e and sauntered
slowly on up the hill under the tall old elm trees that the Town had
planted a century ago to keep the heat from the heads of the like of me
while the toilers down in the Settlement had no such proof of ancestral
care.

"They are producing in the sweat of their brows while I--saunter," I
said to myself, as I stretched out my bare arm from which the white silk
sleeve had been rolled away after the prevailing mode of the sport for
which it was designed, and flexed and regarded the bunch of muscles that
knotted themselves on my smooth, tanned forearm.

"It _could_ swing a wash tub as well as the best racquet this side of
the Meadowbrook Club," I added aloud with a queer kind of primitive
shame mixed with my physical pride in myself.

"Or juggle a heavy baby and a kitchen stove into a square meal?" added a
laughing voice as the Jaguar padded up beside my shoulder on his tennis
shoes before I had heard him at all, so deep was my absorption in my own
judgment and absolution of myself.

"Still I was put out just a few minutes ago by a woman half my size," I
laughed in return as the long strides shortened into harmony with mine.

"I heard about it and ran after you to ask you to come back or, if you
refused, to let me go with you wherever you are going. I left Mother
Spurlock in charge of the newly installed Epworth Leaguers. Charlotte
disapproved of my coming and said so," and we both laughed in delight
over my strenuous name-daughter.

"Are you asking me _quo vadis?_" I demanded, with a look at him out of a
corner of my eye that got in return a glint of the jewels under dull
gold that always infuriated as well as interested me.

"'Whither thou goest, I will go, and where thou lodgest I will lodge--'"
the parson suddenly chanted under his breath, using the old Gregorian
measure for the few words of the oldest song of impersonal love extant.
"Thank you for bringing Martha's boy up to the Little House. Jacob has
refused both Mother Spurlock and me to let him come."

"I didn't bring him. He and the pup brought me and then he was stolen
from me into the fold, as it were," I answered as I paused at the front
gate of the Poplars, which had a white clematis drifting over its tall
stone pillars and clutching at the straight iron bars as if trying to
keep me out of even my own fold. "Will you come in with me?" I asked
with a laugh, as I flung the old gate wide in spite of the tendril
fingers.

The parson laug