At first she listened to him with scarcely more interest than she would have felt towards the amiable volubility of any of the countrymen; but his talk soon rose above the commonplace. Insensibly he became aware that the girl beside him could understand, could sympathize, respond.
"I know you can't put ropes on the world and try to pull back against its turning round," the doctor said when at a bend of the road they could look down almost upon the roof of a cottage below, a cottage with a sadly neglected garden patch at one side and a tumbled-down chimney. "It's a good deal better to stand behind and push, or to get in front and pull. I'm fond of pulling, myself! But when it comes to the individual instance, it's sometimes more merciful to stand in the way of what we're pleased to call progress. Now that girl down there—daughter of a horse-dealer, the owner of a little store at one of the crossroads in the other valley—it would really have been better if she had never gone to school, never been away from home, never learned of anything beyond what she has. She has been taught enough to make her know how badly off she is. Her father was ambitious, and sent his daughter to board in town and go to the high school. She stayed there two years, and absorbed about as much as she could; then she came back home, but her education had taught her something finer and better than what she came back to. She did just what any restless young thing would do. Inside of a year she eloped with the handsomest rascal in the mountains. And Tobet's a moonshiner!"
"Moonshiner! But I thought the Government had done away with all that sort of thing? I heard a man say, at a place where I was staying before I came here, that there was really no more of it left, in these mountains. The men are intimidated, the stills discovered and broken up. Isn't that so?"
A wry smile from the doctor answered her. "Then there must be some natural springs of it about here," he said. He pointed back over his shoulder with his whip. "See that big pine up there on the left? Well, if an empty bottle be left there, at the foot of the tree, at night, with a fifty-cent piece under it, the bottle will be filled in the morning, and the coin gone. I don't ask any questions, and I suppose she would not answer any; but if she would, Grace Tobet could explain how that sort of thing happens."
Rosamund was not greatly impressed. "Well, there probably is not very much of it," she said, "and they must be quite used to it. I don't suppose it does them much harm, does it?"
The doctor was silent for a moment. Then he said, and his voice was very low, "Grace Tobet has lately lost her baby, her little girl. Joe came in one morning, struck by white lightning, as they say around here. He fell on the baby, and Grace came in from the garden too late. She told Mother Cary that perhaps it was just as well."
Rosamund paled. Presently the doctor went on, "And you see, poor Grace knows better things; she remembers that town and the school, and the little pleasures and gayeties there."
Neither spoke again until White Rosy drew up before the Tobet cottage. The front windows and door were closed, but on the sill of the back door a woman crouched, a woman in faded brown calico, whose face, when she raised it from her arms, showed a dark bruise on one side. She rose and smiled wanly.
"I've brought a lady to see you, Mrs. Tobet," the doctor said. He introduced them as formally as if Grace Tobet had been a duchess. Then he said, "Now you two talk, while I hunt up Joe. Where is he?"
The woman nodded towards the front of the house, and the doctor went indoors. Rosamund and Mrs. Tobet looked at each other.