"Dinner near ready, Jane?" he demanded in a gruff tone. Jane gave a brief little nod and hurried on with the rest of the preparations. Rough laughter, scraping of boots, loud clattering of knives on plates, and a continual demand for replenishment, followed the course of the dinner. Jane sat wearily, but her plateful of cabbage and pork lay untasted before her. Out on the porch the little girl sipped a glass of milk and watched the cool dimness of the distant woods. The men pushed back their chairs, wiped their mouths with the backs of their brown hands, and hurried away to the fields. Jane's husband stopped for a moment to mend a rip in his boot. It was a difficult rip to mend and his temper was soon exhausted. "Why don't ye learn that white-faced brat out there to work!" he stormed, "us short o' hands an' her less good than none at all--an' a nuisance to boot." Jane suddenly turned and let a saucer fall. Her lips were compressed for a moment, then she went down on one knee and carefully picked up the fragments of china. "What a snap ye've got, next to what brother Dan's wife had," Jim went surlily on. "Dan made her go out an' tend his grapes, while all ye've got to do is cook a little and wash up--an' ye act as if ye was worked hard. Dan's wife never kicked--she'd be'n sorry if she had," and he gave a hard dry laugh in appreciation of his own humor. But Jane did not hear this last remark; she was thinking of her brother-in-law's wife, a frail little woman whose life had been made up of pruning grapevines or cutting grapes, working side by side with the Italian women whom her husband hired, working harder than any of them did, too, and for far less recompense. She remembered how angry Dan had been because his wife had appeared one afternoon in a shirt-waist, instead of the usual wrapper. It was a clumsy, cheap, ill-made thing, but Margaret's eyes had danced when Jane came to see her that day. And she remembered how Dan had come in and declared he wanted no high-falutin' things around his house; that he had married to get some one to work for him, not for a parlor ornament. Poor little Margaret! How her thin cheeks had flushed and her timid eyes filled with tears! But she died not long after--Jane gave a half-envious sigh. "Goin' to stand there all day lookin' at nothin'?" a gruff voice asked suddenly, and she started. The knife with which she had been peeling potatoes to fry for supper, slipped and cut her finger. She went over to the sink and wiped away the red streak, while her husband shufflingly made his exit, grumbling to himself over the foolishness of ever bothering with such a useless baggage as a woman. On the porch he stumbled over the little crutch and kicked it aside with an oath.