"The Bonner house?" Liff echoed incredulously.

"Yes. You won't understand--and it don't matter. All I say is: he's
going to the Hyatts' in a day or two."

Liff looked more and more perplexed. "Bash is ugly sometimes in the
afternoons."

She threw her head back, her eyes full on Hyatt's. "I'm coming too: you
tell him."

"They won't none of them trouble you, the Hyatts won't. What d'you want
a take a stranger with you though?"

"I've told you, haven't I? You've got to tell Bash Hyatt."

He looked away at the blue mountains on the horizon; then his gaze
dropped to the chimney-top below the pasture.

"He's down there now?"

"Yes."

He shifted his weight again, crossed his arms, and continued to survey
the distant landscape. "Well, so long," he said at last, inconclusively;
and turning away he shambled up the hillside. From the ledge above
her, he paused to call down: "I wouldn't go there a Sunday"; then he
clambered on till the trees closed in on him. Presently, from high
overhead, Charity heard the ring of his axe.

She lay on the warm ridge, thinking of many things that the woodsman's
appearance had stirred up in her. She knew nothing of her early life,
and had never felt any curiosity about it: only a sullen reluctance to
explore the corner of her memory where certain blurred images lingered.
But all that had happened to her within the last few weeks had stirred
her to the sleeping depths. She had become absorbingly interesting to
herself, and everything that had to do with her past was illuminated by
this sudden curiosity.

She hated more than ever the fact of coming from the Mountain; but it
was no longer indifferent to her. Everything that in any way affected
her was alive and vivid: even the hateful things had grown interesting
because they were a part of herself.

"I wonder if Liff Hyatt knows who my mother was?" she mused; and it
filled her with a tremor of surprise to think that some woman who was
once young and slight, with quick motions of the blood like hers, had
carried her in her breast, and watched her sleeping. She had always
thought of her mother as so long dead as to be no more than a nameless
pinch of earth; but now it occurred to her that the once-young woman
might be alive, and wrinkled and elf-locked like the woman she had
sometimes seen in the door of the brown house that Lucius Harney wanted
to draw.

The thought brought him back to the central point in her mind, and
she straye