
in.

Lettice was asleep by the lamp in the sitting room. She looked younger
than ever, but there were shadows under her ey