white bluebell—the only one Rue had ever seen. As long as she could remember it had come up there every year and bloomed, snow-white amid a world of its blue comrades in the grass below. She looked for it now, 52 saw it in bud—three sturdy stalks sprouting at right angles from the wall and curving up parallel to it. Somehow or other she had come to associate this white freak of nature with herself—she scarcely knew why. It comforted her, oddly, to see it again, still surviving, still delicately vigorous, though where among those stone slabs it found its nourishment she never could imagine.

52

The intense blue of the sky had altered since noon; the west became gradually duller and the air stiller; and now, over the Gayfield hills, a tall cloud thrust up silvery-edged convolutions toward a zenith still royally and magnificently blue.

She had been sitting there watching her swimming cork for over an hour when the first light western breeze arrived, spreading a dainty ripple across the pond. Her cork danced, drifted; beneath it she caught the momentary glimmer of the minnow; then the cork was jerked under; she clasped the pole with all her strength, struck upward; and a heavy pickerel, all gold and green, sprang furiously from the water and fell back with a sharp splash.

Under the sudden strain of the fish she nearly lost her balance, scrambled hastily down from the parapet, propping the pole desperately against her body, and stood so, unbending, unyielding, her eyes fixed on the water where the taut line cut it at forty-five degrees.

At the same time two men in a red runabout speeding westward caught sight of the sharp turn by the bridge which the ruins of the paper mill had hidden. The man driving the car might have made it even then had he not seen Ruhannah in the centre of the bridge. It was instantly all off; so were both mud-guards and one 53 wheel. So were driver and passenger, floundering on their backs among the rank grass and wild flowers. Ruhannah, petrified, still fast to her fish, gazed at the catastrophe over her right shoulder.

53

A broad, short, squarely built man of forty emerged from the weeds, went hastily to the car and did something to it. Noise ceased; clouds of steam continued to ascend from the crumpled hood.

The other man, even shorter, but slimmer, sauntered out of a bed of milkweed whither he had been catapulted. He dusted with his elbow a grey 

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