In the extension of his commercial activity Martin Eckles kept his room at the Greenstream hotel and employed a horse and buggy for his excursions throughout the county. It had become his habit to sit through the evenings with the Stammarks where his flood of conversation never lessened. Lucy scarcely added a phrase to the sum of talk. She rocked in her chair with a slight endless motion, her dreaming gaze fixed on the dim valley.

Wilmer Deakon, on the occasion of his first encounter with Eckles at the Stammarks', acknowledged the other's phrase and stood waiting for Lucy to proceed with him to the parlor. But Lucy was apparently unaware of this; she sat calm and remote in her crisp white skirts, while Wilmer fidgeted at the door.

Soon, however, she said: "For goodness' sake, Wilmer, whatever's the matter with you? Can't you find a chair that suits you? You make a person nervous."

At the same time she rose ungraciously and followed him into the house.

Wilmer came out, Calvin thought, in an astonishingly short time. Courting was nothing like it had been in his day. The young man muttered an unintelligible sentence that, from its connection, might be interpreted as a good night, and strode back to the barn and his horse.

Martin Eckles smiled: "The love birds must have been a little ruffled."

And Calvin, with a strong impression of having heard such a thing before, was vaguely uneasy. Eckles sat for a long space; Lucy didn't appear, and at last the visitor rose reluctantly. But Lucy had not gone to bed; she came out on the porch and dropped with a flounce into a chair beside Calvin.

"Wilmer's pestering me to get married right away," she told him; "before ever the house is built. He seems to think I ought to be just crazy to take him and go to that lonely Sugarloaf place."

"It's what you promised for," Calvin reminded her; "nothing's turned up you didn't know about."

"If I did!" she exclaimed irritably. "What else is a girl to do, I'd like to ask? It's just going from one stove to another, here. Only it'll be worse in my case-you and Aunt Ettie have been lovely to me. I hate to cook!" she cried. "And it makes me sick to put my hands in greasy dishwater! I suppose that's wicked but I can't help it. When I told Wilmer that to-night he acted like I'd denied communion. I can't help it if the whippoorwills make me shiver, can I? Or if I want to see a person go by once in a while. I-I don't want to be bad-or to hurt you or Wilmer. Oh, I'll settle down, there's nothing else to do; I'll marry him and get old before my time, like the others."

Calvin Stammark leaned forward, his hands on his knees, and stared at her in shocked amazement-Hannah in every accent and feeling. The old sense of danger and helplessness flooded him. He thought of Phebe with her dyed hair and cigarette-stained lips, her stories of the stage and life; he thought of Hannah dying alone and dog poor. Now Lucy--

"Do you remember anything about your mother," he asked, "and before you came here?"

"Only that we were dreadfully unhappy," she replied. "There was a boarding house with actresses washing their stockings in the rooms and a landlady they were all afraid of. There was beer in the wash-stand pitcher. But that wouldn't happen to me," she asserted; "I'd be different. I might be an actress, but in dramas where my hair would be down and everybody love me."

"You're going to marry Wilmer Deakon and be a proper happy wife!" he declared, bringing his fist down on a hard palm. "Get this other nonsense out of your head!"

Suddenly he was trembling at the old catastrophe reopened by Lucy. His love for her, and his dread, choked him. She added nothing more, but sat rigid and pale and rebellious. Before long she went in, but Calvin stayed facing the darkness, the menace of the lonely valley. Except for the lumbermen it would be worse in the Sugarloaf cutting.

Damn the frogs!

Martin Eckles appeared in the buggy the following evening and offered to carry Lucy for a short drive to a near-by farm; with an air of indifference she accepted. Wilmer didn't call, and Calvin sat in silent perplexity with Ettie. The buggy returned later than they had allowed, and Lucy went up to bed without stopping on the porch.

The next morning Ettie, with something in her hand, came out to Calvin at the stable shed.

"I found this in Lucy's room," she said simply.

It was Martin Eckles' gold ring, set with the insignia in rubies, suspended in a loop of ribbon.

A cold angry certitude formed in his being. What a criminal fool he had been! What a blind booby! His only remark, however, brought a puzzled expression to Ettie's troubled countenance. Calvin Stammark exclaimed, "Phebe Braley." He was silent for a little, his frowning gaze fixed beyond any visible object, then he added: "Put that back where you found it and forget everything."

Ettie laid a hand on his sleeve. "Now, Calvin," she begged, her voice low and strained, "promise me--"

"Forget everything!" he repeated harshly.

His face was dark, forbidding, the lines deeply bitten about a somber mouth, his eyes were like blue ice. He walked into Greenstream, where he saw the proprietor of the small single hotel; then, back in his room, he unwrapped from oiled leather a heavy blued revolver; and soon after he saddled his horse and was clattering in a sharp trot in the opposite direction from the village.

It was dark when, having returned, he dismounted and swung the saddle from the horse to its tree. Familiar details kept him a long while, his hands were steady but slow, automatic in movement. He went in through the kitchen past Ettie to his room, and after a little he re-wrapped the revolver and laid it back in its accustomed place. Supper, in spite of Lucy's sharp comment, was set by the stove, and Ettie was solicitous of his every possible need. He ate methodically what was offered, and afterward filled and lit his pipe. It soon went out. Once, on the porch, he leaned toward Lucy and awkwardly touched her shoulder.