f faith over skepticism, that pump. Graham had
contemned it utterly, hardly allowing, even, that it was picturesque, but
Bill, the odd-job man had, with her encouragement, spent a patient hour
over it and in the teeth of scientific probability, lo, it had given
forth streams of water as clear as any that had ever miraculously been
smitten out of a rock. The partners had forbidden her to drink any of it
except boiled, until it had been analyzed.

She looked about. She had the world to herself. So she carried her rubber
tub, her sponge and a bath-towel out to the warped wooden platform and
bathed _en plein air_, water and sun together. She came in, deliciously
shuddering, lighted a fire, already laid, of shavings and sticks, put the
kettle on to boil and dressed. She felt--new born that morning.

This sensation made the undercurrent of a long fully filled day. She
almost never had time to look at it but she knew it was there. It
enabled her to take with equanimity the unlooked-for arrival (so far as
she and her aunt were concerned) of Graham's young torn-boy sister,
Sylvia. It made it possible for her to say, "Why, yes, of course! I'd
love to," when Graham, along in the afternoon asked her if she wouldn't
go for a walk over the farm with him. They spent more than an hour at
it, sitting, a part of the time, side by side atop the gate into the
upper pasture, yet not even then had the comfortable sense of pleasant
companionship with him taken fright. It was a security that resided, she
knew, wholly in herself.

He was holding himself, obviously, on a very tight rein, and it was quite
conceivable that before her visit ended, he would bolt. There was a
moment, indeed--when he came with Rush to supper at the apple house and
got his first look at the transformation she had wrought in it--when that
possibility must have been in the minds of every one who saw his face.

She had dramatized the result of her two days' labor innocent of any
intention to produce an effect like that. The partners when they came
dropping in from time to time had, learned nothing of her plans, seen
none of their accomplishments, so to-night the old-fashioned settle
which Bill had knocked together from lumber in the packing room and she
had stained, two of the sorting tables, fitted into the corners beside
the fireplace to make a dais, the conversion of another into a capital
dining table by the simple expedient of lengthening its legs, the rag
rug, di