Running down the steps, Dorinda took the list from her and glanced over it. "We haven't got the kind of coffee you want," she said. "It was ordered two weeks ago, but it hasn't come yet." "Well, we'll have to make out with what you have. If you'll wrap up the things, Bob will bring them out to me." She was a shy girl, gentle and amiable, yet there was a barely perceptible note of condescension in her manner. "Just because she's rich and I'm poor, she thinks she is better than I am," Dorinda thought disdainfully, as she went up the steps. While she was weighing and measuring the groceries, Bob Ellgood came from the post office (which consisted of a partition, with a window, in one corner of the store) and stopped by the counter to speak to her. He was a heavy, slow-witted young man, kind, temperate, and good-looking in a robust, beefy fashion. Because he was the eldest son of James Ellgood, he was regarded as desirable by the girls in the neighbourhood, and Dorinda remembered that, only a few Sundays ago, she had looked at him in church and asked herself, with a start of expectancy, "What if he should be the right one after all?" She laughed softly over the pure absurdity of the recollection, and a gleam of admiration flickered in the round, marble-like eyes of the young man. "I hope the Greylocks' steer didn't harm your father's plant beds," he said abruptly. "No," she shook her head. "I haven't heard that they suffered." Having weighed the sugar, she was pouring it into a paper bag, and his eyes lingered on the competent way in which her fingers turned down the opening, secured it firmly, and snipped off the end of the string with an expert gesture. Only a week ago his attention would have flattered her, but to-day she had other things to think of, and his admiring oxlike stare made her impatient. Was that the way things always came, after you had stopped wanting them? "Well, he ought to have a good crop after the work he's put on those fields," he continued, as she placed the packages in a cracker box and handed them to him over the counter. She shook her head. "No matter how hard you work it always comes back to the elements in the end. You can't be sure of anything when you have to depend upon the elements for a living." "That's what Father says." He accepted the fatalistic philosophy without dispute. "After all, the rain and frost and drought, not the farmer, do most of the farming." He had had a good education, and though his speech was more provincial than Jason's, it lacked entirely the racy flavour of Pedlar's Mill. With the box under one arm, he was still gazing at her, when the impatient voice of Geneva rang out from the doorway, and the girl came hurrying into the store. "What are you waiting for, Bob? I thought you were never coming." Then, as her eyes fell on Dorinda, she added apologetically, "Of course I know the things were ready, but Bob is always so slow. I've got to hurry back because Neddy won't stand alone."