Joe roused Morgan next morning at dawn, and busied himself with making a fire in the kitchen stove and bringing water from the well until the guest came down to feed his horse. Morgan was in a crusty humor. He had very little to say, and Joe did not feel that the world was any poorer for his silence. "This will be my last meal with you," announced Morgan at breakfast. "I'll not be back tonight." Ollie was paler than usual, Joe noticed, and a cloud of dejection seemed to have settled over her during the night. She did not appear to be greatly interested in Morgan's statement, although she looked up from her breakfast with a little show of friendly politeness. Joe thought that she did not seem to care for the agent; the tightness in his breast was suddenly and gratefully eased. "You haven't finished out your week, there'll be something coming to you on what you've paid in advance," said she. "Let that go," said Morgan, obliterating all claim with a sweep of his hand. "I think you'd better take back what's coming to you," suggested Joe. Morgan turned to him with stiff severity. "Are you the watch-dog of the old man's treasury?" he sneered. "Maybe I am, for a day or two," returned Joe, "and if you step on me I'll bite." He leveled his steady gray eyes at Morgan's shifting orbs, and held them there as if to drive in some hidden import of his words. Morgan seemed to understand. He colored, laughed shortly, and busied himself buttering a griddle-cake. Ollie, pale and silent, had not looked up during this by-passage between the two men. Her manner was of one who expected something, which she dreaded and feared to face. Morgan took the road early. Joe saw him go with a feeling of relief. He felt like a swollen barrel which had burst its close-binding hoops, he thought, as he went back to the place where he dropped his scythe yesterday. As he worked through the long morning hours Joe struggled to adjust himself to the new conditions, resulting from the discovery of his own enlargement and understanding. It would be a harder matter now to go on living there with Ollie. Each day would be a trial by fire, the weeks and months a lengthening highway strewn with the embers of his own smoldering passion. Something might happen, almost any day, youth and youth together, galled by the same hand of oppression, that would overturn his peace forever. Yet, he could not leave. The bond of his mother's making, stamped with the seal of the law, held him captive there. At length, after spending a harrowing morning over it, he reached the determination to stand up to it like a man, and serve Isom as long as he could do so without treason. When the day came that his spirit weakened and his continence failed, he would throw down the burden and desert. That he would do, even though his mother's hopes must fall and his own dreams of redeeming the place of his birth, to which he was attached by a sentiment almost poetic, must dissolve like vapor in the sun.