those other hens, less conventional, who ran away to
lay in secret places in the weeds, to accumulate a store against
the time when the setting instinct should possess them.

She thought of those cannier, less docile hens and laughed. She
opened a gate into the barnyard, intending to go to the barn for
a look at the horses, taking in the duck pond and perhaps the
pigs on the way. Her Uncle George's voice arrested her.

"Susan," he cried. "Come here."

She turned and looked wistfully at him. The same harsh,
unforgiving countenance--mean with anger and petty thoughts. As
she moved hesitatingly toward him he said, "You are not to go
out of the yard." And he reentered the house. What a mysterious
cruel world! Could it be the same world she had lived in so
happily all the years until a few days ago--the same she had always
found "God's beautiful world," full of gentleness and kindness?

And why had it changed? What was this sin that after a long
sleep in her mother's grave had risen to poison everyone against
her? And why had it risen? It was all beyond her.

She strolled wretchedly within bounds, with a foreboding of
impending evil. She watched Lew in the garden; she got her aunt
to let her help with the churning--drive the dasher monotonously
up and down until the butter came; then she helped work the
butter, helped gather the vegetables for dinner, did everything
and anything to keep herself from thinking. Toward eleven
o'clock her Uncle Zeke appeared in the dining-room, called his
wife from the kitchen. Susan felt that at last something was to
happen. After a long time her aunt returned; there were all the
evidences of weeping in her face.

"You'd better go to your room and straighten it up," she said
without looking at the girl. "The thing has aired long enough,
I reckon. . . . And you'd better stay up there till I call you."

Susan had finished the room, was about to unpack the heavy-laden
shawl strap and shake the wrinkles out of the skirts, folded
away for two days now. She heard the sound of a horse's hoofs,
went to the window. A young man whom she recognized as one of
her Uncle Zeke's tenants was hitching to the horse block a
well-set-up young mare drawing a species of broad-seated
breaking sulky. He had a handsome common face, a wavy black
mustache. She remembered that his name was Ferguson--Jeb
Ferguson, and that he was working on shares what was known as
"the creek-bottom farm," whi