“Oh, and I’m one of them—­I belong,” I said to myself as I noted each cottage into which I went and came at will, as friend and beloved neighbor.  Even at that distance I could see a small figure, which I knew to be Luella Spain, running up the long avenue, and in its hand I detected something that, I was sure, was a covered plate or dish.  “And I’m making Elmnest fulfil its destiny into the future—­into the future that the great Evan Baldwin is preaching about in town, instead of practicing out in the fields.  I wonder if he really knows a single thing about farming.”

“He does,” came an answer from right at my shoulder in Pan’s flutiest voice, and I turned to find him standing just behind me on the very edge of the old tilting rock.

“How do you know?” I demanded of him as I took the clean white cloth tied up at four corners, gypsy-fashion, which he offered me and which, I could see, was fairly bursting with green leaves of a kind I had never seen before.

“I was with him at the Metropolitan the night I saw Ann Craddock in Gale Beacon’s box, you know,—­the night that Mr. G. Bird sang ‘Delilah,’ and also I’ve slept on the bare ground with him in his woods in Michigan and on his red clay in Georgia.”

“Well, I hate him all the same for the insult of his offer to buy Elmnest, though I doubt if he has any family pride or any family either, so, of course, he wouldn’t understand that it is an insult to offer to buy one’s colonial home with holes in the door to shoot Indians through,” I answered with the temper that always came at the mention of the name of a man I had chosen to consider a foe without any consent on his part at all.

“You’d think he was born and raised in a hollow log if you should ever interview him, and he hasn’t any family, but from some of the motions he is making, I think he intends to have,” answered Pan, with one of his most fluty jeers, and he shook his head until the crests ruffled still lower over the tips of his ears.

“Are you—­you one of his agents—­that is, spies, and was it you that insulted me by wanting to buy Elmnest just because it was poor and old?” I demanded, with the color in my cheeks.

“I am not his spy or his agent, and do you want to come down to the spring-house and cook these wild-mustard shoots for our dinner, or shall I go at our old garden with the prospect of an empty stomach at sunset?”

“Why won’t you come in to dinner with me?” I asked, with a mollified laugh, though I knew I was bringing down upon myself about my hundredth refusal of proffered hospitality.

“Two reasons—­first, because I won’t eat with my neighbors at the ’great house’ when I can’t eat with them in the cottage, and I just can’t eat the grease that a lot of the poorer villagers deluge their food with.  I’m Pan, and I live in the woods on roots and herbs.  Second—­because about six weeks ago I found a farm woman who would come out at my wooing to cook