The young girl whose future had been settled down at the corners, came along the road next morning toward the Fairchild house, all unconscious of her destiny. She lived in a small, old-fashioned farm-dwelling back in the fields, alone with her grandmother, and although there was a bitter feud between the heads of the two houses, it had not stopped her from being a familiar and helpful figure in her uncle’s homestead.

Annie Fairchild was a country girl in some senses of the term, calm-faced, clear-eyed, self-reliant among her friends, but with a curious disposition toward timidity in the presence of strangers. She was held to be too serious and “school-ma’am-ish” for pleasant company by most rural maidens of her acquaintance, and the few attempts of young farmers of the country-side to establish friendly relations with her had not been crowned with conspicuous success. It could scarcely be said that she was haughty or cold; no one could demonstrate in detail that her term of schooling in a far-off citified seminary had made her proud or uncivil; but still she had no intimates.

This was the more marked from the fact that she was a pretty girl—or if not precisely pretty, very attractive and winning in face. No other girl of the neighborhood had so fine and regular a profile, or such expressive, dark eyes, or so serenely intelligent an expression. It had been whispered at one time that Reuben Tracy, the school-master, was likely to make a match of it with her, but this had faded away again as a rootless rumor; by this time everybody on the Burfield road tacitly understood that eventually she was to be the wife of her cousin Seth, when it “came time for the two farms to join.” And she had grown accustomed long since to the furtive, half-awed, half-covetous look which men cast upon her, without suspecting the spirit of reluctant renunciation underlying it.

She met Milton Squires on the road, close in front of the Fairchild’s house, this morning, and, nodding to him, passed on. She did not particularly note the gaze he bent upon her as she went by, and which followed her afterward, almost to the Fairchild gate. If she had done so, and could have read all its meaning, she would not have gone on with so unruffled a face, for it was a look to frighten an honest young woman—an intent, hungry, almost wolfish look, unrelieved by so much as a glimmer of the light of manliness.

But she was alike unconscious of his thoughts and of the gossip he had heard at the corners. Certainly no listener who followed her to the gate, where she encountered Seth at work screwing on a new hinge, would have gathered from the tone or words of the greeting on either side any testimony to confirm the common supposition that they were destined for each other.

“Good morning, Seth,” she said, halting while he dragged the great gate open for her, “you’re all through breakfast, I suppose?”

“No, I think Albert and his wife are at the table still. We didn’t call them when the rest got up, you know. They’re not used to country ways.”

“Anybody else here?”

“No, except John.”

“Oh, I’m so glad he came. That Lize Wilkins has been telling everybody he wouldn’t come on Sabrina’s account. And it would have looked so bad.”

“Yes, Lize Wilkins talks too much. All John ever said was that he wouldn’t stay here in the house any more than he could help. It’s too bad he can’t get along better with Aunt; it would make things so much pleasanter.”

“How’s your father, Seth? He seemed at first to take it pretty hard.”

“He appeared a little brighter yesterday, after Albert came, but he’s very poorly this morning. Poor old man, it makes a sad difference with him—more I suppose than with us boys, even with me, who never have been away from her hardly for a day.”

“Yes, Seth, a boy outgrows his mother, I suppose, but for an old couple who have lived together forty years a separation like this must be awful. I shall go up to the house now.”

Seth followed her with his eyes as she walked up the road, past the old-fashioned latticed front door with its heavy fold of crape hanging on the knocker, and turned from sight at the corner of the house; and the look in his face was soft and admiring, even if it was hardly loverlike. In his trouble—and he felt the bereavement most keenly—it seemed restful and good to have such a girl as Annie about, Indeed, a vague thought that she had never before seemed so sweet and likeable came to him, as he turned again to the hinge, and lightened his heart perceptibly, for almost the last words his mother had spoken to him had been of his future with Annie as his wife.

“You will have the farm before long, Seth,” she said, smiling faintly as he stroked her pale hair—somehow to the last it never grew grey—and looked at her through boyish tears, “and Annie will bring you the Warren farm. Her grandmother and I have talked it over many a time. Annie’s a good girl, there’s no better, and she’ll make my boy a good, true wife.”

For a year or two back Seth had understood in a nebulous way that his parents had an idea of his eventually marrying Annie, but his mother’s words still came to him in the form of a surprise. First, it had been far from his thoughts that old Mrs. Warren, Annie’s invalid grandmother, would listen to such a thing, much less plan it. There was a bitterness of long standing between the two families, he knew. His father’s younger brother—a halfbrother—named William Fairchild, had married Mrs. Warren’s only daughter under circumstances which he had never heard detailed, but which at least had enraged the mother. Both William and his wife had died, out West he believed, years and years ago, leaving only this girl, Annie Fairchild, who came an orphan to the grandmother she had never seen before, and was reared by her. In this Mrs. Warren and his aunt Sabrina had found sufficient occasion for a quarrel, lasting ever since he could remember, and as he had always understood from his aunt that her battle was in defense of the whole family, he had taken it for granted that he not less than the other Fairchilds was included in Mrs. Warren’s disfavor. He recalled, now, indeed, having heard Annie say once or twice that her grandmother liked him; but this he had taken in a negative way, as if the grandmother of the Capulets had remarked that of all the loathed Montagus perhaps young Romeo was personally the least offensive to her sight.

And second, he was far from being in a Romeo’s condition of heart and mind. He was not in love with Annie for herself—much less for the Warren farm. To state plainly what Seth had not yet mustered courage to say in entire frankness even to himself, he hated farming, and rebelled against the idea of following in his father’s footsteps. And the dreams of a career elsewhere which occupied the mutinous thoughts Seth concealed under so passive an exterior had carried him far away from the plan of an alliance with the nice sort of country cousin who would eventually own the adjoining farm. So in this sense, too, his mothers dying words were a surprise—converting into a definite and almost sacred desire what he had supposed to be merely a shapeless fancy.

Not all this crossed his mind, as he watched Annie till she disappeared, and then turned back to his work. But the sight of her had been pleasant to him, and her voice had sounded very gentle and yet full of the substance of womanliness—and perhaps his poor, dear mother’s plan for him, after all, was the best.

The gate swinging properly at last, there was an end to Seth’s out-door tasks, and he started toward the house. The thought that he would see Annie within was distinct enough in his mind, almost, to constitute a motive for his going. At the very door he encountered his brother Albert’s wife, coming out, and stopped.

Isabel Fairchild was far from deserving, at least as a woman, the epithets with which Aunt Sabrina mentally coupled her girlhood. There was nothing impertinent or ill-behaved about her appearance, certainly, as she stood before Seth, and with a faint smile bade him good-morning.

She was above the medium height, as woman’s stature goes, and almost plump; her hair, much of which was shown in front by the pretty Parisian form of straw hat she wore, was very light in color; her eyes were blue, a light, noticeable blue. She wore some loose kind of black and gray morning dress, with an extra fold falling in graceful lines from her shoulders to her train, like a toga, and she carried a dainty parasol, also of black and gray, like the ribbons on her dark hat. To Seth’s eyes she had seemed yesterday, when he saw her for the first time, a very embodiment of the luxury, beauty, refinement of city life—and how much more so now, when her dingy traveling raiment had given place to this most engaging garb, so subdued, yet so lovely. It seemed to him that his sister-in-law was quite the most attractive woman he had ever seen.

“I thought of going for a little stroll,” she said, again with the faint, half-smile. “It is so charming outside, and so blue and depressing in the house. Can I walk along there through the orchard now?—I used to when I was here as a girl, I know—and won’t you come with me? I’ve scarcely had a chance for a word with you since we came.”

The invitation was pleasant enough to Seth, but he looked down deprecatingly at his rough chore clothes, and wondered whether he ought to accept it or not.

“Why, Seth, the idea of standing on ceremony with me! As if we hadn’t played together here as children—to say nothing of my being your sister now!”

They had started now toward the orchard, and she continued:—

“Do you know, it seems as if I didn’t know anybody here but you—and even you almost make a stranger out of me. Poor Uncle Lemuel, he is so broken-down that he scarcely remembers me, and of course your Aunt and I couldn’t be expected to get very intimate—you remember our dispute? Then John, he’s very pleasant, and all that, but he isn’t at all like the John I used to look up to so, the summer I was here. But you—you have hardly changed a bit. Of course,” she made haste to add, for Seth’s face did not reflect unalloyed gratification at this, “you have grown manly and big, and all that, but you haven’t changed in your expression or manner. It’s almost ten years—and I should have known you anywhere. But John has changed—he’s more like a city man, or rather a villager, a compromise between city and country.”

“Yes, I’m a countryman through and through, I suppose,” said Seth, with something very like a sigh.

“John has seen a good deal of the world they tell me, and been on papers in large cities. I wonder how he can content himself with that little weekly in Thessaly after that.”

“I don’t think John has much ambition,” answered Seth, meditatively. “He doesn’t seem to care much how things go, if he only has the chance to say what he wants to say in print. It doesn’t make any difference to him, apparently, whether all New York State reads what he writes, or only thirty or forty fellows in Dearborn County—he’s just as well satisfied. And yet he’s a very bright man, too. He might have gone to the Assembly last fall, if he could have bid against Elhanan Pratt. He will go sometime, probably.”

“Why, do you have an auction here for the Assembly?”

“Oh, no, but the man who’s willing to pay a big assessment into the campaign fund can generally shut a poor candidate out John didn’t seem to mind much about being frozen out though—not half so much as I did, for him. Everybody in Thessaly knows him and likes him and calls him ‘John,’ and that seems to be the height of his ambition. I can’t imagine a man of his abilities being satisfied with so limited a horizon.”

“And, you, Seth, what is your horizon like?” asked Isabel.

They had entered the orchard path, now, and the apple blossoms close above them filled the May morning air with that sweet spring perfume which seems to tell of growth, harvest, the fruition of hope.

“Oh, I’m picked out to be a countryman all the days of my life I suppose.” There was the sigh again, and a tinge of bitterness in his tone, as well.

“Oh, I hope not—that is, if you don’t want to be. Oh, it must be such a dreary life! The very thought of it sets my teeth on edge. The dreadful people you have to know: men without an idea beyond crops and calves and the cheese-factory; women slaving their lives out doing bad cooking, mending for a houseful of men, devoting their scarce opportunities for intercourse with other women to the weakest and most wretched gossip; coarse servants who eat at the table with their employers and call them by their Christian names; boys whose only theory about education is thrashing the school teacher, if it is a man, or breaking her heart by their mean insolence if it is a woman; and girls brought up to be awkward gawks, without a chance in life, since the brighter and nicer they are the more they will suffer from marriage with men mentally beneath them—that is, if they don’t become sour old maids. I don’t wonder you hate it all, Seth.”

“You talk like a book,” said Seth, in tones of unmistakable admiration. “I didn’t suppose any woman could talk like that.”

“I talk as I feel always, when I come into contact with country life, and I get, angry with people who maunder about its romantic and picturesque side. Where is it, I should, like to know?”

“Oh, it isn’t all so bad as you paint it, perhaps, Isabel. Of course——“—here he hesitated a little—“you don’t quife see it at its best here, you know. Father hasn’t been a first-rate manager, and things have kin all so bad as you paint it, perhaps, Isabel. Of course——” here he hesitated a little—“you don’t quife see it at its best here, you know. Father hasn’t been a first-rate manager, and things have kind o’ run down.”

“No, Seth, it isn’t that; the trail of the serpent is over it all—rich and poor, big and little. The Nineteenth century is a century of cities; they have given their own twist to the progress of the age—and the farmer is almost as far out of it as if he lived in Alaska. Perhaps there may have been a time when a man could live in what the poet calls daily communion with Nature and not starve his mind and dwarf his soul, but this isn’t the century.”

“But Webster was a farm boy, and so was Lincoln and Garfield and Jackson—almost all our great men. Hardly any of them are born in cities, you will find.”

“Oh, the country is just splendid to be born in, no doubt of that; but after you are born, get out of it as soon as you can.”

“I don’t know as I can leave Father very well,” said Seth slowly, and as if in deep thought.

They walked to the end of the pasture beyond the orchard, to within view of the spot where all the Fairchilds for three generations had been laid, and where, among the clustering sweet-briars and wild-strawberry vines Milton had only yesterday dug a new grave. The sight recalled to both another subject, and no more was said of country life as they returned to the house. Indeed, little was said of any sort, for Seth had a thinking mood on. Nothing was very clear in his mind perhaps, but more distinctly than anything else he felt that existence on the farm had all at once become intolerable.