"This," said McQuade, settling himself behind a huge pan of wax, "is the one time when I can understand this making of sugar. All the rest of the year I think of these groves of idle trees,--there's nothing in the world so idle as a maple tree--and every one of them worth a pocketful of money, and I wonder at Fan's lack of business sense. Why doesn't she cut the timber down?" He spoke of her impersonally, as though she might have been, perhaps, a neighbor at home in the next county. "But," he concluded, "when I sit down with a pan of wax in me arms I can understand it all. She keeps the trees doing nothing the year 'round just to furnish her her pan of wax. And, like the good Yankee that she is, she has all the better of the bargain, at that." "Hear him!" his wife retorted. "And if I dared to have as much as one live tree of these groves cut down he'd go crazy. I think he's a heathen pagan. I think he comes up in the summer to worship in the groves like the old people did in the Bible." "They were high thinkin' people, I take it," said McQuade, ready for contention. "But the times were against them." "I wonder," said Fan McQuade slyly. "Or were they leaving behind a good hard job of haying or something when they ran off up into the groves for their sacrifices?" "That's right!" complained McQuade. "Go on and tell all the neighbors about me and disgrace me! These two young people don't think bad enough about me. The first time they laid eyes on me they thought I was a bank robber, at the very politest." Augusta and Jimmie laughed happily over the memory of that amazing evening when they had first seen McQuade, and Augusta was starting to tell Mrs. McQuade about their awakening the morning after, while at the same time she was mechanically prodding about in the snow with her paddle to pick up more wax. She looked down, surprised and disbelieving. McQuade had given her a helping of wax so big that she had not believed that she could eat a quarter of it. And, without thinking or stopping, she had eaten up every bit of it. _And she was hungry for more._ She looked up in horror, and exclaimed confusedly: "I beg everybody's pardon. I never piggied anything up so in my life!" "Don't apologize, dear," said Fan McQuade, smiling down into Augusta's burning face. "We'd've been disappointed if you hadn't done just as you did. I always distrust people who don't forget themselves when they first eat sugar wax. I think there must be something wrong with them." Wardwell, who had done exactly as his wife had done, had not even the grace to look guilty. With deliberate optimism, he was making a hopeful estimate on how many times he could repeat the performance. McQuade was in no wise perturbed. "Take breath, and we'll begin again fair. It's the one thing," he explained, as he started away to bring more, "that you can take too much of to-night, and wake up wantin' more in the mornin'."