“It wasn’t foolish; it was nice,” she affirmed.

She perched on the tongue of a wagon while he mended the disker, dividing her attention between him and the live things of the barnyard.  A string of decorative white ducks marched in single file about the edge of the cow pound.  Beyond them a proud red-wattled cock paraded and purred among his harem of trim hens, now and then disturbed in his dignity by the darting nervousness of a pair of malicious guineas, acknowledged brigands of the feathered tribes.  Trim iridescent pigeons toddled about on their coral feet, looking for leftovers from the chickens’ table.

“Say, Wes, I should think you’d have a dog,” she said suddenly.  “A nice big dog lazying round here would sort of complete it.”

He bent suddenly over his disker and gave the nut he was working on a mighty twist, but he had tossed aside his hat, and she could see the sudden jump and darkening of his menacing vein.

“I had a dog,” he said in a low voice, “but he died.”

A curious restraint fell on them, and for the first time Annie felt herself an alien, a stranger, far adrift from familiar shores.  She shivered in the light wind.

“You cold?  You better go in the house and get something round you,” Wes said to her.

“I guess I’d better.”  And she left him hammering.

In the house she found Aunt Dolcey in the big bedroom over the living room.  She had just finished remaking the bed—­an old maple four-poster, the wood a soft and mellowed orange, fine and colourful against the white quilt, the lace-edged pillow slips.

“I put on clean sheets,” said Aunt Dolcey as Annie hesitated on the threshold.  “Yes’m, I put on everything clean, an’ the bes’.  I know what’s fitten.  My chile, dish yer de third bridal bed I made up for wives of de Dean men.”

Something caught in Annie’s throat, terrified her.  This old black woman, with her remoteness, her pitying wise eyes, what did she mean?  Annie wanted terribly to ask her.  But how begin?  How get through this wall of inscrutability which the black and yellow races have raised for their protection?

She fluttered nearer to the old woman.

“Look,” she began tremulously—­“look—­it’s all right, isn’t it, my marrying him so quick?  I haven’t got any folks, and—­and I suppose I haven’t got much sense; but there was something about him that just made me trust him and—­and want him.  But it was all so quick, and—­now I’m here it seems like maybe—­there was—­something——­Oh, you’d tell me, wouldn’t you?  It is all right, isn’t it?”

The old woman considered.  “It’s all right ef you’re all right,” she pronounced at length.

“But—­but what do you mean?  And—­and look here—­Aunt Dolcey—­tell me—­what’d he do to that dog he had?”

“What you know ’bout any dog?”

“I don’t know—­anything; but when I asked him why he didn’t have a dog—­he was queer.  It scared me.”