turn next, I wouldn't wonder."

She laughed a little uncertainly. "Why do you keep on saying that?"

He echoed her laugh. "I guess I do it to get used to the idea."

He drew up to the table again and she sewed on in silence, with dropped
lashes, while he sat in fascinated contemplation of the way in which her
hands went up and down above the strip of stuff, just as he had seen
a pair of birds make short perpendicular flights over a nest they were
building. At length, without turning her head or lifting her lids, she
said in a low tone: "It's not because you think Zeena's got anything
against me, is it?"

His former dread started up full-armed at the suggestion. "Why, what do
you mean?" he stammered.

She raised distressed eyes to his, her work dropping on the table
between them. "I don't know. I thought last night she seemed to have."

"I'd like to know what," he growled.

"Nobody can tell with Zeena." It was the first time they had ever spoken
so openly of her attitude toward Mattie, and the repetition of the name
seemed to carry it to the farther corners of the room and send it back
to them in long repercussions of sound. Mattie waited, as if to give the
echo time to drop, and then went on: "She hasn't said anything to you?"

He shook his head. "No, not a word."

She tossed the hair back from her forehead with a laugh. "I guess I'm
just nervous, then. I'm not going to think about it any more."

"Oh, no--don't let's think about it, Matt!"

The sudden heat of his tone made her colour mount again, not with
a rush, but gradually, delicately, like the reflection of a thought
stealing slowly across her heart. She sat silent, her hands clasped on
her work, and it seemed to him that a warm current flowed toward
him along the strip of stuff that still lay unrolled between them.
Cautiously he slid his hand palm-downward along the table till his
finger-tips touched the end of the stuff. A faint vibration of her
lashes seemed to show that she was aware of his gesture, and that it had
sent a counter-current back to her; and she let her hands lie motionless
on the other end of the strip.

As they sat thus he heard a sound behind him and turned his head. The
cat had jumped from Zeena's chair to dart at a mouse in the wainscot,
and as a result of the sudden movement the empty chair had set up a
spectral rocking.

"She'll be rocking in it herself this time to-morrow," Ethan thought.
"I've been in a dream, and this is th