"H'yare, young feller! wait a minute. Tired?" he asked the girl, with a tone that was more than kindly. It was almost tender. "Yes," she replied, in a low voice. "My shoes hurt me." "Well, here y' go," he replied, taking his stand by the horse, and holding out his hand like a step. She colored and smiled a little as she lifted her foot into his huge, hard, sunburned hand. "Oop-a-daisy!" he called. She gave a spring, and sat on the horse like one at home there. Rob had a deliciously unconscious, abstracted, business-like air. He really left her nothing to do but enjoy his company, while he went ahead and did precisely as he pleased. "We don't raise much corn out there, an' so I kind o' like to see it once more." "I wish I didn't have to see another hill of corn as long as I live!" replied the girl, bitterly. "Don't know as I blame yeh a bit. But, all the same, I'm glad you was working in it to-day," he thought to himself, as he walked beside her horse toward the house. "Will you stop to dinner?" she inquired bluntly, almost surlily. It was evident there were reasons why she didn't mean to press him to do so. "You bet I will," he replied; "that is, if you want I should." "You know how we live," she replied evasively. "If you can stand it, why--" She broke off abruptly. Yes, he remembered how they lived in that big, square, dirty, white frame house. It had been three or four years since he had been in it, but the smell of the cabbage and onions, the penetrating, peculiar mixture of odors, assailed his memory as something unforgettable. "I guess I'll stop," he said, as she hesitated. She said no more, but tried to act as if she were not in any way responsible for what came afterward. "I guess I c'n stand f'r one meal what you stand all the while," he added. As she left them at the well and went to the house he saw her limp painfully, and the memory of her face so close to his lips as he helped her down from the horse gave him pleasure at the same time that he was touched by its tired and gloomy look. Mrs. Peterson came to the door of the kitchen, looking just the same as ever. Broad-faced, unwieldly, flabby, apparently wearing the same dress he remembered to have seen her in years before,--a dirty drab-colored thing,--she looked as shapeless as a sack of wool. Her English was limited to, "How de do, Rob?" He washed at the pump, while the girl, in the attempt to be hospitable, held the clean towel for him. "You're purty well used up, eh?" he said to her. "Yes; it's awful hot out there." "Can't you lay off this afternoon? It ain't right" "No. He won't listen to that." "Well, let me take your place." "No; there ain't any use o' that." Peterson, a brawny, wide-bearded Norwegian, came up at this moment, and spoke to Rob in a sullen, gruff way. "Hallo, when yo' gaet back?"