Orion’s golden sword. If it is like this, we will go to-morrow.”

But Diana, going to him, laid a gentle hand on his arm. “To-morrow was mother’s birthday, pa,” she said softly.

[13]Mrs. Eaton looked up and caught her son’s eye, and turned her face carefully from the two in the bay window. “Think of it,” she murmured, with a look of horrified disapproval, “think of keeping Letty’s birthday here!”

[13]

But Jacob, glancing at Diana’s unconscious back, signed to her to be silent.

[14]

II

IT was the end of another day when Caleb Trench and his dog, Shot, came slowly down the long white road from Paradise Ridge. It is a shell road, exceeding white and hard, and below it, at flood-tide, the river meadows lie half submerged; it turns the corner below the old mill and passes directly through the center of Eshcol to the city. Behind the mill, the feathery green of spring clouded the low hills in a mist of buds and leafage. The slender stem of a silver birch showed keen against a group of red cedars. A giant pine thrust its height above its fellows, its top stripped by lightning and hung with a squirrel’s nest.

Trench and his dog, a rough yellow outcast that he had adopted, were approaching the outskirts of Eshcol. Here and there was a farmhouse, but the wayside was lonely, and he heard only the crows in the tree-tops. It was past five o’clock and the air was sweet. He smelt the freshly turned earth in the fields where the robins were hunting for grubs. Beyond the river the woods were drifted white with wild cucumber. Yonder, in the corner of a gray old fence, huddled some of Aaron Todd’s sheep. The keen atmosphere was mellowing at the far horizon to molten[15] gold; across it a drifting flight of swallows was sharply etched, an eddying maelstrom of graceful wings.

[15]

In the middle of the road Caleb Trench was suddenly aware of a small figure, which might have been three years old, chubby and apparently sexless, for it was clad in a girl’s petticoats and a boy’s jacket, its face round and smeared with jelly.

“Sammy,” said Trench kindly, “how did you get here?”

“Penny,” said Sammy, “wants penny!”

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