alk no more about it.'

"A look of relief, almost a happy look, dawned on her face.
'I _knew_ it was not about me! For I saw your two faces when you met
on the hill, under my porchway. . . . Do you know that, at moments,
you are very much alike? . . . Oh, in general, of course, there is no
likeness at all. . . . But at certain moments. . . . And it was so
when you met, there on the hill: I had to look from one to the other.
It was plain in that instant that you hated one another--yes, and it
might have been for a long time . . . ages and ages. But it could
not have been about me, for you had not set eyes on me but within the
minute. . . . I am glad, anyway, that it is not for my sake that you
hate.'

"Her words came in faint, hurrying wafts, much as for days the wind
had been ruffling after us. The sunset struck slantwise across her
cheek and hung entangled in the brown tress that drooped low by her
right temple. I tell you, Roddy, that if the old gods and goddesses
in our school-books ever turned out to be mortal after all, she was
one, and thus looked, and spoke as she died. . . .

"'I understand well enough,' she went on, 'the small things over
which women quarrel. . . . Though they all seem very far away just
now, I was a woman and could be jealous over _any of them_. But I
never understood why _men_ quarrelled, except for me, of course.
. . . Was it over your work, do you tell me?'

"'Surely,' said I, 'a man's work--'

"'Yes. I know that it is so,' she answered me with a small sigh.
'Do you know that, far back, I come down from the Incas? and I dare
say they thought less of work than of other things. . . . It is all
thanks to your working that we three are alive, now. . . . I
understand a little why men so much value their work. . . . But yet I
do not understand why they drop their work to quarrel as they do.
I understand it no better than the fighting of dogs.' She paused on
that last word, and then, as though it had put new life into her, she
sat erect and opened her eyes wider upon the horizon as she put the
amazing question, 'Was it over a dog that you two hated?'

"It staggered me: but I caught at the first explanation. 'Oh, I
see,' said I. 'Your husband has been telling you?'

"She didn't answer this at once. . . . At length, and as though my
voice had taken long in reaching her, far out on the ocean where her
gaze rested--'No,' said she, 'Pete has told me nothing. ... I never
asked. . .