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“What with all the other things I gotta do, I ain’t got round to paintin’ yet; but I low as how this comin’ fall or spring mebbe I’ll be able to do sumpin’ on it, if my wife’s health keeps up. These chickens are a sight o’ bother at times, an’ we’re takin’ on another cow next week, an’ some pigs.”

I thought of those glum days when he was still hauling sand and stone in his squeaky wagon.

And then came Ida, big, bony, silent, diffident, red-tanned by sun and weather, to whom this narrow fifteen-acre world was no doubt a paradise. Love had at last come to her. It being a Sunday afternoon, the only appropriate time to make a call in the farming world, when presumably the chores of the week were out of the way, still she was astir among her pots and pans, though she came forward and made us welcome in her shy way. Wouldn’t we sit down? Wouldn’t we have a glass of milk? The worthy Widdle, resuming his seat on the porch, went on smoking and dreaming and surveying his possessions. If ever a man looked at ease, he did, and his wife seemed to take great satisfaction in his comfort. She smiled as we talked to him or answered in monosyllables when we addressed her, having been so long repressed by her father, as I assumed, that she could not talk.

But my relative had called my attention to one thing which I was to note, and that was that despite the fact she was within three months of an accouchement, we would find her working as usual, which was true. She was obviously as near her day as that, and yet during our visit she went to look after the pigs and chickens, the while milord smoked on and talked. His one theme was his farm, his proposed addition to his chicken-coop, a proposed enlargement of his pig-pen, the fact that his farm would be better if he could afford to take over the five acres to the east, and so on. Several times he referred to his tour of the West and the fact that he had “served his time” on the Denver & Rio Grande.

After that I could not help thinking of him from time to time, for he illustrated to me again so clearly the casual and accidental character of so many things in nature, the fact that fortune, strength, ease, beauty, fame, any power of the mind or body, come in the main to the individual as gifts and are so often not even added to or developed by any effort of his. Here was this vague, casual weakling drawn back to this region by a kind of sixth sense which regulated his well-being, and after he had failed in all other things, only to find this repressed and yet now free victim, his wife, seeking, by the aid of her small means, some satisfaction in the world of love through him. But did he really care for her?I sometimes asked myself. Could he?Had he the capacity, the power of appreciation and understanding which any worth-while love requires? I wondered.

III

The events of the following September seemed to answer the question in a rather definite way, and yet I am not so sure that they did, either. Life is so casual; love, or the matter of affinity, such an indefinite thing with so many!I was sleeping in a large room which faced the front of the house — a room which commanded the slope of a hill and a distant and splendid valley beyond. Outside was a number of evergreens and horse-chestnuts that rustled and whispered in the slightest breeze. At two or three of the clock of one of those fine moonlit nights I heard a knocking below and a voice calling: