“Hetty looks _dreadfully_!” broke out May at the garden gate. “She is worked and worried to death! I am amazed that Mrs. Wayt allows it. To reduce a girl like that to the level of a household drudge is barbarous. She has no time for society or recreation of any kind. It is toil, toil, toil, from morning until night. Mary Ann—the cook mamma got for them—says she ‘never saw such another young lady for sweetness and kindness to servants as Miss Hetty,’ but that she ‘carries all the house on them straight little shoulders of hern.’ Hester tells the same story in better English.” She repeated what she had heard that evening. March stopped to listen under the king apple tree, where he had begun to love the subject of the eulogy. While May declaimed he reached up for a cluster of green apples and leaves and pulled it to pieces, his face grave, his fingers lingering. “Heaven knows, May”—she was not prepared for the emotion with which it was uttered—“that I would risk my life to make hers happy. I hoped once—but you see for yourself how she avoids me. I could fancy sometimes that she is afraid of me!” “Perhaps she is afraid of herself.” He looked up eagerly. “Is that a chance remark? You women understand one another. Have you seen anything——” “Nothing I could or would repeat, my dear boy! But there is a mystery somewhere, and I can’t believe it is the phenomenon of such a sensible girl’s failure to appreciate my brother. May I say something, March, dear?” “Whatever you like—after what has gone before!” “Maybe it ought not to have gone before—or after, either. For, brother, this is not just the sort of connection that you should form. To speak plainly, you might look higher. ‘Strike—but hear!’ Hetty is all that I have said, and more. But there is a Bohemian flavor about the household. We will whisper it—even at half-past ten o’clock at night, in the orchard—and never hint it to ‘the people,’ or to mamma! They are nomads from first to last—why, I cannot say. They have lived everywhere, and nowhere long. Mrs. Wayt is a refined gentlewoman, but her eyes are sad and anxious. You know how fond I am of Hester, poor child! Still a nameless something clings to them as a whole—not quite a taint, but a tang! Especially to Mr. Wayt. There! it is out! Let us hope the apple trees are discreet! I distrust him, March! He doesn’t ring true. He is always on pose. He is a sanctimonious (which doesn’t mean sanctified) self-lover. Such men ought to remain celibate.” March tried to laugh, but not successfully. “I dissent from and agree to nothing you say. But——” He waited so long that May finished the sentence for him. “But you love Hetty?” “Yes! She _suits_ me, May! As no other woman ever did. As no other woman ever will. I have tried to reason myself out of the persuasion, but get deeper in. She _suits_ me—every fiber and every impulse of my nature. I seem to have known her forever and always to have missed her.”