ok for it and take it. That was why men fought. Wealth, even the
scent of wealth whetted their appetites and drew them on to battle.

A cloud passed between her and the morning sun. She felt the
premonition of tragedy and suffering lowering down like a storm on her
hills. How foolishly she had thought that all life and all the great,
seething business of life was to be done down in the towns and the
cities. Here was life now, with its pressure and its ugly passions,
pushing right into the very hills.

She shivered as she picked up her prize of the morning and her fishing
tackle and started slowly up the hill toward her home.

Her farm had been rented to Norman Apgarth with the understanding that
Ruth was to spend the summer there in her own home. The rent was
enough to give Ruth what little money she needed for clothes and to
pay her modest expenses at the convent at Athens. So her life was
arranged for her at least up to the time when she should have finished
school.

It seemed very strange to come home and find her home in the hands of
strangers. It was odd to be a sort of guest in the house that she had
ruled and managed from almost the time that she was a baby. It would
be very hard to keep from telling Mrs. Apgarth where things belonged
and how other things should be done. It would be hard to stand by and
see others driving the horses that had never known a hand but hers and
Daddy Tom's. Still she had been very glad to come home. It was her
place. It held all the memories and all the things that connected her
with her own people. She wanted to be able always to come back to it
and call it her own. Looking down over it from the crest of the hill,
at the little clump of trees under which lay her Daddy Tom and her
mother, at the little house that had seen their love and in which she
had been born, she could understand the fierceness with which men
would fight to hold the farms and homes which were threatened.

Until now she had hardly realised that those men whom people vaguely
called "the railroad" would want to take _her_ home and farm away from
her. Now it came suddenly home to her and she felt a swelling rage of
indignation rising in her throat. She hurried down the hill to the
house, as though she saw it already threatened.

She deftly threw her fishpole up on to the roof of the wood shed and
went around to the front of the house. There she found Mrs. Apgarth
weeding in what had been Ruth's own flower beds.