"Bill's still on the front porch," said Ma Norton as they reached the Norton driveway. "Do go speak to him, Lydia. He's amiable to-night, but he's been like a bear for months."

Billy's mother went on into the kitchen entrance and Lydia went over to the dim figure on the steps.

"Your mother told me to speak to you," she said meekly.

"I heard her." Billy gave a low laugh. "Come up here in the shadow, sweetheart, and tell me if you ever saw such a moonlit and starlit night."

But Lydia did not stir. "Honestly, I don't dare look at the sky any longer. I have a quiz in rhetoric to-morrow and I've _got_ to get my mind on it."

Billy came down the steps. "Then I'll walk home with you."

"No, you won't. I--I just came over to see if it's all real. Just to touch you and then run back. I'd rather you didn't walk back with me."

The night was brilliant and Billy, responding to some little pet.i.tioning note in Lydia's voice, did not offer to touch her but stood looking down at the sweet dim face turned up to his. She lifted her hand, that thin hand with the work calluses on it, and ran it over his cheeks, brushed her cheek against his shoulder, and then ran away.

She finished her studying and went to bed early, only to lie awake for hours. At last, she crept out of bed and as once before, she clasped her hands and lifted her face to the heavens. "Thank you, G.o.d!" she whispered. Then she went to sleep.

The next night, Kent came out to the cottage. Lydia dreaded his coming so little that she was surprised. Yet this day had been one of continual surprise to her. She had wakened to a dawn of robin songs, and had dressed with an answering song in her own heart. She was as one who had never known sorrow or anxiety. Her whole future lay before her, a clear and un.o.bstructed pathway.

For Lydia had found herself. She was a creature to whom a great love and devotion were essential as motive forces. In turn she had given this, in childish form, to her mother, to little Patience and to Levine. One by one these had been taken from her and she had struggled to give this devotion to Kent, but she could not give where there was no understanding.

And now she saw that for years it had been Billy. Billy who combined all the best of what her mother, her baby sister, and Levine had meant to her, with something greatly more--the divinity of pa.s.sion--a thing she could not understand, yet that had created a new world for her.

Kent tossed his hat on the couch and shook his head at Amos. "Dave's not going to get away with it. He's got some kind of a row going with the Whiskey people and he says we might as well count him out. I don't know what to do now."

Amos groaned. "Lord, what luck!"

"Don't let it worry you," said Lydia calmly. "I made up my mind to-day that I'd go ahead and enter on that land just as other folks are doing, in the good old way. I'm going to make a farm up there, that will blot out all memory of what Mr. Levine did. But I'm going to work for it as a homesteader has to and not take any advantage through Mr. Levine's graft."

Kent looked up crossly. "Oh, Lydia, for heaven's sake, don't begin that again!"

Lydia crossed the room and put her hand on Kent's shoulder as he sat on the couch.

"Kent, look at me," she said, then, very quietly, "I'm going to homestead that land." There was no escaping the note of finality in her decision.

Kent's face whitened. He looked up steadily at Lydia. Amos and Lizzie sensed that they were spectators of a deeper crisis than they understood and they watched breathlessly. Kent rose slowly. The sweat stood on his forehead.

"You know what that means, as far as I'm concerned," he said.

Lydia, chin up, gaze never more clearly blue, nodded.

"Yes, Kent, but we never would have been happy. You and Margery were meant for each other, anyhow."

"Lydia! Lydia!" exclaimed Kent hoa.r.s.ely, half angrily, half pleadingly.

"No, you won't feel badly, when you think it over. Go to Margery now and tell her, Kent."

Kent picked up his cap. "I--I don't understand," he said. Then, angrily, "You aren't treating me right, Lydia. I'll talk to you when I'm not so sore," and he walked out of the house.

Lydia turned to Amos and Lizzie. "There," she said, happily, "I've got Kent settled for life!"

Amos sank into his armchair. "Lydia, have you lost your mind!" he groaned.

"No, I've found it, Daddy. Poor Dad, don't look as if you'd fathered a lunatic!"

Amos shook his head.

"Daddy, let's homestead that land! Let's quit this idea of getting something by graft. Let's do like our forefathers did. Let's homestead that land! Let's earn it by farming it."

Lydia's father looked at her, long and meditatively. He was pretty well discouraged about the probability of ever getting a clear t.i.tle to the land through Kent or Marshall. And the longer he looked at Lydia, the more his mind reverted to New England, to old tales of the farm on which he and his ancestors had been bred.

"A man with three hundred and twenty acres of land is a power in the community," he said, suddenly.

"Oh, yes, Dad!" cried Lydia.

"You never know what a feeling of independence is," said Lizzie, "till you own land and raise wheat."

Amos stared out the door into the darkness. Little by little Lydia saw creeping into his face new lines of determination, a new sort of pride that the thought of the selling of the lands had not put there. He cleared his throat.

"Hang it, Lydia, I'm not as hard as you think I am. I want you to be happy. And I'm not so d.a.m.ned old as you think I am. I'm good for homesteading, if you and Liz are. A farmer with three hundred and twenty acres! G.o.d!"

Lydia nodded. Amos began to walk the floor. "I'm still a young man.

If I had the backing that land gives a man, I could clean out a lot of rottenness in the State. Even if I only did it by showing what a man with a clean record could make of himself."

"That's just the point," cried Lydia eagerly, "and your record wouldn't have been clean, if you'd gotten it through Marshall."

"What young men need nowadays," Amos went on, "is to get back to the old idea of land ownership. Three hundred and twenty acres! Lydia, why can't I enter on it to-morrow?"

"Why not?" asked Lydia.

"If I take Brown's offer for the cottage, it would leave us enough to get a team and I bet I could hire a tractor to get to the cleared portion of it, this Fall. A hundred acres are clear, you know. I might as well quit the factory now, eh, Lydia?"

With a laugh that had a sob in it, Lydia kissed her father and whirled out the door. Billy was coming in at the gate. She flew down to seize his hand and turn him toward the road.

"Let's walk! I've such quant.i.ties to tell you!"

Billy turned obediently, but paused in the shadow of the pine. "Lydia, I can't tell you what it means to me. No matter what bigger things may seem to happen to me, nothing can equal the things I've felt and dreamed to-day."

Then he put his arms about Lydia and kissed her, and she put her arms about his neck and laid her head against his shoulder. They stood thus motionless while the pine whispered above them. And in the intensity of that embrace all the griefs of Lydia's life were hallowed and made purposeful.

"Lydia," said Billy, "I want to tell Mother and Dad. Will you come over home with me, now?"

"Yes," replied Lydia, "and then we must tell my father and Lizzie. Oh, Billy, I forgot," as they started down the road, "I've decided to homestead that land."

"But--why, Lydia dear, you're going to be a lawyer's wife. For heaven's sake, let that beastly land go."

"No, I'm going to be a pioneer's wife!"

There was a little pause, then Billy laughed uncertainly. "Well, I'm not going to talk about it to-night. I'm in a frame of mind to-night where I'd promise you to be an Indian chief if you ask it. Mother and Dad are in the kitchen."