hat she couldn't answer. She had moments of being so
intolerably sorry for Francis that it hurt; quite irrational moments,
when he seemed to need it not at all. This was one.

"Yes," she said, pulling herself together. "That is, if you will take
my word for it that I have no designs on poor old Mr. Pennington."

"Of course I know you haven't," he said. "It was the other way about
that I was afraid of."

"His having designs on me?"

She laughed aloud as she began tuning her strings. It did seem like
the funniest thing she had ever heard. The picture of Pennington, girt
with a sack for an apron, with that plump, quaint face of his, and
those kindly, fussy ways, drying cups for her and having designs while
he did it--it was enough to make even Logan laugh, and _he_ had never
been known to be amused by anything that wasn't intellectual humor.

"Just a-wearyin' for you,"

she began, in her soft little sympathetic voice, that wasn't much good
for anything but just this sort of thing, but could pull the
heartstrings out of you at it, and sang it through. She went on after
that without being asked, just because she liked it. She knew where
the simple chords were in the dark, and she sang everything she wanted
to, forgetting finally Francis, and the woods, and everything else in
the world except the music and the old things she was singing.

When she had finally done, after an hour or so, and laid the banjo
across her lap and leaned back with a little laugh, saying "There! You
must be tired by this time!" Francis rose with scarcely a thank-you,
and walked out of the door.

"I want a turn in the air before I come to bed," he said.

Marjorie said nothing. She was sleepy, as usual--would she never get
over being sleepy up here?--and she laid the instrument on the floor
and stretched out thoughtlessly on the window-seat, instead of going
off to bed as she had been intending to do. As for her husband, he
walked across the veranda straight into a group of his listening men.
The music had drawn them over, and, regardless of mosquitoes, they were
sitting about on the steps, liking the concert.

"We owe you a vote of thanks for importing that little wife of yours,
Ellison," said Pennington, getting up and stretching himself widely in
the moonlight. "Maybe if I do some more dishes for her, she'll come
and sing for us when she knows it, sometime soon."

Francis had an irrational wish to hit Pennington. But there