“Why didn’t you drive around to the back?” she called harshly. “This young-up ain’t company, to be traipsin’ through my front room. Did you bring them rubber rings for my fruit jars?” “You betcha!” Clem Carson refused to be daunted in Sally’s presence. “How’s Pearl, Ma? Cold any better? I brought her some salve for her throat and some candy.” “She’s all right,” Mrs. Carson shouted, as if the car were a hundred yards away. “And why you want to be throwin’ your money away on patent medicine salves is more’n I can see! I can make a better salve any day outa kerosene and lard and turpentine. Reckon you didn’t get any car’mels for me! Pearl’s all you think of.” “Got you half a pound of car’mels,” Carson shouted, laughing. “I’ll drive the new girl around back. “Ma’s got a sharp tongue, but she don’t mean no harm,” Carson chuckled, as he swung the car around the house. When it shivered to a stop between the barns and the house, the farmer lifted out a few bundles which had crowded Sally’s feet, then threw up the cover of the hatch in the rear of the car, revealing more bundles. Carson was loading her arms with parcels when he saw a miracle wrought on her pale, timid face. “Lord! You look pretty enough to eat!” Clem Carson ejaculated, but he saw then that she was not even aware that he was speaking to her. In one of the few books allowed for Sunday reading in the orphanage—a beautiful, thick book with color-plate illustrations, its name, “Stories from the Bible,” lettered in glittering gold on a back of heavenly blue—Sally had found and secretly worshiped the portrait of her ideal hero. It was a vividly colored picture of David, forever fixed in strong, beautiful grace, as he was about to hurl the stone from his slingshot to slay the giant, Goliath. She had dreamed away many hours of her adolescence and early young girlhood, the big book open on her knee at the portrait of the Biblical hero, and it had not seemed like sacrilege to adopt that sun-drenched, strong-limbed but slender boy as the personification of her hopes for romance. And now he was striding toward her—the very David of “Stories from the Bible.” True, the sheepskin raiment of the picture was exchanged for a blue shirt, open at the throat, and for a pair of cheap, earth-soiled “jeans” trousers; but the boy-man was the same, the same! As he strode lightly, with the ease of an athlete or the light-footedness of a god, the sun flamed in his curling, golden-brown hair. He was tall, but not so tall as Clem Carson, and there were power and ease and youth in every motion of his beautiful body. “Did you get the plowshare sharpened, Mr. Carson? I’ve been waiting for it, but in the meantime I’ve been tinkering with that little hand cider press. We ought to do a good business with it if we set up a cider stand on the state road, at the foot of the lane.”