The swift temper which sometimes possessed the girl flamed up at him. “You make me sick!” she cried. “You just sit back and let the world walk over you. You’ve stuck yourself with this damned farm, and now you’re going to sit still and let it smother you. Why don’t you try to do something, anyway? Johnny says you’ve got good orchard land as there is. But you just look wise and think you know it all, and won’t do anything.” Her mother said wearily: “Lucy, you oughtn’t to swear at your father.” “Well, he makes me mad!” the girl cried, furiously defiant. “He’s such a damned stubborn fool!” Moore wiped his forehead with his handkerchief and smiled weakly. “I guess I’m a failure, all right, Lucia,” he agreed. “You’re right to swear at a father like me.” At his humility, her revulsion was as swift as her anger had been; tenderness swept her. She pressed against him, where he sat beside the table, and with her thin arm drew his head against her fleshless bosom. “You’re not, either, papa!” she cried passionately. “You’re always so patient with me. But I do wish you’d talk to Johnny Dree!” He reached up to touch her cheek caressingly. “That’s all right, honey,” he said. “But you will talk to Johnny?” The man nodded, at last. “All right, Lucy. Yes, I’ll talk to him.” III Johnny Dree found a little time, even during the busy weeks of the apple picking, to go with Moore through his orchard, and to search out the trees scattered along the stone walls. He began the work of pruning and trimming them, showed Moore, and showed Lucy, how to continue it. Bade Moore plow under the thick sod around the base of each tree. “Nothing like grass to steal the water an apple tree needs,” he explained. “Grass is worse than weeds.” Before the snow came, much had been done. Moore said once, diffidently: “I’d like to hire you to help me along with this, Dree!” But Johnny shook his head. “You don’t want to hire help only when you have to,” he said. “I just come up when I’m not busy at home. You can help me with haying and things, some time.” The seasons marched monotonously on. The crisp sunshine of fall days, with frost tingling in the air, gave way to bleaker weather, and then to the full rigors of harsh cold, when snow lay thick across the hills, blanketing everything. The routine of little tasks laid itself upon Moore, and upon his wife. Even Lucia, in greater and greater degree, submitted to it. But revolt was always very near the surface in the girl. One day she met Johnny Dree upon the road, and he asked in a friendly way: “Well, you getting to like it here?” She was in ill humor that morning, and she flamed at him. “Oh, I hate it! I hate it!” she cried. “I wish to God I’d never seen this damned hole. But papa’s got us into it, and we can’t get out, and there’s nothing to do but work and work. Sometimes I wish I were dead.”