re. Over to the
left not quite a mile away, behind what looked like nothing more than a
fold in the earth (the creek again, Graham explained. It swung an arc of
two hundred degrees or so, about the main body of their tillable land)
rose the heavily wooded slopes of Hickory Hill.

"We were surprised at this place," he said, "when we opened it up
yesterday. It's the best view on the farm. It will be a fine place
to build a real country house, some day, if we ever make money
enough to do that."

"It is a real country house already," Mary told him briskly. "You two,
living in a tent with a lovely old place like this just waiting for you!
Wait until Aunt Lucile and I have had a day at it and you'll see."

He looked as if he believed her. Indeed, he looked unutterable things,
contemplating her, there in that mellow old room,--wrinkling her nose a
little and declaring that she could still smell apples. But all he said
was that he supposed the roof leaked, but it couldn't be very bad because
everything seemed quite decently dry and not at all musty. He added that
he must be getting back to work, but that an odd-job man, capable more or
less of anything, was at her disposal for as long as she wanted him.

She went with him to the door when he made his rather precipitate
departure and stood, after she had waved him a temporary farewell, gazing
up at the soft sun-bathed slope with its aisles of gnarled trees. She
smiled at the sight of a decrepit long-handled wooden pump. She took a
long breath of the smell of the month of May. Then she turned, with Aunt
Lucile, to such practical matters as bedding, brooms and tea-kettles.

There was more to do than a first look had led them to suppose, and
their schemes grew ambitious, besides, as they advanced with them, so
that, for all the Briarean prodigies of Bill, the odd-job man, they went
to bed dog tired at nine o'clock that night with their labors not more
than half complete. They slept--Mary did, anyhow, the deepest sleep she
had known in years.

She waked at an unearthly--a heavenly hour. The thin ether-cool air was
quivering with the dissonance of bird calls; the low sun had laid great
slow-moving oblongs of reddish gilt upon the brown walls of the big room.
(She had left her aunt in undivided possession of the extemporized
bed-chamber.) She rose and opened the door and looked out into the
orchard. But what her eye came to rest upon was the old wooden pump.

It was a triumph o