window,—­not with the pale rose-glow of your anthracite, but fitful, flashing, hearty, holding out all its hands to you like a Western farmer.  That’s the way our fires burn.  The very smoke went out of no stove-pipe valve, but rushed from great mouths of chimneys, brown, hot, glowing, full of spicy smiles of supper below.  Down in the kitchen, by a great log-fire, where irons were heating, sat Oth, feebly knitting, and overseeing a red-armed Dutch girl cooking venison-steaks and buttermilk-biscuit on the coal-stove beside him.

“Put jelly on de table, you, mind!  Strangers here fur tea.  Anyhow it ort to go down.  Nuffin but de best ob currant Miss Grey ’ud use in her father’s house.  Lord save us!”—­in an underbreath.  “But it’s fur de honor ob de family,”—­in a mutter.

“Miss Grey” waited within.  Not patiently:  sure pleasure was too new for her.  She smoothed her crimson dress, pushed back the sleeves that the white dimpled arms might show, and then bustled about the room, to tidy it for the hundredth time.  A bright winter’s room:  its owner had a Southern taste for hot, heartsome colors, you could be sure, and would bring heat and flavor into his life, too.  There were soft astral lamps, and a charred red fire, a warm, unstingy glow, wasting itself even in long streams of light through the cold windows.  There were bright bits of Turnerish pictures on the gray walls, a mass of gorgeous autumn-leaves in the soft wool of the carpet, a dainty white-spread table in the middle of the room, jars of flowers everywhere, flowers that had caught most passion and delight from the sun,—­scarlet and purple fuchsias, heavy-breathed heliotrope.  Yet Grey bent longest over her own flower, that every childlike soul loves best,—­mignonette.  She chose some of its brown sprigs to fasten in her hair, the fragrance was so clean and caressing.  Paul Blecker, even at the other end of the field, and in the gathering twilight, caught a glimpse of his wife’s face pressed against the pane.  It was altered:  the contour more emphatic, the skin paler, the hazel eyes darker, lighted from farther depths.  No glow of color, only in the meaning lips and the fine reddish hair.

Doctor Blecker stopped to help a stout little lady out of a buggy at the stile, then sent the boy to the stable with it:  it was his own, with saddle-bags under the seat.  But there was a better-paced horse in the shafts than suited a heavy country-practice.  The lady looked at it with one eye shut.

“A Morgan-Cottrell, eh?  I know by the jaw,”—­jogging up the stubble-field beside him, her fat little satchel rattling as she walked.  Doctor Blecker, a trifle graver and more assured than when we saw him last, sheltered her with his overcoat from the wind, taking it off for that purpose by the stile.  You could see that this woman was one of the few for whom he had respect.

“Your wife understands horses, Doctor.  And dogs.  I did not expect it of Grey.  No.  There’s more outcome in her than you give her credit for,”—­turning sharply on him.