“Go ahead!” said the Harvester, glancing at her as he hewed a joist. She turned away her face and sat looking across the lake for a long time. “Is it a difficult question, Ruth?” inquired the Harvester to help her. “Yes,” said the Girl. “I don't know how to make you see.” “Take any kind of a plunge. I'm not usually dense.” “It is really quite simple after all. It's about a girl----a girl I knew very well in Chicago. She had a problem----and it worried her dreadfully, and I just wondered what you would think of it.” The Harvester shifted his position so that he could watch the side of the averted face. “You'll have to tell me, before I can tell you,” he suggested. “She was a girl who never had anything from life but work and worry. Of course, that's the only kind I'd know! One day when the work was most difficult, and worry cut deepest, and she really thought she was losing her mind, a man came by and helped her. He lifted her out, and rescued all that was possible for a man to save to her in honour, and went his way. There wasn't anything more. Probably there never would be. His heart was great, and he stooped and pitied her gently and passed on. After a time another man came by, a good and noble man, and he offered her love so wonderful she hadn't brains to comprehend how or why it was.” The Girl's voice trailed off as if she were too weary to speak further, while she leaned her head against a pillar and gazed with dull eyes across the lake. “And your question,” suggested the Harvester at last. She roused herself. “Oh, the question! Why this----if in time, and after she had tried and tried, love to equal his simply would not come would----would----she be wrong to PRETEND she cared, and do the very best she could, and hope for real love some day? Oh David, would she?” The Harvester's face was whiter than the Girl's. He pounded the chisel into the joist savagely. “Would she, David?” “Let me understand you clearly,” said the man in a dry, breathless voice. “Did she love this first man to whom she came under obligations?” The Girl sat gazing across the lake and the tortured Harvester stared at her. “I don't know,” she said at last. “I don't know whether she knew what love was or ever could. She never before had known a man; her heart was as undeveloped and starved as her body. I don't think she realized love, but there was a SOMETHING. Every time she would feel most grateful and long for the love that was offered her, that 'something' would awake and hurt her almost beyond endurance. Yet she knew he never would come. She knew he did not care for her. I don't know that she felt she wanted him, but she was under such obligations to him that it seemed as if she must wait to see if he might not possibly come, and if he did she should be free.” “If he came, she preferred him?”