"You goin\'?" called Isabel Wilde from the road, to Ardelia, sitting forlornly on the front steps.

It was seven o\'clock of a wonderful August morning, with all the bloom of summer and the lull of fall. Isabel was a dark, strong young creature who walked with her head in the air, and Ardelia, pretty and frail and perfect in her own small way, looked like a child in comparison. Isabel had been down to carry a frosted cake to her little niece Ellen, for Ellen\'s share of the picnic at Poole\'s Woods. It was Fairfax day, when once a year all Fairfax went to the spot where the first settlers drank of the "b\'ilin\' spring" on their way to a clearing.

"You goin\'?" she called again, imperiously, and Ardelia answered, as if from some unwillingness:—

"I guess so."

"Now what do you want to say that for?" rang her mother\'s voice from an upper window, where, trusting to her distance from the road, she thought she could speak her mind without [266]Isabel\'s hearing. "You know you ain\'t. Oliver\'s gone off to work in the acre lot."

Isabel had heard. She stood regarding Ardelia thoughtfully, her black brows drawn together and her teeth set upon one full lip.

"Ardelia," she called softly, after that moment of consideration.

"What is it?" came Ardelia\'s unwilling voice, the tone of one who has emotion to conceal.

"Come here a minute."

Ardelia rose slowly and came down the path. She was a wisp of a creature, perfectly fashioned and very appealing in her blond prettiness. Isabel eyed her sharply and judged from certain signs that she had at least meant to go. She had on her light-blue dimity with the Hamburg frills, and her sorrowful face indicated that she had donned it to no avail.

"What time you goin\', \'Delia?" asked Isabel quietly, over the fence.

Ardelia could not look at her. She stood with bent head, busily arranging a spray of coreopsis that fell out over the path, and Isabel was sure her eyes were wet.

"I don\'t know," she said evasively; "maybe not very early."

Isabel was looking at her tenderly. It was not a personal tenderness so much as a softness born out of peculiar circumstance. She knew [267]exactly why she was sorry for Ardelia in a way no one else could be. Yet there seemed to be no present means of helping her.

"Well," she said, turning away, "maybe I\'ll see you there. Say, \'Delia!" A sudden thought was brightening her eyes to even a kinder glow. "If you haven\'t planned any other way, s\'pose you go with us. Jim Bryant\'s goin\' to take me, and he\'d admire to have you, too. What say, \'Delia?"

Ardelia\'s delicate figure straightened, and now she looked at Isabel. There was something new in her gentle glance. It looked like dignity.

"I\'m much obliged to you, Isabel," she returned stiffly. "If I go, I\'ve arranged to go another way."

"All right," said Isabel. "Well, I guess I\'ll be gettin\' along."

But before she was half-way to the turning of the road she heard Mrs. Drake\'s shrill voice from the upper window:—

"He\'s begun to dig, \'Delia. Oliver\'s begun to dig. He won\'t stop for no picnics, I can tell ye that."

It seemed to Isabel as if the world were very much out of tune for delicate girls like \'Delia who wanted pleasure and could not have it. She paused a moment at the crossing of the roads, the frown of consideration again upon her brow. [268]"Makes me mad," she said to herself, but half absently, as if that were not the issue at all. Then she turned her back on her own home-road and the house where her starched dress was awaiting her, and where Jim Bryant would presently call to take her to Poole\'s Woods, and walked briskly down the other way.

Isabel stopped at the acre field, but she had no idea of what she meant to say when she was there. Oliver was digging potatoes, as she knew he would be, and she recognized the bend of the back, the steady stress of one who toiled too long and too unrestingly, so that his very pose spoke like a lifelong purpose. She stood still for a moment or two before he saw her, gazing at him. Old tenderness awoke in her, old angers also. She remembered how he had made her suffer in the obstinate course of his own will, and how free she had felt when at last she had broken their engagement and seen him drift under Ardelia\'s charm. But he would always mean something to her more than other men, in a fashion quite peculiar to himself. She had agonized too much over him. She had protected him too long against the faults of his own nature, and now she could not be content unless, for his sake, she protected Ardelia a little also. Suddenly he lifted himself to rest his back, and saw her. They stood confronting each other, each [269]with a sense of familiarity and pain. Oliver was a handsome fellow, tall, splendidly made, with rich, warm coloring. He looked kindly, but stolidly set in his own way.

"That you, Isabel?" he asked awkwardly.

They had met only for a passing word since the breaking of their troth.

"Yes," said Isabel briefly. "I\'ve got to speak to you. Wait a minute. I\'ll come in by the bars, and you meet me under the old cherry. It\'ll be shady there."

She turned back to the bars, ducked deftly under, and, holding her skirts from the rough land, made her way to the cherry in the corner of the lot. Oliver wonderingly followed. She felt again that particular anger she reserved for him, when she saw him stalking along, hoe in hand. It was a settled tread, with little spring in it, and for the moment it seemed to her a prophecy of what it would be when he was an old man, with a staff instead of the hoe. She was waiting for him under the tree.

"Oliver," she began, speaking out of an impulse hardly yet approved by judgment, "you goin\' to the picnic?"

Oliver looked at her in wonder.

"Why, no," said he slowly.

"Didn\'t you promise \'Delia you\'d go?"

"No, I guess not. I said mebbe I\'d be round [270]if I had time, but I ain\'t found the time. These \'taters have got to be dug."

The red had surged into Isabel\'s full cheeks. She looked an eloquent remonstrance.

"Oliver," she said impetuously, "\'Delia\'s sittin\' on the front steps, waitin\' for you to come. She\'ll be terrible disappointed if you put her aside like this."

Oliver took off his hat and passed a hand over his forehead. She noticed, as she had a hundred times, how fine his hair was at the roots, and was angry again because he would not, with his exasperating ways, let any woman love him as she might. He seemed to have nothing to say, but she knew the picture of lone \'Delia sitting on the steps was far from moving him. It did cause him an honest trouble, for he was kind; but not for that would he postpone his work.

"Oliver," she continued, "did you ever know what \'twas that made me tell you we must break off bein\'—engaged?"

He was looking at her earnestly. His own mind seemed returning to a past ache and loss.

"I understood," he said at length—"I understood \'twas because you kinder figured it out we shouldn\'t get along well."

She stood there, a frowning figure, her lips [271]compressed, her eyes stormy. Then she turned to him, all frankness and candor.

"Oliver," she said, "I never give you any reasons. What\'s the use? I was terrible fond of you. I was. I don\'t know \'s any girl ought to say that when you\'re engaged to somebody else, and I\'m engaged myself, and happy as the day is long. But what \'twas—what come between us—you never made me have a good time."

He stood leaning upon his hoe, very handsome, very stern in his attention to her, and, as she could see, entirely surprised. The child in her, that rare, ingenuous part she kept in hiding, came out and spoke:—

"Why, Oliver, we never had any fun! You were awful good to me. You\'d worry yourself to pieces if I was sick; but we never had more\'n one or two good times together, long \'s it lasted, and them I planned. And I got terrible tired of it, and I says to myself, \'If it\'s so now, when we\'re only goin\' together, it\'ll be a million times worse when we\'re married.\' And then when you took a fancy to \'Delia, I was real pleased. I says to myself. \'Maybe she\'ll know how to manage him. Maybe \'twas somethin\' in me,\' I says, \'that made him not want to have a good time with me, and maybe now \'twon\'t be so.\' And when I see you goin\' on the same old way, workin\' from mornin\' till night, I says to myself, [272]\'Something\' \'s got to be done. I ain\'t goin\' to have \'Delia put upon like this.\' \'Tain\'t because it\'s \'Delia. I ain\'t so terrible fond of \'Delia, only we went to school together. But don\'t you see, Oliver, I couldn\'t say it for myself? No girl could. But I can for \'Delia."

"Well," said Oliver, "well." He was entirely amazed. Then as he looked at the field, a general maxim occurred to him, and he remarked, "The farm\'s got to be carried on."

"No, it ain\'t, either," said Isabel, with a passionate earnestness, "not as you do it. Other folks don\'t work themselves to death the way you do, and you\'re forehanded too. It\'s because you like it. You like it better\'n anything else. You were born so, and it\'s just as bad as bein\' born with an appetite for drink or anything else."

"I never knew you felt so, Isabel," he said gravely. "I don\'t see why you didn\'t speak on \'t before when—old times."

"I\'d rather have died," she declared passionately. "Any girl would. \'Delia would. Maybe she\'ll cry all the afternoon if she finds she ain\'t goin\'; but if you call over there Saturday night, butter won\'t melt in her mouth. She won\'t tell you how \'shamed she is before folks to think you didn\'t take the trouble to go with her. Anyways, she won\'t if she\'s any kind of a girl."

Oliver had plucked some wisps of grass from [273]the edge of turf under the tree, and he was wiping his hoe thoughtfully. Isabel began to laugh. She was trembling all over from old angers and the excitement of her new daring, and she kept on laughing.

"One thing," she said, as she brushed away the tears with an impatient hand, "\'Delia\'s mother\'s got her spy-glass on us this very minute. What under the sun she thinks I\'m here for I don\'t know and I don\'t much care. You can tell her anything you\'re a mind to. Only you come. Come now, Oliver, you come!"

Oliver quite meekly hung up his hoe in the branches and waited for her to lead the way.

"I\'ve got to ketch the colt," he said. "Mother took Dolly to go after aunt Huldy. Mother\'s always made a good deal o\' the picnic."

There was a beat of hoofs upon the road, and Isabel, her present mission stricken from her mind, turned to see. It was Jim Bryant, driving by to call for her.

"My soul!" she said, under her breath.

"What is it, Isabel?" Oliver was asking her, with concern.

She had caught herself up, and she laughed in a sorry mirth.

"Nothin\'," she said. "You catch the colt."

They walked out of the field in silence. At the stone wall he paused.

[274]"Isabel," he said solemnly,—and with that double sense she had had all through the interview, she thought this was the look she had seen on his grandfather\'s face when he led in prayer,—"Isabel, you\'d ought to spoke to me before. Why, I\'ve been tryin\' to get ahead so \'s to make her comfortable, when—we set up housekeepin\'."

Isabel was not sure whether he meant her or Ardelia. At any rate, it was the woman to whom he was determined to be loyally kind. She also paused and looked at him with earnest eyes. It was the last moment in all her life to convince and alter him.

"Don\'t you see, Oliver," she urged, "that\'s what folks are together for, chiefly, to have a good time. I don\'t mean they\'ve ............