ir own.

"No; not large. About a hundred." (In speaking of farms the word
"acres" is omitted by the natives, by analogy to such old expressions
as "a stag of ten.")

"I wanted my hat this morning," she went on. "I had to ride to
Tewnell Mill."

"Yes you had."

"How do you know?"

"I saw you."

"Where?" she inquired, a misgiving bringing every muscle of her
lineaments and frame to a standstill.

"Here--going through the plantation, and all down the hill," said
Farmer Oak, with an aspect excessively knowing with regard to some
matter in his mind, as he gazed at a remote point in the direction
named, and then turned back to meet his colloquist's eyes.

A perception caused him to withdraw his own eyes from hers as
suddenly as if he had been caught in a theft. Recollection of the
strange antics she had indulged in when passing through the trees was
succeeded in the girl by a nettled palpitation, and that by a hot
face. It was a time to see a woman redden who was not given to
reddening as a rule; not a point in the milkmaid but was of the
deepest rose-colour. From the Maiden's Blush, through all varieties
of the Provence down to the Crimson Tuscany, the countenance of Oak's
acquaintance quickly graduated; whereupon he, in considerateness,
turned away his head.

The sympathetic man still looked the other way, and wondered when she
would recover coolness sufficient to justify him in facing her again.
He heard what seemed to be the flitting of a dead leaf upon the
breeze, and looked. She had gone away.

With an air between that of Tragedy and Comedy Gabriel returned to
his work.

Five mornings and evenings passed. The young woman came regularly to
milk the healthy cow or to attend to the sick one, but never allowed
her vision to stray in the direction of Oak's person. His want of
tact had deeply offended her--not by seeing what he could not help,
but by letting her know that he had seen it. For, as without law
there is no sin, without eyes there is no indecorum; and she appeared
to feel that Gabriel's espial had made her an indecorous woman
without her own connivance. It was food for great regret with him;
it was also a _contretemps_ which touched into life a latent heat he
had experienced in that direction.

The acquaintanceship might, however, have ended in a slow forgetting,
but for an incident which occurred at the end of the same week. One
afternoon it began to freeze, and the frost increased w