times the apple disagrees with him for that with the new apple he got
not a new stomach."

I laughed a little, but said, "This is not all. There was something
between him and the man he struck which we do not yet know. Did you see
him?"

"Yes, and before this--last week some time in the market-place. He was
looking at old Dinah's tub of white lilies when I noticed him, and to me
came a curious thinking of how he was so unlike them, many people having
for me flower-likeness, and this man, being of a yellow swarthiness and
squat-browed, 'minded me soon of the toadstool you call a corpse-light."

"Perhaps we shall know some time; but here is home, and will he speak of
it to Mistress White, do you think?"

"Not ever, I suppose," said Schmidt; and we went in.

The sight we saw troubled me. In the little back parlor, at a round
mahogany table with scrolled edges and claw toes, sat facing the light
Mistress White. She was clad in a gray silk with tight sleeves, and her
profusion of rich chestnut hair, with its willful curliness that forbade
it to be smooth on her temples, was coiled in a great knot at the back
of her head. Its double tints and strange changefulness, and the smooth
creamy cheeks with their moving islets of roses that would come and go
at a word, were pretty protests of Nature, I used to think, against the
demure tints of her pearl-gray silken gown. She was looking out into the
garden, quite heedless of the older dame, who sat as her wont was
between the windows, and chirruped now and then, mechanically, "Has thee
a four-leaved clover?" As I learned some time after, one of our older