Shandon brought her startled eyes from little Danny’s face.  The child, with little eager grunts and frowning concentration, was busy with the clasp of her pocketbook, and her big, gentle hand had been guarding it from his little, wild ones.  The sight of the doctor’s face brought back her bitterest memories with a sick rush, at a moment when her endurance was strained to the utmost.  He had decreed that Dan should be operated on, he had decided that she should not be with him, he had come to tell her that the big, protecting arm and heart were gone forever—­and now he had an early buttercup in his buttonhole, and on his lips the last of the laughter that he had just been sharing with Mary Dickey!  And Mary, the picture of complacent daintiness, was sauntering on, waiting for him.

Shandon was not a reasonable creature.  With a sound between a snarl and a sob she caught the light driving whip from its socket and brought the lash fairly across the doctor’s smiling face.  As he started back, stung with intolerable pain, she lashed in turn the nervous horse, and in another moment the cart and its occupants were racketing down the home road again.

“And now we never will git no closer to Shandon Waters!” said Johnnie Larabee, regretfully, for the hundredth time.  It was ten days later, and Mrs. Larabee and Mrs. Cass Dinwoodie were high up on the wet hills, gathering cream-colored wild iris for the Dickey wedding that night.

“And serve her right, too!” said Mrs. Dinwoodie, severely.  “A great girl like that lettin’ fly like a child.”

“She’s—­she’s jest the kind to go crazy, brooding as she does,” Mrs. Larabee submitted, almost timidly.  She had been subtly pleading Shandon’s cause for the past week, but it was no use.  The last outrage had apparently sealed her fate so far as Deaneville was concerned.  Now, straightening her cramped back and looking off toward the valleys below them, Mrs. Larabee said suddenly: 

“That looks like Shandon down there now.”

Mrs. Dinwoodie’s eyes followed the pointing finger.  She could distinguish a woman’s moving figure, a mere speck on the road far below.

“Sure it is,” said she.  “Carryin’ Dan, too.”

“My goo’ness,” said Johnnie, uneasily, “I wish she wouldn’t take them crazy walks.  I don’t suppose she’s walking up to town?”

“I don’t know why she should,” said Mrs. Dinwoodie, dryly, “with the horses she’s got.  I don’t suppose even Shandon would attempt to carry that great child that far, cracked as she seems to be!”

“I don’t suppose we could drive home down by the marsh road?” Johnnie asked.  Mrs. Dinwoodie looked horrified.

“Johnnie, are you crazy yourself?” she demanded.  “Why, child, Mary’s going to be married at half-past seven, and there’s the five-o’clock train now.”

The older matron made all haste to “hitch up,” sending not even another look into the already shadowy valley.  But Johnnie’s thoughts were there all through the drive home, and even when she started with her beaming husband and her four young children to the wedding she was still thinking of Shandon Waters.