Elmira felt comforted by his faith in a way which he did not suspect. It strengthened her own. Perhaps, after all, Lawrence would not care for Lucina; perhaps he would work and wait for her, as, indeed, he had vowed to do. After that Elmira worked over the herb-beds with her face to the road. When Belinda Lamb reported that Lawrence and Lucina had been out riding, and Ann said, with a bitter screw of her nervous little face, "Fish in shallow waters bites easy, especially when there's gold on the hook," she was not much disturbed. Ann fully abetted her daughter in her resolution to dismiss her suitor, after his father's manifestation. "I guess there's as good fish in the sea as ever was caught," said she, "and I guess Doctor Seth Prescott 'll find out that. If there's them he don't think fit to tie his son's shoestrings, there's them that feels above tyin' 'em." In September Jerome began work on his mill. He had never been so hopeful in his life. It cost him more self-denial not to go to Lucina and speak out his hope than ever before. He queried with himself if he could not go, then shut his heart, opening like a mouth of hunger for happiness, hard against it. "The mill may burn down; they may not buy the logs. I've got to wait," he told himself. By early spring the mill was in full operation. The railroad through Dale was surveyed, and work was to be commenced on it the next fall, and Jerome had the contract for the sleepers. Again he wondered if he should not go to Lucina and tell her, and again he resolved to wait. He had made up his mind that he would not speak until a fixed income was guaranteed by at least a year's test. "I wish they would put railroads through for us every year," he said to the man whom he had secured to help him. He was an elderly man from Granby, who had owned a mill there, which had been sold three years before. He had a tidy sum in bank, and people wondered at his going to work again. "I 'ain't got so very many years to work," he told Jerome when he sought to hire him, "an' I thought I'd give up for good three years ago; thought I'd take it easy, an' have a comfortable old age. I got fifty dollars more'n I expected when I sold out the mill, an' I laid it out for extras for mother an' me; bought her a sofy an' stuffed rockin'-chair, a new set of dishes, an' some teaspoons, an' some strainers for the windows agin fly-time. 'Now, mother,' says I, 'we'll jest lay down in the daytime, an' rock, an' eat with our new spoons out of our new dishes, an' keep the flies out, the rest of our lives.' "But mother she looked real sober. 'What's the matter?' says I. "'Nothin',' says she, 'only I was thinkin' about your father.' "'What about him?' says I. "'Nothin',' says she, 'only I remember mother's sayin', when he quit work, he wouldn't live long. She always said it was a bad sign.'