"Slipped it off the mantel right under her eyes."

Billy looked at the picture again with the same quiet gravity.

"Guess it doesn't belong to either of us," he decided, and carefully held it over the fire until the flames covered it.

Jimmy had not enjoyed such an interesting bit of drama for a long time. He also congratulated himself as a rather successful diplomat.

"I suppose you know you have a chance of the office in her county?"

he remarked incidentally. "What are you going to do about it?"

Billy didn't say definitely what he intended to do about it. That night he stood at his window for a long time in the dark and looked out over the roofs of the city, ma.s.sed off in dark, blurry squares with the street lights stretching between like ropes of toy electric globes strung along a circus midway. Very confining it seemed to his country-bred instincts, while beyond the last flickering lamp in some laborer's cottage, the moist brown earth stretched for miles and miles in limitless freedom. A thin white mist rose from it now like incense from the hearth of the G.o.d of production. It was the wonderful season of beginnings on the farm, birth and promise everywhere--the eternal old mother pulsing with the first life of the bursting seed, warm, yellow beaks chipping their sh.e.l.ls, wobbly-legged colts blinking at the light of day, and weak, trembly, clamorous lambs needing the tenderest care of all, and so few people with the right human instinct to look after them.

A pa.s.sionate hunger for the land possessed him. Beyond the pine-covered hills lay the place he had set his heart on. It would take a long time to work it into the Eldorado it promised, and his restive young muscles ached to get at it. There would be two or three years of the grindingest kind of work, then returns would begin to come in. The quaint Swiss chalet with its low stone wall and chimney would go up among the trees, and its light blink down through their shelter on the highway at night as he had pictured it for years.

There would still be an abundance of man-size tasks to do, and worries to handle, and debts to meet; the same fields would call him to work every day, but there would be the cabin to come back to at night to dream and to love.

As usual his arguments brought him back in a circle. Of course Jimmy had been right in thinking the farm was the loneliest place in the world to go to alone, and of course, whatever Jimmy or anyone else thought, the dreams of the little house were all inspired by a vision that had hovered never far from the surface of his consciousness since it startled him out of his boyhood a few years before. As is usual with idealistic natures, he had endowed his idol with every grace he worshipped; it was strengthened and purified as his experience broadened, until no one else would ever have recognized it as belonging to the silky little kitten of a maid who handled her playthings with such soft-pawed heartlessness. The longer he stayed away from her the more she seemed set apart in a world of other interests and other friends. Now the opportunity had come to live in the same community, and while there were moments when the prospect rather terrified him, it never occurred to him to let it pa.s.s. He still wanted the farm, but the farm could wait; the human, jealous fear of losing her stamped out every other ambition. So it came about that the next few weeks found him moving into the county agricultural office.

The work habit is a powerful saving force to tide us sanely over periods of distracting interests. When Billy took on the robes of his office he was not by any means indifferent. He owed enough personally to the Representative in his home county to appreciate the bigness of the job, and his brief experience as a.s.sistant made it easy for him to go ahead with the general routine. Against this there was a troublesome undercurrent of dissatisfaction working, a half-ashamed feeling that he was making the position a means to an end. But because he had worked all his life he began at once to dig up something to do. The more he investigated the more he found to do, and the more he found to do the more he became fired with the possibilities of achievement.

For the first week he drove all day from one school to another, distributing settings of eggs and seed potatoes, and leaving with the children such scientific information as they might apply in directing the increase thereof. In the evenings he talked late with labor-hara.s.sed farmers who came to get him to negotiate for hired men, and remained to discuss other less urgent matters. As soon as he could see a free evening ahead, he phoned Miss Evison to ask if he might call.

He heard a dozen receivers come down while someone went to bring her, and when her voice did come over the wires the clear, smooth staccato was not rea.s.suring. It had the ring of a woman with much business to despatch, but who hadn't yet learned the art of handling each case whole-heartedly.

"Mr. Withers?" she repeated with doubtful inflection, then, "Oh, yes, I do remember. I believe I had you confused with someone else."

This was less complimentary than puzzling, since the local papers had advertised widely the coming of the new Agricultural Representative, in one case, by some strange accident, directly following an account of Miss Evison's card party in the "society column."

She would be glad to see him, however; the difficulty was just to find an evening free. She counted over her engagements, beginning at the end of the week and working back, and decided she could give him the next evening. He came away from the interview grateful, but unhappy. Two things troubled him. When she could be so charmingly cordial, why did she ever a.s.sume that tantalizing aloofness which made a man wonder how much discomfort his attention was giving her?

And why, when she must have known who he was, did she pretend to have forgotten? To his simple standards of honesty it was disappointing.

Then he reflected that he didn't understand girls--that, of course, a girl of her popularity must be bored to death with cases like his own and had a right to use her own methods of defence.

It was a maid in uniform who admitted Billy to the Evison home and ushered him into a parlor to wait for Miss Marjorie. As it was his first experience with this formality he was a little embarra.s.sed. The room itself was not just fashioned to put any one at ease. He didn't know much about house furnishings, but he judged from its fantastic twistings and carvings that this was copied from some antique historic period. He knew also that it must have cost about as much as he would have to spend in equipping a whole house. A level shaft of warm, yellow light from the sunset came through the curtain and touched a vase of long-stemmed jonquils, but the highly cut points of the gla.s.s caught the light and splintered it into a dazzling spectrum, leaving the delicate beauty of the flowers pale and lifeless.

Somehow the picture remained strangely in his mind when Marjorie came. There was something dazzling about her, just as there had been when she played a local magnet in the college ballroom, and it seemed to outshine the natural girlish sweetness which by reason of his own ideals and his lover's interpretation of a few of her pa.s.sing moods had grown into his thoughts of her. She greeted him with the a.s.sured graciousness cultivated of constant social experience that he knew nothing about. He was frankly embarra.s.sed and he didn't care. Weighed against her cool indifference, it seemed to save a remnant of reality in his dream.

The April evening out of doors was inviting. The night air was sweet with the perfume of budding orchards, the roads for miles around were smooth and damp, and the Department of Agriculture car was at their service. Billy considered her dress, doubtfully; very pretty it was, sheer and white, with little blue flowers sprinkled over it; very short, like a little girl's, showing white silk stockings dotted with the same blue flowers.

"I just wondered," he ventured, "if you'd care to wrap up and come for a drive?"

Her composure left her instantly. She drew in her breath in childish antic.i.p.ation.

"Down to the city?" she asked. "I haven't been there for ages.

They're playing The Follies to-night. Do you think we'd be in time if we hurried?"

A few minutes later she ran downstairs in her motoring outfit, followed by her mother. She was very proud of her mother, because, impressed by the striking resemblance, people always thought, "Just like the daughter will be twenty years from now." She was very pretty, willowy and girlish with a youthfulness that told of painstaking preservation, effusively gracious, in a subtly superior way, years of social practice in the same groove having equipped her with a supply of stock-phrases ready to be tripped off glibly to any occasion.

"You'll take good care of our little girl?" she said. "She doesn't make a practice of running off like this unchaperoned, but we want her to have a good time and it's really very dull for her here. Since Mr. Evison got the farming bug he has become a hopeless recluse. He runs out to the farm almost every day, and I tell him he'll soon be driving his own pigs in to the market." She laughed gaily at the idea, a silvery little descending scale, and Billy wondered why she should have bothered for him. "You're connected with the Farmers'

Inst.i.tute or something here yourself, aren't you?" she continued.

Billy explained as briefly as he could what he was trying to do, and received at the end of each department, the safe comment, "How interesting!"

Of course it wasn't interesting, as he told it. There's nothing interesting about dealing out setting eggs and potatoes to school children all day, and trying to round up elusive and indifferent farm laborers at night. Personally he saw something very much worth while beneath these externals, but weighed by her standards they shrank perceptibly. Not that he attached any importance to her judgment; only she was Marjorie's mother, and her opinion might matter a good deal.

Nature never intended a motorist to speed through the soft dusk of an April night in the country. The breath of the balm of Gilead tree, the scent of whitethorn blossoms, the rich, earthy odors from fresh-ploughed fields, were lost in a chill, damp wind driving in their faces; the blurry outlines of heavily ta.s.selled willows on the roadside, and lamplight pictures caught through the windows of farm houses--mothers bending over children at their lessons, or a late supper group where the day's work had been unusually long, all shot past like dizzy films on a crazy reel; the musical roar of high, boiling creeks, and the sleepy chirp of nesting birds were drowned in the pounding of the engine. It wasn't the hilarious joy of speeding, just the strained sitting-tight and making time. There was a rough, noisy climb up a stony hill, and the city glittered in a bowl below.

They coasted down silently, and when Billy could take his eyes from the wheel, to fairly look at the girl, he found her bright with excitement.

"I wonder if I'll see anyone I know," she said.

The play was not inspiring, to make the best of it. This didn't matter much to Marjorie, because she had not forgotten her opera gla.s.ses, and seemed to find a wonderful interest in searching the audience. Suddenly she brought the gla.s.ses down, and directed her attention solely to Billy and the stage. Billy didn't look near the stage much; his knowledge of plays was limited, but critical, and on the night when the hope of four years had its first gift of reality, it would have seemed a prodigal waste to give his attention to stage fiction. He found quite heaven enough for the present in her nearness, the beauty of her white, regular profile, and her adorable way of leaning the merest trifle over the arm-rest between them.

When it was over, and the car was gliding quietly over the road home, she slid down snugly in the seat like a satisfied child, and he thought, with large plans for the future, how little it took to make her happy. He didn't know, of course, that the satisfaction of her evening had begun when her gla.s.ses caught the attention of a very desirable acquaintance whose interest of late seemed to require some stimulation. If she had had all gifts of the G.o.ds at her command, nothing, she reflected, could be more effective than to be seen with Billy with his good looks and the unaccountable impression he gave of "being somebody." None of her friends would know who he was, of course, and she didn't intend that they ever should know. Altogether she had spent a very profitable evening. Then there was something very gratifying about Billy's company; he gave so much and asked so little. She was accustomed to lavish attention from other men, but none of them ever offered her the deference of a saint and the indulgence of an irresponsible child. It was an understood part of their social code that she work her resources to the limit to be entertaining, that she make the most of her beauty, that she play the game for what it was worth. With this she had an easier trick of her own--to set them off against each other through the gentle art of inviting opposition.

The balmy softness of the evening had gone and the air held the chill of midnight. The lights were out in the houses except an occasional night-burning lamp turned low in a kitchen. They saw one bent, white-bearded old man with a lantern coming from the barn, presumably making his anxious nightly rounds to the sheep-fold during lambing time. Marjorie roused from her reverie and shivered a little.

"How terribly lonesome," she said. "I don't know how they stand it to live here all the time, but I suppose some people are made for that sort of thing."

"I suppose so. I'd rather farm than anything else."

"You would? Of course you mean to manage a farm, or to advise other people like you're doing now. That's different."

Billy smiled.

"You don't advise people much at this job," he said. "You just try to get the community in line with whatever service the Department of Agriculture (which is their own) has to give them." And then because he didn't want her to have any illusions as to the dignity of his work he outlined in detail some of its humblest phases.

"How very funny," she laughed. "You must be very much amused sometimes, but it must be an awful bore, too, dealing with that cla.s.s of people day after day. Someone's generally at home at our house. I know you'd like Dad and I hope we'll see heaps of you."

"That's very kind," he said, genuinely grateful, "but I didn't mean that I find it tiresome at all. You see it's different when you've always been a farmer yourself, and I'd like to go back to real practical farming on a place of my own."

"Yes?" she inquired, beginning to get his viewpoint. "I know a girl friend of mine--and they're very nice people--they have a farm that they live on the year round, and all summer her father wears a white suit and goes right out among the men."

Then Billy must have touched something, for the car shot out suddenly, and they didn't discuss things agricultural any more. He had about decided that the case was hopeless.

The lights were still bright in the house when they drove up, but she led him around to a side door opening into her own little sitting-room. Someone had just kindled a fire on the hearth, and slipping out of her coat she dropped down on a stool. Billy looked down at her with a tenderness that he wouldn't have dared to let her see, then his eyes wandered to a few of the room's features that clamored for attention.

It was decidedly a girl's sanctum. The one soft-shaded light was turned low, but the flickering blaze from the fire showed the walls gay with pennants. On the mantel, the little French writing-desk, and here and there in odd s.p.a.ces on the walls were photographs; she seemed to have a preference for college graduates in gown and sheep-skin and the smiling a.s.surance that usually goes with a degree before experience has tested its infallibility as a talisman. On a table in the centre of the room, a vase of tall American Beauties served, no doubt, to keep green the memory of some very ardent or wealthy admirer.

A less prejudiced person might have seen in the collection of trophies something in common with the scalps decorating the walls of an Indian tepee, but to Billy it only emphasized his infinitesimal place in her world. There was something very sober and kind in his eyes when they came back again to the thoughtful face with its starry eyes and childish, pursed-up mouth and the mysterious touch that comes from the glow and shadows of the firelight. He thought how sweet and becoming this seriousness was, compared with her lighter, irresponsible moods, and he looked ahead to the time when life would have taught her more of its meaning. Then the little Swiss clock chimed out twelve and he came to apologetically.

"When may I see you again?" he asked.

She drew her brows together and counted on her fingers a list of engagements for a week.

"You'd better call me up," she said. "I'm never sure of what I want to do for a day ahead."

It was the beginning of many such evenings, distracting, uncertain, alluring but promising nothing, and the agricultural office suffered accordingly.