to spade?"

"Up," said Jeff. "I don't care where. You always spade up, don't you?"

In a minute Lydia saw Anne, with the sun on her brown hair, the colonel,
and Jeff with the shining spade like a new sort of war weapon, going
forth to spade "up". Evidently Anne intended to have no spading at
random in a fair green orchard. She was one of the conservers of the
earth, a thrifty housewife who would have all things well done. They
looked happily intent, the three, going out to their breaking ground.
Lydia felt the tempest in her going down, and she wished she were with
them. But her temper shut her out. She felt like a little cloud driven
by some capricious wind to darken the face of earth, and not by her own
willingness.

She went down to the noon dinner quite chastened, with the expression
Anne knew, of having had a temper and got over it. The three looked as
if they had had a beautiful time, Lydia thought humbly. The colour was
in their faces. Farvie talked of seed catalogues, and it became evident
that Jeff was spading up the old vegetable garden on the orchard's edge.
Anne had a soft pink in her cheeks. They had all, it appeared, begun a
pleasant game.

Lydia kept a good deal to herself that day. She accepted a task from
Anne of looking over table linen and lining drawers with white paper.
Mary Nellen was excused from work, and sat at upper windows making a hum
of study like good little translating bees. Anne went back and forth
from china closet to piles of dishes left ready washed by Mary Nellen,
and the colonel, in the library, drowsed off the morning's work. Lydia
had a sense of peaceful tasks and tranquil pauses. Her own pulses had
quieted with the declining sun, and it seemed as if they might all be
settling into a slow-moving ease of life at last.

"Where is he?" suddenly she said to Anne, in the midst of their weaving
the household rhythm.

"Jeff?" asked Anne, not stopping. "He's spading in the garden."

"Don't you want to go out?" asked Lydia. She felt as if they had on
their hands, not a liberated prisoner, but a prisoner still bound by
their fond expectations of him. He must be beguiled, distracted from the
memory of his broken fetters.

"No," said Anne. "He'll be tired enough to sleep to-night."

"Didn't he sleep last night?" Lydia asked, that old ache beginning again
in her.

"I shouldn't think so," said Anne. "But he's well tired now".

And it was Lydia that night at ten who heard long breath