In order that he might be ready thus to leave Virginia when the time should come, rejoicing instead of grieving over Dorothy’s good fortune in finding some fitter life than his to share, Arthur knew that he must this year discharge the last dollar of debt that rested upon the Wyanoke estate. He must be a free man on Dorothy’s return--free to reënter the world of scientific work, free to make and keep himself master of his own mind, as he had always been until this strange thing had come over his life. He thus set himself two tasks, one of which he might perhaps fulfil by hard work and discreet management. The other promised to be greatly more difficult. He made a very bad beginning at it by sitting up late at night to read and ponder Dorothy’s letters, to question them as to the future, to study every indication of character or impulse, or temporary mood of mind they might give. With the debt-paying problem he got on much better. He had now a whole year’s accumulated income from his annuity, and he devoted all of it at once to the lightening of this burden. He studied markets as if they had been problems in physics, and guided himself in his planting by the results of these studies. He had sold apples and bacon and sweet potatoes the year before, as we know, with results that encouraged him to go further in the direction of “Yankee farming.” This year he planted large areas in watermelons and other large areas in other edible things that the people of the cities want, but which no south side Virginia planter had ever thought of growing for sale. He was laughed at while doing all this, and envied when the results of it appeared. He deliberately implicated Dorothy in these his misdeeds, also, doing on her plantation precisely as he did on his own, so that when late in the autumn he gave account of his stewardship he was able to inform the court, to its astonishment and to that of the entire community, that he had discharged every dollar of debt that had rested upon his ward’s estate. The judge applauded such management of a trust estate, and Arthur Brent’s neighbors wondered. Some of them saw in his success ground of approval of “Yankee farming”; all of them conceived a new respect for the ability of a man who had thus, in so brief a time, freed two old estates from the hereditary debts that had been accumulating for slow generations. Arthur had been additionally spurred and stimulated to the accomplishment of this end, by the forebodings of evil in connection with national politics which had gravely haunted him throughout the year.