Apart from her half-dazed recollection of the rainy afternoon a week since, their relations as ruthless creditor and hopeless debtor appeared to be unchanged. During the interval she had gone doggedly about her self-imposed labors, rising in the faint light of dawn to set strawberry and lettuce plants, wintered carefully on the south side of the big barns, with the vague unreasoning hope that somehow or other she might be permitted to reap the fruit of her toil. Between times she was casting about for another home and other modes of livelihood for herself and Jimmy. It would be difficult, if not impossible, she was told, to secure a position to teach. Only normal-school graduates stood any chance of preferment, and there appeared to be no prospect of a vacancy of any kind before fall. To become a dressmaker’s apprentice was possible; but the woman who provided the opportunity offered instruction for the first six months in lieu of wages. And obviously one could not live on information alone, however valuable. Household servants were always in brisk demand, she had been reminded; but pride of race wrestled with the untold humiliation of such a lot. Besides, there was Jimmy. Her heart grew faint at the thought of the loving, carefully-shielded child in the cold shelter of an “asylum” or the bound property of some shrewd farmer, an investment involving a grudging expenditure of coarse food and scanty, insufficient clothing and forced to yield an ever-increasing increment of labor. Oh, life was cruel at its best. Her flesh and her soul cried out at the thought of what its worst might be. If there was a way of escape, why not accept it? She was turning these things wearily over in her mind when the quick whir of wheels sounded at her back. She stepped aside to allow the vehicle to pass, without raising her eyes. A harsh, domineering voice, the sort of voice to be slavishly obeyed, ordered the horse to stand still. She looked up quickly to meet the eager gaze of the man who was in her thoughts. A vivid color, of which she was angrily conscious, rose to her forehead. She stammered some sort of greeting, her eyes drooping before the dominant insistence in his. “I was just on my way to your house,” he said. His voice, as well as his eyes, was eager, insistent. “Get in, won’t you, and ride with me? I have something to say to you.” The girl hesitated, her cheeks paling. He sprang to the ground, speaking sharply to his young, restive horse. “Allow me to assist you,” he said, with a politeness wholly unfamiliar to Barbara. She gave him an astonished look, which he interpreted correctly, with the acumen of a trained politician. “You have been thinking that I was exceedingly abrupt—even rude, in the way I spoke to you the other day,” he said, as he took her firmly by the hand and lifted her to a seat in the vehicle which was “dreaded more’n pison snakes” by the delinquent debtors in the countryside, according to Peg Morrison.