It was early June and the Wellivers had lived in Bidwell, for four months and, during the last year of her life at Fort Wayne Maud had been so continually ill that she had seldom seen the grocer, but now a letter had come from him. The letter came from the city of Cleveland. “I am here at a convention of the K of Ps,” he wrote, “and I have met a man here who is a widower like myself. We are in the same room at the hotel. I want to stop to see you on the way home and would like to bring my friend along. Can’t you get another girl and we’ll all spend an evening together. If you can do it, you get a surrey and meet us at the seven-fifty train next Friday evening. I’ll pay for the surrey of course and we’ll go off somewhere to the country. I’ve got something very important I want to say to you. You write me here and let me know if it’s all right.” Maud sat in the field beside May and thought of the letter. An answer must be sent at once. In fancy she saw the little bright-eyed grocer standing before May, the hero of the passage in the wood with Jerome Hadley, the woman who lived the romance of which she herself dreamed. At the post office during the afternoon she had heard two young men talking of a dance to be given at a place called the Dewdrop. It was to be held on Friday evening, and a bold impulse had led her to go to a livery stable and make inquiry about the place. It was twenty miles away and on the shores of Sandusky Bay. “We will go there,” she had thought, and had engaged the surrey and horses and now she was face to face with May and the thought of the little grocer and his companion frightened her. Freeman Hunt the widower had a bald head and a grey mustache. What would his friend be like? Fear made Maud’s body tremble and when she tried to speak, to tell May of her plan, the words would not come. “She’ll never do it. I’ll never get her to do it,” she thought again. * * * * * “There was a man here. For weeks he lay sick to the point of death in our house and all the time I did not dare sleep.” May Edgley was building high her tower of romance. Having several times listened, as Maud told of the imaginary son of the railroad president who had been determined to marry her, she had set about making a romantic lover of her own. Books she had read, the remembrance of childhood tales of love and romantic adventure poured in upon her mind. “There was a man here. He was just twenty-four but what a life he had led,” she said absentmindedly. She appeared to be lost in thought and for a long time was silent. Then she got suddenly to her feet and ran to where two large maple trees stood on a little hill in the midst of the field. Maud also got to her feet and her body shook with a new fear. The grocer was forgotten. May returned and again sat on the grass. “I thought I saw someone snooping there behind that tree,” she said. “You see I have to be careful. A man’s life depends on my being careful.”