“Oh, no, not for myself!” Rose Mary hastened to exclaim, and she turned the whole artillery of the pearl treasures upon him in mirth at his mistake.  “It’s Aunt Viney I want them for.  She only has five left.  She says she didn’t mind so long as she had any two that hit, but the hitters to all five are gone now and she is so distressed.  I’m saving up to take her down to the city to get a brand new set.  I have eleven dollars now and two little bull calves to sell, though it breaks my heart to let them go, even if they are of the wrong persuasion.  I always love them better than I do the little heifers, because I have to give them up.  I don’t like to have things I love go away.  You see you mustn’t think of going to New York until the spring is all over and summer comes for good,” she continued, with the most delightful ingenuousness, as she shaped the last of the ten flowers and glanced from her task at him with the most solicitous concern.  “Of course, you feel as if the smash your lung got in that awful rock slide has healed all up, and I know it has, but you’ll have to do as the doctor tells you about not running any risks with New York spring gales, won’t you?”

“Oh, yes, I suppose I will,” answered Everett, with a trace of restlessness in his voice.  “I’m just as sound as a dollar now and I’m wild to go with that gang the firm is sending up into British Columbia to thrash out that copper question.  I know they counted on me for the final tests.  Some other fellow will find it and get the fortune and the credit, while I—­I—­”

He stared moodily out the door of the milk-house and down Providence Road that wound its calm, even way from across the ridge down through the green valley.  Rose Mary’s milk-house was nestled between the breasts of a low hill, upon which was perched the wide-winged, old country house which had brooded the fortunes of the Alloways since the wilderness days.  The spring which gushed from the back wall of the milk-house poured itself into a stone trough on the side of the Road, which had been placed there generations agone for the refreshment of beast, while man had been entertained within the hospitable stone walls.  And at the foot of the Briars, as the Alloway home, hill, spring and meadows had been called from time immemorial, clustered the little village of Sweetbriar.

The store, which also sheltered the post-office, was almost opposite the spring-house door across the wide Road, the blacksmith shop farther down and the farm-houses stretched fraternally along either side in both directions.  Far up the Road, as it wound its way around Providence Nob, could be seen the chimneys and the roofs of Providence, while Springfield and Boliver also lay like smoke-wreathed visions in the distance.  Something of the peace and plenty of it all had begun to smooth the irritated wrinkle from between Mark Everett’s brows, when Rose Mary’s hand rested for a second over his on the table and her rich voice, with its softest brooding note, came from across her bowl.