e sat, a little red of face
himself, gazing across into the girl's starry eyes.

"Go ahead!" she prompted him with a gasp.

Then his lips began to curl until a smile overspread his face and
half-closed his eyes. He leaned back and raised obediently a quaintly
solemn, quaintly boyish treble.

"I wa'n't guessin'," he averred soberly, "ner I wa'n't thinkin' it
will. It'll jest be rainin', come sunup, and it'll be good fer till
Wednesday, for sure!"

At the beginning of that quavering statement Dexter Allison's lips fell
apart. They remained open long after Steve had finished. Once he
started to rise, and then dropped back into his chair, dumfounded.
There was no doubt concerning the success of his daughter's query. At
last he got to his feet and padded around the table. With a hand on
either of the boy's shoulders, he turned that browned face up to his
own.

"You," he murmured, weakly. "You! And Elliott said that you could
outguess dear old Mother Nature herself! Well, I--I'm damned!"

They talked no more business at table that morning, and Allison found
scant opportunity to make himself heard at all. Even the reticence
which seemed a part of Steve's grave face and big body was swept aside
before the tumult of questions that tumbled from Barbara's lips,
promptly to be supplemented by Caleb whenever her breath gave out.

"And to think that you didn't recognize him, even when you met him face
to face," she rallied her father. "It was dense enough of me not to
have known instantly who it must be, the first day you began your
endless reiteration of 'my man, O'Mara.' I, at least, should have
known, because--because"--she faltered a little--"well, they always do,
in books!"

It raised another storm of laughter--that faltering, ingenuous reason
of hers--and Barbara hastened to explain that the phrase was a relic of
her own childhood, which she had once coined in extenuation of conduct
to which her mother had objected. She still employed it, she
explained, in particularly irresponsible moments.

It was minutes before Allison could wedge in a single remark, longer
than that before he stopped frowning to himself in a fashion which made
Caleb remember that moment of inexplicable vehemence, outside on the
veranda. They had retrogressed as far as the "injine"--the "steam
injine"--when Allison finally made himself heard.

"What I can't remember is just why you left us so suddenly. I know it
was some sort of a