able it had been that Rush should go to Elgin.

He was somewhat flushed and a little out of breath but he seemed, after
the first uncomfortable minute, collected enough. He mounted the
running-board and directed the chauffeur to drive on across the bridge
and fork to the right with the main road up to a small nondescript
building on the far side of it.

It was a part of the farm, he explained, indicating the wilderness off to
the left,--a part of what must once have been a big apple orchard.
Indeed, exploring it yesterday for the first time, he had found a
surprising number of old trees, which, choked as they were with
undergrowth, looked as if they were still bearing fruit. The building,
which they had never even entered until yesterday, had served as a
sorting and packing house for the crop, though the old part of
it--paradoxically the upper part--appeared to have been built as a
dwelling by some pioneer settler. A second story had been added
underneath by digging out the bank.

It stood well back from the road, a grass grown lane with a turning
circle leading to it. It had what had once been a loading platform, wagon
high, instead of a veranda. The lower story, a single room which they
peered into through a crack in a warped unhinged door, seemed unpromising
enough, a dark cobwebby place, cumbered with wooden chutes from the floor
above by which, Graham explained, they rolled the apples down into
barrels after they had been sorted up-stairs. A carpenter had been busy
most of the morning, he added, flooring over the traps from which these
chutes led down.

Mary, though, fairly cried out with delight, and even Miss Wollaston
beamed appreciation when, Graham, having led them up the bank and around
to the back of the building, ushered them in, at the ground level up
here, to the upper story of the building. There was a fireplace in the
north end of it with twin brick erections on either side which they
thought must have been used for drying apples. The opposite end,
partitioned off, still housed a cider mill and press, but they had
contrived, he said, a makeshift bedroom out of it.

Along the east side of the room were three pairs of casement windows
which commanded a view of the greater part of the farm; across the road,
across Hickory Creek, across the long reach of the lower pasture and the
seemingly limitless stretches of new plowed fields. The clump of farm
buildings, old and new, was in the middle of the pictu