barnyard. It was one of her inexorable
prescriptions for him that he should drink a glass of warm milk-punch
before breakfast, and smell the cow's breath during the operation. She was
milking the white cow herself, while the pseudo sempstress, Nichols, waited
with the goblet, and the bandy-legged shoemaker, Twiss, stood on guard,
eyeing Brindle's horns suspiciously.

"Now the glass! These are the strippings. Oh you'll soon learn, Betty!
You'll make butter as well as you used to make dresses badly."

The little widow and Twiss laughed, as they always did at Jane's weak
jokes, and took the punch to the captain. She was the finest wit of her day
in their eyes. The hostler's boy ran down from the stable to speak to her.
She thought he had as innocent a face as she had ever seen. No doubt he
would have gone to perdition if Neckart had not rescued him. She stopped to
talk to him with beaming eyes, and meeting Betty's toddling baby took it up
and tossed it in the air, and then walked on, carrying the soft little
thing in her arms. The farm was like the Happy Valley this morning! God was
so good to her! She could warm and comfort all these people. Then she
turned into the woods and sat down on a fallen log. It was the place where
they had stopped to rest yesterday, Neckart lying at her feet. There was
the imprint still in the dead moss where his arm had lain. She looked
guiltily about, and then laid her hand in the broken moss with a quick
passionate touch. The baby caught her chin in its fingers. She hugged it to
her breast, and kissed it again and again. From the hemlock overhead a
tanager suddenly flashed up into the air with a shrill peal of song. Jane
looked up, her face and throat dyed crimson. Did he know? She glanced down
at the grass, at the friendly trees all alive with rustling and chirping.
The sky overhead was so deep and warm a blue to-day. It seemed as if they
all knew that he loved her.

The captain found Mr. Neckart standing on the stoop listening to some sound
that came up from the woods.

"It is Jane singing," he said. "You would not hear her once in a year.
Hereditary gift! In the old Swedish annals we read of the remarkable voices
of the Svens."

"I never heard her sing before." Yet he had known at once that it was she.
It was the most joyous of songs, but there was a foreboding pathos in the
voice which moved him as no other sound had ever done.

"You are not going before breakfast?" cried the captai