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"Sure enough. If I only had you for a mother-in-law–that’s why I’m so poor. Nobody to keep me moving. If I had someone to do the talking for me, I’d work. " He grinned broadly and drove out.

His irritation led him to say some things to Nina which he would not have thought of saying the day before. She had been working in the field and had dropped her hoe to see him.

"Say, Nina, I wouldn’t work outdoors such a day as this if I was you. I’d tell the old man to go to thunder, and I’d go in and wash up and look decent Yankee women don’t do that kind of work, and your old dad’s rich; no use of your sweatin’ around a cornfield with a hoe in your hands. I don’t like to see a woman goin’ round without stockin’s and her hands all chapped and calloused. It ain’t accordin’ to Hoyle. No, sir! I wouldn’t stand it. I’d serve an injunction on the old man right now. "

A dull, slow flush crept into the girl’s face, and she put one hand over the other as they rested on the fence. One looked so much less monstrous than two.

Claude went on, "Yes, sir! I’d brace up and go to Yankee meeting instead of Dutch; you’d pick up a Yankee beau like as not. "

He gathered his cream while she stood silently by, and when he looked at her again she was in deep thought.

"Good day," he said cheerily.

"Goodbye," she replied, and her face flushed again.

It rained that night, and the roads were very bad, and he was late the next time he arrived at Haldeman’s. Nina came out in her best dress, but he said nothing about it, supposing she was going to town or something Like that, and he hurried through with his task and had mounted his seat before he realized that anything was wrong.

Then Mrs. Haldeman appeared at the kitchen door and hurled a lot of unintelligible German at him. He knew she was mad, and mad at him, and also’ at Nina, for she shook her fist at them alternately.

Singular to tell, Nina paid no attention to her mother’s sputter. She looked at Claude with a certain timid audacity.

"How you like me today?"

"That’s better," he said as he eyed her critically. "Now you’re talkin’! I’d do a little reading of the newspaper myself, if I was. you. A woman’s business ain’t to work out in the hot sun–it’s to cook and fix up things round the house, and then put on her clean dress and set in the shade and read or sew on something. Stand up to ’em! Doggone me if I’d paddle round that hot cornfield with a mess o’ Dutchmen–it ain’t decent!"

He drove off with a chuckle at the old man, who was seated at the back of the house with a newspaper in his hand. He was lame, or pretended he was, and made his wife and daughter wait upon him. Claude had no conception of what was working in Nina’s mind, but he could not help observing the changes for the better in her appearance. Each day he called she was neatly dressed and wore her shoes laced up to the very top hook.

She was passing through tribulation on his account, but she sald nothing about it. The old man, her father, no longer spoke to her, and the mother sputtered continually, but the girl seemed sustained by some inner power. She calmly went about doing as she pleased, and no fury of words could check her or turn her aside.