ia also was going to
heaven.

"Do you care what happens to you here?" he asked.

"Yes," she answered instantly. "I care about staying with my folks."

The homely touch almost conquered him. He thought perhaps such a fierce
little barbarian might even find it better to eat bitter bread with her
own than to wander out into strange flowery paths.

"Are you going to heaven, too, Lydia?" he ventured. "With Anne?"

"I'm going everywhere my folks go," she said, with composure. "Now I
can't talk any more. I told Mary Nellen I'd dust while they do the
silver."

The atmosphere of a perfectly conventional living was about them.
Jeffrey had to adjure himself to keep awake to the difficulties he alone
had made. He had come out to confess to her the lawlessness of his mind
toward her, and she was deciding merely to go on living with him and her
father, which meant, in the first place, dusting for Mary Nellen. They
walked along the orchard in silence, and Jeffrey, with relief, also took
a side track to the obvious. Absently his eyes travelled along the
orchard's level length, and his great thought came to him. The ground
did it. The earth called to him. The dust rose up impalpably and spoke
to him.

"Lydia," said he, "I see what to do."

"What?"

The startled brightness in her eyes told him she feared his thought,
and, not knowing, as he did, how great it was, suspected him of tragic
plans for going away.

"I'll go to work on this place. I'll plough it up. I'll raise things,
and father and I'll dig."

As he watched her interrogatively the colour faded from her face. The
relief of hearing that homespun plan had chilled her blood, and she was
faint for an instant with the sickness of hearty youth that only knows
it feels odd to itself and concludes the strangeness is of the soul. But
she did not answer, for Anne was at the window, signalling.

"Come in," said Lydia. "She wants us."

Miss Amabel, in a morning elegance of black muslin and silk gloves, was
in the library. Anne looked excited and the colonel, there also, quite
pleasurably stirred. Lydia was hardly within the door when Anne threw
the news at her.

"Dancing classes!"

"At my house," said Miss Amabel. She put a warm hand on Lydia's shoulder
and looked down at her admiringly: wistfully as well. "Can anything,"
the look said, "be so young, so unthinkingly beautiful and have a right
to its own richness? How could we turn this dower into the treasury of
the po