k.
It will be two or three years yet before the company will be ready for
construction."

Minor details were rehearsed, concluded. Two weeks later Gordon signed an
agreement of partnership with Valentine Simmons to purchase collectively
such timber options as were deemed desirable, and to merchandise their
interests at a uniform price to the railroad company concerned.

XIII

When Gordon returned to his dwelling he found Sim Caley and his sister's
husband taking the horse from the shafts of a dusty, two-seated carriage.
Rutherford Berry was a slightly-built man with high, narrow shoulders, and
a smooth, pasty-white face. He was clerk in a store at the farther end of
Greenstream valley, and had flat, fragile wrists and a constant,
irritating cough.

"H'y, Gord!" he shouted; "your sister wanted to visit with you over night,
and see Lettice. We only brought two--the oldest and Barnwell K."

The "oldest," Gordon recalled, was the girl who had worn Clare's silk
waist and "run the colors"; Barnwell K. Berry was, approximately, ten.

"That's right," he returned cordially. He assisted in running the carriage
back by the shed. Lettice and his sister were stiffly facing each other in
the sitting room. The latter had a fine, thin countenance with pale hair
drawn tightly back and fastened under a small hat pinned precariously
aloft; her eyes were steady, like his own. She wore a black dress
ornamented with large carmine dots, with a scant black ribband about her
waist, her sole adornment a brassy wedding ring, that almost covered an
entire joint. She spoke in a rapid, absent voice, as if her attention were
perpetually wandering down from the subject in hand to an invisible
kitchen stove, or a child temporarily unaccounted for.

"Lettice looks right good," she declared, "and, dear me, why shouldn't
she, with nothing on her mind at all but what comes to every woman? When I
had my last Rutherford was down with the influenza, the youngest was taken
with green-sickness, and we had worked out all our pay at the store in
supplies. You're fixed nice here," she added without a trace of envy in
her tired voice. "I suppose that's Mrs. Hollidew in her shroud. We have
one of James--he died at three--sitting just as natural as life in the
rocker."

"Where's Rose?" he asked.

"In the kitchen, helping Mrs. Caley. I wanted to ask that nothing be said
before Rose of Lettice's expecting. We've brought her up very delicate;
and besi