I refused to bother about the absurdity of this, for
the sake of bringing sleep the sooner.
I was privileged to observe the following day that my neighbor's
daughter was still of a dusky whiteness, the baffling, shaded whiteness
of soft new snow in a cedar thicket. Incidentally she partook of another
quality of soft new snow--one by no means so incommunicable.
And yet in sunlight I incurred the full, close look of her eyes, and no
longer doubted the presence of a Peavey strain in her immediate
ancestry. Far in their incalculable depths I saw a myriad of lights,
brown-gold, that smouldered, ominously, even promisingly. It might never
meet this young woman's caprice to be flagrantly a Peavey in my
presence, but her capacity for this, if she chose to exercise it, I
detected beyond a doubt. She was patently a daughter of Miss Caroline,
and the cosmic chill had been an afterthought of her own.
She did me the honor, late in the afternoon of this day, to occupy an
easy-chair within my vined porch. She went farther. She affected a
polite interest in myself. But her craft was crude. I detected at once
that she had fallen in love with my dog; that she came not to seek me,
but to follow him, who had raced joyously from her at his first
knowledge of my home-coming.
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