She sat down on the bottom step and drew her white skirts about her. "What's the matter with right now?" she asked, smiling. "I've got to earn my living right now," he objected, beginning with a swift deftness to bore a tiny hole. She was diverted for an instant. "What are you doing to our nice old newel-post?" she asked. "I thought they said you were going to set up the new sideboard." "Oh, that's no job at all; it's done. Didn't you hear me pushing and banging things around? Now I've the job before me of fitting the very latest thing in newel-posts in place of your old one." The girl returned to her first attack. "Well, anyhow, if it's a long job, it's all the better. Go ahead and talk at the same time. You won't feel you're wasting time." Their low-toned talk and the glimmering light of the hall made them seem oddly intimate. Lydia expressed this feeling while Rankin stood looking doubtfully at her, a little daunted by the pretty relentlessness of her insistence. "You see, you're not nearly so much a stranger to me as I am to you. Remember how I sewed and listened. I'm a grown-up little pitcher, and my ears are still large. I was remembering just now, before you came in, how strangely you used to talk to Dr. Melton, and I thought it wasn't so surprising, after all, your doing 'most anything queer." Rankin laughed as he bent over his tools. "Little pitchers have tongues, too, I see." Either Lydia felt herself more familiar with her interlocutor than before, or one result of her meditation had been the loss of her excessive fear of wounding his feelings. She spoke now quite confidently, "But, honestly, what in the world did you do it for?" "It?" He made her define herself. "Oh, you know! Give up everything--lose your chance in society, and poke off into the woods to be a common--" In spite of her new boldness she faltered here. He supplied the word, with a flash of mirth. "Don't be afraid to say it right out--even such an awful term as workman, or carpenter. I can bear it." "I knew it!" Lydia exclaimed. "As I was thinking it over on the stairs just now, I said to myself that probably you weren't a bit apologetic about it; probably you had some queer reason for being proud of yourself for doing it." He cast a startled look at her. "You're the only person in Endbury with imagination enough to guess that." "But why? why? why?" she urged him, her flexible eyebrows raised in the eagerness of her inquiry. "I feel just as though I were going to hear the answer to a perfectly maddeningly unanswerable riddle." He had another turn in his attempt at evasion. "It wouldn't be polite to tell you the answer, for what I'm trying to do is to get out of being what everybody you know thinks is the only way to be--except Dr. Melton, of course." "What's the matter with 'all the people I know,'" she challenged him explicitly.