“What did you do that for?  It’s a good mile further.”

“Yes; but it’s better riding, that way.”

“You’d better go back over the hill.  The barn’s worth seein’, the best one this side of town.”  Mrs. Richardson rocked to and fro in exultation at having some one to listen to her month’s accumulation of gossip.  Bannock Bars was an isolated hamlet, and visitors were few.  “Sol’s girl, Fannie, has gone to Oswego for a week.  She’s had scarlet fever, and it left her ailin’.  It’s too bad, for she is a likely girl.”

“Very likely,” Phebe assented, half under her breath.

“What?”

“I said it was extremely probable.”

“What was?” Mrs. Richardson glared at her guest who was tranquilly waving a palm-leaf fan.

“That Fannie is a good girl.”

“Well, she is,” Mrs. Richardson returned shortly.

There was a silence, while Phebe inspected the black cambric binding of her fan, and tried to gather energy to go out into the hot sun once more.  Mrs. Richardson had rocked herself into more placid humor.

“They’ve got a boarder over to Sykes’s,” she resumed.

“Have they?” Phebe spoke indifferently.  Bannock Bars was too near town for her to realize how countrified it was, how the coming of a single stranger could stir the placid current of its existence.

“He’s from New York, Bartlett is his name, or some such thing.  They say he’s a music feller.”

“A what?” Phebe wondered whether Mrs. Richardson had reference to a member of a German band.  The words suggested something of the kind.

“A feller that writes music.  I don’t know anything about it only what they say.  Anyhow, he’s brought a pianner with him, and they say he bangs away on it like all possessed, and then stops short and scolds.  I went past there, one day, when the windows was open, and I heard him thumpin’ and tiddlin’ away for dear life.  It didn’t seem to me there was much tune to it, nor time neither; you couldn’t so much as tell where one line left off and the next begun.”

Phebe’s fan slid out of her lap, and, as she stooped to pick it up, she dropped her handkerchief.

“Have you seen him?” she asked, when she was upright once more.

“How?”

“Have you ever seen this Mr. Bartlett?”

“Yes.  He goes round in one of these short-pant suits and great coarse stockin’s and shoes, and he never acts as if he knew what he was about.  Half-baked, I call him.  He holds his head like this, and he struts along as if Bannock Bars wa’n’t half good enough for him.  Mis’ Sykes says he ain’t a mite fussy, though, takes what she gives him and don’t complain.  Land!  If he can stand Eulaly Sykes’s cookin’, he must be tough.”

“Perhaps he will keel over, some day,” Phebe suggested.

“I should think he would.  But then, they say folks like him eat all sorts of things at night suppers, so I suppose he is used to it.”  She rocked in silence, for a moment; then she went on, “What do you find to do with yourself, now you’re home again?  You was with Mis’ Farrington’s folks; wasn’t you, she that was Theodora McAlister?”