“There is one more—who—answers your requirements, but she was too proud to enter the lists.” Samuel’s face lit up. Proud women can be very tender and only a tender soul could accept the basket. Moreover, a woman with sufficient spirit to resent his action today was a woman after his own heart. He lifted his head from its sidewise slant and, throwing back his shoulders, looked Jessica square in the eyes: “What’s the woman’s name?” “Miss Ellie Smith.” “Waal, I be goin’ ter change it!” vowed Mr. Jessup. “Whar be she?” The matron hesitated, wondering whether she could play the part of the traitor to dignified, self-reliant Miss Ellie, but Jessica was very young. She looked down the long years that these two had traveled, and seeing how dusty and stony and hard the road had been, wondered why they should not come into a restful, fragrant garden at last. Ellie, she knew, even yet, with the help of the right man, could make the garden. And now as she looked keenly into Samuel Jessup’s eyes—eyes shaded by iron-gray brows, but deep, dark brown eyes, limpid, sparkling, full of tenderness and an appealing hunger for tenderness—she felt that Samuel could play an all-sufficient Adam to Ellie’s Eve, in the garden. “Miss Ellie’s all alone in the kitchen, hulling strawberries for supper,” she said very low. Then bending far over her desk, as if completely absorbed in her books, she went on: “It’s the south dining-room door. Go right in, take the basket with you—no, no, not that woman, too—and ask Miss Ellie if she won’t take charge of your basket for an hour or so.” Samuel grinned. He wagged his head back and forth until his wig shook in sympathetic anticipation. Years and years seemed to fall from him, until with his small, thick-set figure and his sparkling, youthful eyes he looked like a boy getting ready to steal apples. With short, firm, quicksteps he entered the dining-room. No one would have thought him a victim of lumbago from his gait now. Then of a sudden, Miss Jessica, no longer able to contain herself, went into her private room, where he had consulted with the ten, and danced around with glee. “Miss Ellie, you darling!” she whispered to herself. “I know you’ll do it!” Miss Ellie, in a prim, dainty blue gingham dress, with a great bib apron enveloping her slender figure, sat at the south kitchen window hulling berries, the basket of red fruit on the table beside her, a yellow earthen bowl in her lap. Her silver-gold hair caught sunbeam lights from the window until each single thread danced and twinkled. Little curls of silver gold nestled against the nape of her slender neck. Her face was that of an April lady’s—first the clouds chased across it, clouds of contempt, of anger and of regret; and then it took on a soft blaze of tenderness and of passionate longing.