understanding of a man, or the domineering spirit of a crude lad,
jealous of his passing authority.

The uncertainty troubled her. She watched him from the door and saw him
approach Morgan, where he was backing his horse into the shafts.

"All right, is he?" asked Joe, stopping a moment.

Morgan was distant.

"I guess he'll live another day, don't worry about him," said he, in
surly voice.

"What time do you aim to be back today?" pursued Joe, entirely unmoved
by Morgan's show of temper.

"Say, I'll set up a bulletin board with my time-table on it if you've
got to have it, Mr. Overseer!" said Morgan, looking up from the buckling
of a shaft-strap, his face coloring in anger.

"Well, you don't need to get huffy over it."

"Mind your business then," Morgan growled.

He didn't wait to discuss the matter farther, but got into the buggy
without favoring Joe with as much as another glance, gave his horse a
vindictive lash with the whip and drove off, leaving the gate open
behind him.

Joe shut it, and turned back to his mowing.

Many a time he paused that morning in his labor, leaning on the snath of
his scythe, in a manner of abstraction and seeming indolence altogether
strange to him. There was a scene, framed by the brown casing of the
kitchen door, with two figures in it, two clinging hands, which
persisted in its disturbing recurrence in his troubled mind.

Ollie was on dangerous ground. How far she had advanced, he did not
know, but not yet, he believed, to the place where the foulness of
Morgan had defiled her beyond cleansing. It was his duty as the guardian
of his master's house to watch her, even to warn her, and to stop her
before she went too far.

Once he put down his scythe and started to go to the house, his mind
full of what he felt it his duty to say.

Then there rose up that feeling of disparity between matron and youth
which had held him at a distance from Ollie before. He turned back to
his work with a blush upon his sun-scorched face, and felt ashamed. But
it was not a thing to be deferred until after the damage had been done.
He must speak to her that day, perhaps when he should go in for dinner.
So he said.

Ollie seemed self-contained and uncommunicative at dinner. Joe thought
she was a little out of humor, or that she was falling back into her old
gloomy way, from which she had emerged, all smiles and dimples, like a
new and youthful creature, on the coming of Morgan. He thought, t