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 watching his hand reach for the sugar bowl, miss it and reach again. He was drinking when suddenly he dropped his cup and jerked up and away from the table; Kincheloe and Ethel herself started also as the report of a rifle rang, sharp and clear, outside the house. The gun fired again.

Miss Platt and Ethel's grandmother alike had revealed no alarm.

"Asa said he would get his gun," Miss Platt volunteered quietly, "and come back for the foxes."

"Of course," her husband said, dropping back into his seat.

Lucas remained at the table only a moment before he proceeded to the front room where, in recent years, family prayer was said each evening after supper. His wife followed him, but Ethel went to her own room and from the darkened window looked out to the Rock to see a light glowing there again. This quieted her; yet she went down to the kitchen to ascertain from Mrs. Singlewolf that Asa actually had returned and shot at a fox before she rejoined her grandparents and Miss Platt in the sitting room. Miss Platt's husband had gone out, not taking the dogs this time.

"Asa wounded a fox," Miss Platt explained. "Mr. Kincheloe is helping Asa track him."

Ethel sat down while her grandmother started the victrola to playing "Brighten The Corner Where You Are." Then Lucas read a chapter from the Bible—the eighth of 1st Kings which Ethel decided must be the longest in either testament; after that was prayer; and while she knelt, listening to her grandfather's voice go on and on, an amazing panic possessed her. She was feeling that the long, deliberate reading and now the endless supplication was for a purpose other than