The telegram came to Mason as he sat on the porch of the Herrick cottage. He read it, and his eyes smiled, but his feeling was not one of amusement. The significance of that impulsive message struck deep, and his blood responded to it as if it were an embrace.

It settled all doubt in his mind concerning her. She was as free and self-reliant as he thought her, and the severe terms of his proposal had not repelled her, and yet that she loved him in a right human and very passionate way did not seem to him possible.

He had, also, other misgivings. He wished he had delineated more fully in his letter the negative side of his character. "She is young and beautiful," he thought, "and will want to see life. She will value social affairs—I am done with them. She will want words of tender protestation, flattery perhaps, which I cannot give.

"My habits are fixed. I like my silent pipe at night after dinner. I shall undoubtedly get more and more disinclined to social duties as time goes on.

"In ten years I shall be forty-eight years old, an old man, when she is just in her splendid June season. She will find the difference between our ages wider than now. She will be a wife. I can free her when she asks it, but I cannot give her back her sweet, superb girlhood. I can give her perception and comprehension of the world and of life, but I cannot make her young again. I may die after a few years, leaving her a mother with a hazardous future. Then she will be doubly cursed.

"Again, this marriage may ruin and interrupt her career. With some women marriage, especially maternity, seems to take away their power as artists, and to turn them into cooks and nurses; meritorious vocations of course, but——"

All night long he alternately mused and dozed upon the problem. He roused up at early daylight with a feeling of doom upon him. He had made a mistake. He was not fitted to be a husband—he was a poor thing, at best, who had not had energy enough to get out of a groove nor to demand adequate pay for grinding in his groove. He lacked "push," and had dreamed away the best years of his life, at least such parts of the years as he had saved from the merciless drive of his paper. He was pulp, squeezed dry.

He groaned, and a curse came upon his lips, and his forehead knit into a tangle of deep lines. His paper had used him. It had sucked the blood of his heart. The creative energy of his brain had gone into the impersonal columns of the editorial page—to what end? To the end that the Evening Star Publishing Company should be rated high in Bradstreet. Had any human being been made better by anything he had written in those columns? Politics? Good God! he had sold his soul, his blood, the grace of his limbs, the suppleness of his joints, the bloom of his enthusiasms, to put this or that damned party into power.

And now, when a beautiful young woman, singing her way to fame, had sent for him, he must go to her, cynical, thin-haired, stiff in joints, bent in shoulders and reeking with the smell of office life and, worst of all, worked out, his novel not yet written, and his enthusiasm turned to indifference and despair.

The problem of the age that morning made him savage. He looked out of the window at the farmhouses gleaming in the early light, at the smoke curling up into the still air, at the men going to milk the cows—

"The damn fools!" he said in his heart. "They don't know enough to vegetate any more than I had sense to know I was becoming a machine. Rot and rot! So we go like leaves to the muck-heap." The porter rushed in and shook him.

"Almos' to Bluff Siding, sah."

This put a little resolution into his blood, and he dressed rapidly, with little thought on anything else. Once or twice he looked out at the misty blue hills, cool and fresh with recent rains. As the porter came to get his grip a few minutes later, Mason wondered how he should meet her, with a hand-shake or a kiss? How would she meet him?

As the train slowed down he saw her at the platform. She sat in a carriage waiting for him. He had one flashing thought: "There sits my wife!" It startled him. The tremendous significance of that phrase made his brain dizzy for a moment.

She was dressed trimly, he noticed, as he came toward her, and she held her horse firmly—he liked her for that, it showed self-mastery. As for him, he felt more uncertainty of footing than ever before in his life, and tried to throw off the stoop in his shoulders.

As he came forward, she flushed, but her steady eyes met his unwaveringly. He looked into their clear obscurity of depth, wherein were purity and unworldly womanly ways.

She held out her hand, firm and strong, and he took it in his. Outwardly it was merely a friendly greeting, yet something subtler than light came from her to him. He did not speak for an instant, then he said:

"This is good of you! I did not expect this great pleasure."

Her voice trembled as she said:

"I wanted to be the first to greet you, and besides, papa wouldn't know you."

He smiled for the first time.

"That's true. But it's very early—quite in the small hours."

"Oh, that's nothing; I'm a farmer's girl, you know. But put your valise in, we must be off."

How strong and supple she looked! and how becoming her silk waist and straw hat! She could drive, too. Some way she seemed quite another sort of person here in her own land and in her own carriage. She was so much more composed. "She has imagination," he repeated to himself.

They turned into the road before he spoke again.

"So this is your 'coolly'?"

"No, this is our valley. The coolly is over there where you see that cloud shadow sliding down."

He looked about slowly at the hills and fields.

"It's very fine; much finer than Oconomowoc and Geneva."

"We like it ... papa and I."

They were both talking around the bush, as the saying goes, but he finally said:

"I was very glad to receive your telegram. Am I to take it as an affirmative answer?"

She said with effort:

"I wanted you to see how poor and humble we all are before—before I—"

He studied her profile. Her lips quivered, and a tear glistened through the veil.

"On my part," he said, "I regretted that I did not further set forth my general cussedness and undesirability.—How well you drive!" he said, by way of relieving the stress of the moment.

He took command now, and there were no more tender allusions. He sniffed the smell of the grass and the way-side trees, and remarked upon the cattle, and inquired the names of several birds whose notes reached across the field.

"Do you know, I'm no wild lover of the country, and I don't admire the country people unreservedly. There are exceptions, of course—but my experience with them has not been such as to make them heroic sufferers, as the new school of fiction sets 'em forth. They are squalid enough and poor enough, heaven knows, but it is the squalor of piracy—they do as well as I should under the same circumstances, no doubt."

Rose looked at him narrowly, as if to find his real thought. He stopped abruptly at her glance.

"I beg your pardon for boring you; but these disagreeable phases of my character should be known to you. I'm full of whims and notions, you'll find."

She looked away and a moment later said: "There is our farm; that house in the grove is ours."

"Cattle I hate, so I hope your father will not expect me to be interested in stock."

This was the first time he had mentioned her father, and it moved her unaccountably. It would be so dreadful if he should not understand her father. His perverse attitude toward her and toward the country had brought her from exalted singleness of emotion down to a complexity of questionings and forebodings.

As they whirled in the yard Mason saw a new house of the ambitious pork-pie order, standing in a fairly well-kept sward, with a background of barns, corncribs, pigsties and beehives. A well-to-do farmstead of the more fortunate sort, and the thought that the man coming out of the barn to meet them was to be his father-in-law struck him like a gust of barnyard air. Really could it be that he had made this decision?

As the man came nearer he appeared a strong-armed, gentle-faced farmer of sixty. His eyes were timid, almost appealing. His throat was brown and wrinkled as leather. His chin beard was a faded yellow-grey, and his hands were nobbed and crooked in the fingers. He peered at Mason through dimmed eyes.

"Father," said Rose, and her voice trembled a little, "this is Mr. Mason."

John Dutcher put up his hand heartily.

"How do you do, sir?" His timid smile touched Mason, but there was something else in the man which made him return the hand-clasp.

"I am glad to see you, Mr. Dutcher," he said, and his tone was so genuine it brought a gush of tears to the daughter's eyes. Her lover understood her father after all.

"Won't you 'light out, sir?" continued John with elaborate hospitality.

"Well, yes, I think I will," said Mason, and Rose's spirits shook off their cowls.

Suddenly she heard every bird singing, the thrush in the poplar top, the catbirds in the willows, the robin on the lawn; the sun flooded the world with magical splendor. It was morning in the world and morning in her life, and her lover was walking up the path by her side.

It was splendid beyond belief to show him to his room, to bring him water and towels and to say from the doorway, with a smile:

"Breakfast is ready!"

The picture that she made lingered pleasantly on Mason's interior eye. She was so supple of form and so radiant of color, and so palpitant with timid joy.

She sat alone at the table when he came out. She explained as she showed him his seat, "Father and my aunt had breakfast long ago."

Mrs. Diehl brought the coffee in and bowed awkwardly to Mason. The whole thing seemed like a scene in a play to him. It was charming, all the same, to sit alone at the table with such a girl; it was just the least bit exciting. His hands shook a little, he noticed.

As he took his cup of coffee from her he said whimsically:

"I expect to wake up soon."

"Does it seem like a dream to you too?"

"Well, it isn't my everyday life, I must confess."

To her he seemed handsomer and more refined than in the city. He seemed simpler, too, though he was still complex enough to keep her wondering. The slope of his shoulders and the poise of his head were splendid to her. It could not be possible that he was here to see her; to be served by her; to spend the days with her; to be her husband if she should say so.

And yet she retained her dignity. She did not grow silly nor hysterical as a lesser woman might have done. She was tremulous with happiness and wonder, but she sat before him mistress of her hands and voice. Her very laughter pleased him; if she had giggled—heavens, if she had giggled!

John also went busily, apparently calmly, about his work. Mason was pleased at that; it showed astonishing reserve in the man.

Again that keen, sweet feeling of companionship—wifehood—came to Rose as they walked out side by side into the parlor. He had come to her; that was the marvelous thing! She was doing wifely things for him; it was all more intimate, more splendid than she thought!

They sat down in the best room and faced each other. It was their most potential moment. Breakfast was eaten and the day was before them, and an understanding was necessary.

"Now, I can't allow you to be hasty," Mason said. "I'll tell you what I think you had better do; defer your answer until two weeks from today, when I shall return to the city. That will give us time to talk the matter over, and it will give you time to repent."

A little shadow fell over her and the sunlight was not quite so brilliant. The incomprehensible nature of the man came to her again, and he seemed old, old as a granite crag, beyond song, beyond love, beyond hope.

Then he smiled: "Well, now, I'm ready to go see the world; any caves, any rocking boulders, any water tower?"

She took up the cue for gaiety: "No, but I might take you to see the cemetery, that is an appropriate Sunday walk; all the young people walk there."

"The cemetery! I'm a believer in crematories. I'll tell you what we'll do. After you've hung out the wash-boiler to dry we'll go down under the trees, and I'll listen to some of your verse. Now, that is a tremendous concession on my part. I hope you value it to the full."

"I do, indeed."

"You do? good! We'll put the matter in movement at once."

"The dew is still on the grass," she said warningly.

"So it is. I thank you for remembering my growing infirmities. Well, let's go out and see the pigs. As I told you, I hate cattle and swine, they act out so frankly the secret vices of man—but, never mind, I'll go out and have it out with your father."

The moment he began in that tone she was helpless.

They moved out into the barnyard, but John was not in sight.

"I guess he's with his bees," Rose said. "He likes to sit out there and watch them when he is resting."

They peered over the fence, and their eyes took in a picture they will never forget while they live. John Dutcher sat before his bees in the bloom of the clover, his head bowed in his hands. He was crying for his lost daughter.

There came a gripping pain in the girl's throat, the hot tears rushed to her eyes, and she cried in a voice of remorseful agony:

"Father—pappa John!"

He lifted his head and looked at her, his eyes dim with tears, his lips quivering.

The girl rushed through the gate, and Mason turned and walked away like a man discovered thieving from an altar.