Mrs. Dill stooped, took up the turkey-wing, and gave the clean hearth a perfunctory flick. Then she returned the wing to its place and leaned back in her chair, gazing absently at the shining andirons. "Well," she said, "Henrietta Parkman was in this mornin', and she told me you'd bought the medder; but I didn't hardly believe it." "Yes," said Myron. He spoke in rather a consequential voice, and cleared his throat frequently in the course of talking, as if to accord his organs a good working chance. "The deeds were passed last week, and it's bein' recorded." "What you goin' to do with it?" "I bought it because it lays next to the Turnbull place, and when that come into my hands last fall, I knew 'twas only a matter o' time till I got the medder, too." "Well, what you goin' to do with it?" A tinge of anxiety was apparent in her voice, a wistful suggestiveness, as if she could conceive of uses that would be almost too fortunate to be hoped for. Myron hesitated. It often looked as if he judged it unwise to answer in any haste questions concerning the domestic polity, and Mrs. Dill was used to these periods of incubation. She had even thought once, in a moment of illuminative comparison, that her husband seemed to submit a bill before one branch of his mental legislature before carrying it on to the next. "I'm goin' to pasture my cows in it," he responded. "I shall buy in some more stock this spring, and I expect to set up a milk-route." "How under the sun you goin' to manage that?" She seldom questioned her lawful head, but the surprise of the moment spurred her into a query more expressive of her own mood than a probing of his. "You can't keep any more cows'n you've got now. The barn ain't big enough." "The Turnbull barn is. I've seen the day when there was forty head o' cattle tied up there from fall to spring." "The Turnbull barn's twenty minutes' walk from here. You can't go over there mornin' and evenin', milkin' and feedin' the critters. You'd be all the time on the road." "Yes," said Myron, "'tis a good stretch. So I've made up my mind we'd move over there." A significant note had come into his voice. It indicated a complexity of understanding: chiefly that she would by nature resist what he had to say, and then resume her customary acquiescence. But for a moment she forgot that he was Mr. Dill, and that she had promised to obey him. "Why, Myron," she said, with a mild passion, warmed by her incredulity, "we've lived on this place thirty year." "Yes, yes," said her husband. "I know that. What's the use o' goin' back over the ground, and tellin' me things I know as well as you do? What if 'tis thirty year? Time we got into better quarters." "But they ain't better. Only it's more work." Myron got up and moved back his chair.