For half a mile, the road led past Sir William's fields, in which the wheat was now its full ripe harvest yellow. Around one of these fields, a binder hummed, and the shirt-sleeved man on the seat of it flung a kiss to Daisy from afar. That shirt-sleeved man was Sir William Ware, Baronet. The man who was stooking behind the binder also lifted his hand to his lips, though in _his_ case the salute was not a kiss but a friendly hail; for the stooker was he who had been yodling, artificial, "city-bug"-imitating Dexie Coleman. He had callouses on his palms now that it would be hard to get through with a chisel, and on each arm a biceps that would burst an iron ring. Daisy herself was changed in some indefinable way. Her mouth was softened, her eyes had become forward-looking and dreamy, her color more delicate. Her attitude was not now tensed, aggressive, a-jump with schoolgirlish spirit; but gentle, relaxed, restful. One could not on this day imagine her with the horsewhip of punishment in her hand. There were no pools on the Toddburn highway to impede this August drive. The breath of autumn was soft in the air, and the summer's work of the sun was over. The ruts of the trail were cushioned with soft dust, the uplands ripe green, the trees full-sapped and thriving, every twig deciduously ready for the going of the leaves. The prairie plants had long ago sent the last of their pollen abroad by wind and voyaging bee. There were red berries on the rose-bushes, and white on the wolf-willow. The house of the world was swept and garnished for the fall. The thoughts of the young woman who sat, with that quiescent and settled look in her eyes, on the seat of the tranquilly-travelling buggy, moved to her beginning of life and ratchetted slowly up the years to the now; and it came to Daisy Ware, as it has come to many another who thinks more abstrusely, that consummated marriage is, and properly, the climax of womanhood. Every growing thing about her whispered it to-day. The message received definiteness and point as there blew across her lap a fragment of fertile fluff that had in its heyday and its summer nodding-time been part of a maiden dandelion-blossom. In the light of this flash of truth from exemplary Nature, the young wife saw in its true light the "board and lodging" marriage in which she might have continued unawakened--continued, perhaps, until she was old and blase and "set" and sterile--if it had not been for the potent something, salutarily born, both to her and to her husband, by the airs that move among the hills and groves of God. She saw why a "little chum" is not a wife.