he ridge, and Raven saw with interest that
it had been broken out.

"Chopping?" he asked, Jerry following his glance to the ascending road.

Jerry grinned and clucked to the horse. He looked well satisfied with
himself.

"No," he said. "But the minute you wrote you was comin', I yoked up the
oxen an' broke her out. Charlotte said you'd want to be goin' up there."

Raven laughed. It was funny, too grimly funny. Even Charlotte and Jerry
were pushing him on up the rise to Old Crow's hut. Dick had begun it and
they were adding the impulse of their kindly forethought.

"Yes," he said, "I shall. I'll go up at once." ("And have it over!" his
mind cynically added.)

They were descending the last slope and the mild-mannered horse caught
the idea of stables and put on a gait. Raven could see the house,
delightful to him in its hospitable amplitude and starkly fitting the
wintry landscape. There in the columned front porch running away at each
side into wide verandas, stood a woman, tall, of proportions that
looked, at this first glance, heroic. She wore a shawl about her
shoulders, but her head was bare.

"There she is," said Jerry, with an evident pride in so splendid a fact.
"I tell her she never can wait a minute to let anybody turn round."

It was true. Charlotte could not wait. She began to wave--no short,
staccato, pump-handle wave, but a sweep indicative of breadth, like the
horizon line. Raven, while they were jingling up to the house, took one
more look at it, recognizing, with a surprise that was almost poignant,
how much it meant to him. He might not be glad to get back to it--in his
present state of disaffection he could not believe there was a spot on
earth he should be glad to see--but it touched the chord of old memories
and his eyes were hot with the assault of it. A square house with many
additions, so that it rambled comfortably away, threaded over at
advantageous points by leafless lines of woodbine and bitter-sweet and
murmured over by a great grove of pines at the west: his roots of life
were here, he recognized, with a renewed pang of surprise. He was not
used to thinking about himself. Now that the changed bias of his mind
had bred new habits, he was thinking a great deal.

They stopped at the porch and Charlotte came down to them, stepping
lightly yet with deliberation. Raven knew she probably moved slowly
because she was so heavy, but it gave the effect of majesty walking. She
was unchanged, he