only the haziest memories."

The question brought them into a sudden intimacy, as if his impulsive
appeal to her had established a relation which had not existed the
minute before. He liked the look of her strong shoulders, of her deep
bosom rising in creamy white to her throat; and the quiver of her red
lower lip when she talked, aroused in him a swift and facile emotion.
The melancholy of the landscape, reacting on the dangerous softness of
his mood, bent his nature toward her like a flame driven by the wind.
Around them the red-topped orchard grass faded to pale rose in the
twilight, and beyond the crumbling rail fence miles of feathery
broomsedge swept to the pines that stood straight and black against the
western horizon. Impressions of the hour and the scene, of colour and
sound, were blended in the allurement which Nature proffered him, for
her own ends, through the woman beside him. Not Blossom Revercomb, but
the great Mother beguiled him. The forces that moved in the wind, in the
waving broomsedge, and in the call of the whip-poor-will, stirred in
his pulses as they stirred in the objects around him. That fugitive
attraction of the body, which Nature has shielded at the cost of finer
attributes, leaped upon him like a presence that had waited in earth and
sky. Loftier aspirations vanished before it. Not his philosophy but the
accident of a woman's face worked for destiny.

"I never knew just how it was," she answered slowly as if weighing her
words, "but your uncle wasn't one of our folks, you know. He bought
the place the year before the war broke out, and there was always some
mystery about him and about the life he led--never speaking to anybody
if he could help it, always keeping himself shut up when he could. He
hadn't a good name in these parts, and the house hasn't a good name
either, for the darkies say it is ha'nted and that old Mrs. Jordan--'ole
Miss' they called her--still comes back out of her grave to rebuke the
ha'nt of Mr. Jonathan. There is a path leading from the back porch to
the poplar spring where none of them will go for water after nightfall.
Uncle Abednego swears that he met his old master there one night when he
went down to fill a bucket and that a woman was with him. It all comes,
I reckon, of Mr. Jonathan having been found dead at the spring, and you
know how the darkies catch onto any silly fancy about the dead walking.
I don't believe much in ha'nts myself, though great-grandma has