"I should just say I did," Elizabeth replied warmly, extending her hand to the little woman Luther was setting on her feet. Luther climbed promptly into the high seat from which he had just lifted his wife and held his own hand down to Elizabeth from there. "It was mighty fine for you to send word for her t' come along." And Elizabeth did not let him gather from any hint of expression or word that so far from sending word for Sadie to spend the day with her, she had not known till in these last ten minutes that either of them was expected. John came and talked to Luther, mounting the spring-seat at his side to ride to the field, but did not look at Elizabeth, though she looked at him longingly and everything in her cried out for reconciliation and openness. John had a way of ignoring her when explanations had to be made. Luther's attitude toward his wife had influenced Elizabeth in Sadie's favour as nothing else had ever been able to do. She began to feel less hostile, and as they turned toward the house asked her interestedly how she was "coming on" with her garden and chickens. This was common ground, and Sadie warmed to the real welcome she was accorded. She stopped beside Elizabeth's coops in the backyard and examined the little groups of begging, downy balls with the animation of a true farmer's wife. Here was something she knew as well as Elizabeth; in fact, when a count was made it was discovered that Sadie's broods several times outnumbered those of the neighbour she envied. It was an absorbing topic of conversation, and the two women stood for some moments with the hungry little beggars clamouring lustily about them. Suddenly they became conscious of the smell of burning sugar. "Oh, my goodness!" Elizabeth exclaimed, and ran to the kitchen, leaving her guest to follow as she chose. Hepsie had gone upstairs, and as Elizabeth opened the oven door a cloud of smoke rolled out which nearly blinded her and set her to coughing. Sadie followed her in and somehow her mood changed as she looked over the well-kept kitchen. Something in the tidy order and tasty arrangement of its shelves hurt. Sadie was not a natural housekeeper. "Bet she just thinks she beat us all," she thought as she laid her bonnet on the sitting-room sofa, where she had felt of the pillows, and the lambrequin which hung from the long shelf where the clock and vasts stood, on the opposite side of the room. "Bet she don't put on no airs about me just the same." She looked at the small bookcase below the mantel in a perfect rage of envy. Elizabeth was surrounded by the things which befitted Elizabeth, and Sadie realized as she had never done in their childhood the chasm which separated them, and knew nothing of the anguish of the young wife as she laboured with the disfigured pies, nor that Elizabeth thought of the look of love she had seen Sadie receive with something very like envy in her heart.