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He spoke casually.

“Nice day,” said he.

The woman nodded.

“Been berrying?” inquired David. The woman nodded again.

David looked scrutinizingly at her pail. “I saw better berries real thick a piece back,” said he.

The woman murmured something. In spite of herself, a tear trickled over her fat, weather-beaten cheek. David saw the tear, and something warm and glorious like sunlight seemed to waken within him. He felt such tenderness and pity for this poor feminine thing who had not the strength to keep the tears back, and was so pitiably shorn of youth and grace, that he himself expanded. He had heard in the town something of her history. She had made a dreadful marriage, tragedy and suspicion had entered her life, and the direst poverty. However, he had not known that she was in the vicinity. Somebody had told him she was out West.

“Living here?” he inquired.

“Working for my board at a house back there,” she muttered. She did not tell him that she had come as a female “hobo” in a freight-car from the Western town where she had been finally stranded. “Mrs. White sent me out for berries,” she added. “She keeps boarders, and there were no berries in the market this morning.”

“Come back with me and I will show you where I saw the berries real thick,” said David.

He turned himself about, and she followed a little behind, the female failure in the dust cast by the male. Neither spoke until David stopped and pointed to some bushes where the fruit hung thick on bending, slender branches.

“Here,” said David. Both fell to work. David picked handfuls of berries and cast them gaily into the pail. “What is your name?” he asked, in an undertone.

“Jane Waters,” she replied, readily. Her husband’s name had been Waters, or the man who had called himself her husband, and her own middle name was Jane. The first was Sara. David remembered at once. “She is taking her own middle name and the name of the man she married,” he thought. Then he asked, plucking berries, with his eyes averted:

“Married?”

“No,” said the woman, flushing deeply.

David’s next question betrayed him. “Husband dead?”

“I haven’t any husband,” she replied, like the Samaritan woman.

She had married a man already provided with another wife, although she had not known it. The man was not dead, but she spoke the entire miserable truth when she replied as she did. David assumed that he was dead. He felt a throb of relief, of which he was ashamed, but he could not down it. He did not know what it was that was so alive and triumphant within him: love, or pity, or the natural instinct of the decent male to shelter and protect. Whatever it was, it was dominant.

“Do you have to work hard?” he asked.

“Pretty hard, I guess. I expect to.”

“And you don’t get any pay?”

“That’s all right; I don’t expect to get any,” said she, and there was bitterness in her voice.

In spite of her stoutness she was not as strong as the man. She was not at all strong, and, moreover, the constant presence of a sense of injury at the hands of life filled her very soul with a subtle poison, to her weakening vitality. She was a child hurt and worried and bewildered, although she was to the average eye a stout, able-bodied, middle-aged woman; but David had not the average eye, and he saw her as she really was, not as she seemed. There had always been about her a little weakness and dependency which had appealed to him. Now they seemed fairly to cry out to him like the despairing voices of the children whom he had never had, and he knew he loved her as he had never loved her before, with a love which had budded and flowered and fruited and survived absence and starvation. He spoke abruptly.

“I’ve about got my business done in these parts,” said he. “I’ve got quite a little money, and I’ve got a little house, not much, but mighty snug, back where I come from. There’s a garden. It’s in the woods. Not much passing nor going on.”