She made a brave effort in the days that followed, to keep that thought from entering her mind. She was too proud to mention the matter again, but constantly she kept watching Jason. She found that she was waiting to hear him involuntarily say the words that she longed to hear. As she studied him and the situation, there came to her the realization that he was thinking for her, that he was planning for her, that he was working for her, but equally he was thinking, he was planning, he was working for himself. He was making the money that would insure her having a home again and freedom, but he was assuming nothing. Whatever he made, he divided equally. For the share of land that she furnished he was doing his equivalent in work. The division was fair enough. She did not know, until Jason told her, that he always had loved the country, that it had been a boyhood hope to own and to work upon land, that he had only done the thing that he was glad in his heart to do when he had escaped from the grocery through the arrangement he had made, and found himself free to devote most of his time to the development and cultivation of land. He pointed out to her the extent of the land he had purchased adjoining her nearest neighbour, James Ford, the father of Ellen who was still helping her about the house and in the garden. Nothing could have given Mahala more comfort at that minute than the thought that Jason was not sacrificing himself; that he was doing the thing that he had hoped, and for a long time planned, to do; that he was happy with the wind in his hair and his feet in the freshly turned earth of a furrow. Watching him at his work, sometimes answering the chatter of Ellen, who was so full of the joy of living that she talked upon any occasion that she felt it proper that she might speak, milling these things over in her heart, there came to Mahala the realization that Ashwater stood to Jason Peters in some small degree in the same light as it now did to her. It had been a place where an unkind fate had bound him and he had suffered from taunt and from insult; he had suffered from unjust persecution; manhood had brought to him the power to fend for himself and the friend he needed in his hour of trial, but it had not taught him to love the place in which he lived or the people among whom he had endured humiliation and suffering. The first wave of gladness that she had known since her earliest calamity had befallen her, washed up in Mahala’s heart with a real comprehension of the fact that Jason was happy; that he wanted to live upon the land; that he enjoyed every foot of his environment. It pleased her when she discovered that he disliked that day upon which he was forced to go upon errands to Ashwater to repair implements or for food.