“Is that all, Tillie? Haven't you got a right to be happy?” She was quick of wit, and she read his tone as well as his words. “You get out of here--and get out quick!” She had jumped to her feet; but he only looked at her with understanding eyes. “I know,” he said. “That's the way I thought of it at first. Maybe I've just got used to the idea, but it doesn't seem so bad to me now. Here are you, drudging for other people when you ought to have a place all your own--and not gettin' younger any more than I am. Here's both of us lonely. I'd be a good husband to you, Till--because, whatever it'd be in law, I'd be your husband before God.” Tillie cowered against the door, her eyes on his. Here before her, embodied in this man, stood all that she had wanted and never had. He meant a home, tenderness, children, perhaps. He turned away from the look in her eyes and stared out of the front window. “Them poplars out there ought to be taken away,” he said heavily. “They're hell on sewers.” Tillie found her voice at last:-- “I couldn't do it, Mr. Schwitter. I guess I'm a coward. Maybe I'll be sorry.” “Perhaps, if you got used to the idea--” “What's that to do with the right and wrong of it?” “Maybe I'm queer. It don't seem like wrongdoing to me. It seems to me that the Lord would make an exception of us if He knew the circumstances. Perhaps, after you get used to the idea--What I thought was like this. I've got a little farm about seven miles from the city limits, and the tenant on it says that nearly every Sunday somebody motors out from town and wants a chicken-and-waffle supper. There ain't much in the nursery business anymore. These landscape fellows buy their stuff direct, and the middleman's out. I've got a good orchard, and there's a spring, so I could put running water in the house. I'd be good to you, Tillie,--I swear it. It'd be just the same as marriage. Nobody need know it.” “You'd know it. You wouldn't respect me.” “Don't a man respect a woman that's got courage enough to give up everything for him?” Tillie was crying softly into her apron. He put a work-hardened hand on her head. “It isn't as if I'd run around after women,” he said. “You're the only one, since Maggie--” He drew a long breath. “I'll give you time to think it over. Suppose I stop in to-morrow morning. It doesn't commit you to anything to talk it over.” There had been no passion in the interview, and there was none in the touch of his hand. He was not young, and the tragic loneliness of approaching old age confronted him. He was trying to solve his problem and Tillie's, and what he had found was no solution, but a compromise. “To-morrow morning, then,” he said quietly, and went out the door. All that hot August morning Tillie worked in a daze. Mrs. McKee watched her and said nothing. She interpreted the girl's white face and set lips as the result of having had to dismiss Schwitter again, and looked for time to bring peace, as it had done before.