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The young fellow was silent. It was a great problem. The question of divorce had never before been borne in upon him in this personal way. It seemed to him a clear case. The man ought to be driven off and the woman left in peace. He thought of the pleasure it would give her to hear the sound of the mill again.

They stood there side by side, nearly the same age, and yet the woman’s face was already lined with suffering, and her eyes were full of shadow. There seemed no future for her, and yet she was young.

“Please don’t let him know I’ve said anything to you, will you?”

“I’ll try not to,” he said, but he did not consider himself bound to any definite concealment.

They ate dinner together without Miner, who had a fit of work on hand which made him stubbornly unmindful of any call to eat. Moreover, he was sure it would worry his wife.

The meal was a pleasant one on the whole, and they found many things in common to talk about. Morris wanted to ask her a few more questions about her life, but she begged him not to do so, and started him off on the story of his college life. He was an enthusiastic talker and told her his plans with boyish frankness. He forgot his fatigue, and she lost for a time her premature cares and despairs. They were laughing together over some of his college pranks when Miner came in at the door.

“Oh, I see!” he said, with an insulting, insinuating inflection. “Now I understand the early dinner.”

Morris sprang up and, walking over to the sneering husband, glared down at him with a look of ferocity that sat singularly upon his round, fresh face. “Now you shut up! If you open your mouth to me again I’ll lick you till your hide won’t hold pumpkins!”

Miner shrank back, turned on his heel, and went off to the barn. He did not return for his dinner.

Morris insisted on helping Mrs. Miner clear up the yard and uncover the grapevine. He liked her very much. She appealed to the protector in him, and she interested him besides, because of the melancholy which was lined on her delicate face, and voiced in her low, soft utterances.

He appealed to her, because of his delicacy as well as strength. He had something of the modern man’s love for flowers, and did not attempt to conceal his delight in thus tinkering about at woman’s work. He ate supper with her and worked on until it was quite dark, tired as he was, and then shook hands and said “Good night.”

Morris came back to his work the next day with a great deal of pleasure. He had spent considerable thought upon the matter. He had almost determined on a course of action. He had thought of going directly to Miner and saying:

“Now look here, Miner, if you was half a man, you’d pull out and leave this woman in peace. How you can stand around here and occupy the position you do, I don’t see.”

But when he remembered Mrs. Miner’s words about the children, another consideration came in. Suppose he should take the children with him–that was the point; that was the uncertain part of the problem. It did not require any thought to remember that the law took very little consideration of the woman’s feelings. He said to himself that if he ever became judge, he would certainly give decisions that would send such a man as Miner simply whirling out into space.

Miner was in the barn when Morris clambered up the ladder with a bunch of shingles on his shoulder, about seven o’clock. He came out and said:

“Say, you want to fix that window up there.”

“Get away from there!” shouted Morris, in uncontrollable rage, “or I’ll smash this bunch of shingles on your cursed head. Don’t you open that ugly p’tater trap at me, you bow-legged little skunk! I’m goin’ to lick you like a sock before I’m done with you.”