She darted a quick look at me, and turned back to the trellis, where she was nailing on strips. She did not speak, and when I came over to face her, with a post for the next arch, I saw that her eyes were moist. She turned her face half away, blinking her eyelids hard, bit her lip, then picked up the level and set it with a smack against the post. I put my hand over hers--both our hands were dirty!--and said, "What is the matter? Are you tired?" "Please, please--level this post," she replied. "Are you tired?" "No, I'm not tired. I'm a fool. Come, we must finish the arch!" "I guess we won't do any more arches to-day," I replied, "or you won't, at any rate. You'll go home and rest." She looked at me an instant with just the hint of her twinkle coming back. "I'm so unused to taking orders," she said, "that I've lost the art of obedience. Move the post a little to the right, please." I did so, and we worked on in silence. We had built the wide central arch by the time the sun began to drop down into our faces. There were only five arches more to build. "I shall write to-night and have the roses hurried along," said I. We walked back toward the house and looked over the lawn, past the sundial, and saw the farm through the trellis, and beyond the farm the trees at the edge of my clearing, and then a distant roof or two, and the far hills. The apple blossoms were fragrant in the orchard. The persistent song sparrows were singing. The shadow of the dial post stretched far out toward the east. "It is pointing toward the brook," said I. "Shall we go and ask the thrush to sing?" She shook her head. "Not to-night," she said briefly, and I walked, grieved and puzzling, up the road by her side. The next day she pleaded a headache, and I went to the farm alone. The south room was shining with its first coat of paint. Hard was, as he put it "seein' daylight" in his work, and I realized that soon I should be sending for Mrs. Pillig and son Peter and moving away from Bert's. Somehow the idea made me perversely melancholy. The house seemed lonely as I wandered through it, sniffing the strong odour of fresh paint. I went out to find Mike, and learned that the small fruits had come--a hundred red raspberries, fifty blackcaps, twenty-five of the yellow variety, a hundred blackberries, not to mention currant bushes. We walked about the garden to find the best site for them, and finally chose for the berries the end of the slope between the vegetables and field crops and the pines and tamaracks. Here was a long, narrow stretch where the brook in times past had made the soil sandy, so that it drained well, but where the swampy land was close enough to offer the least danger of complete drying out. While Mike and Joe were ploughing the dressing under and harrowing, I took my garden manual in hand and carefully sorted out the varieties according to their bearing season. Then we began planting them in rows.