m afraid they are beginning to
feel hard toward me because I won't listen to any talk about going.
Sometimes I feel like I'm getting tired of standing up for this
country."

"I won't tell the boys yet, if you'd rather not."

"Oh, I'll tell them myself, to-night, when they come home. They'll
be talking wild, anyway, and no good comes of keeping bad news.
It's all harder on them than it is on me. Lou wants to get married,
poor boy, and he can't until times are better. See, there goes the
sun, Carl. I must be getting back. Mother will want her potatoes.
It's chilly already, the moment the light goes."

Alexandra rose and looked about. A golden afterglow throbbed in
the west, but the country already looked empty and mournful. A dark
moving mass came over the western hill, the Lee boy was bringing in
the herd from the other half-section. Emil ran from the windmill
to open the corral gate. From the log house, on the little rise
across the draw, the smoke was curling. The cattle lowed and
bellowed. In the sky the pale half-moon was slowly silvering.
Alexandra and Carl walked together down the potato rows. "I have
to keep telling myself what is going to happen," she said softly.
"Since you have been here, ten years now, I have never really been
lonely. But I can remember what it was like before. Now I shall
have nobody but Emil. But he is my boy, and he is tender-hearted."

That night, when the boys were called to supper, they sat down
moodily. They had worn their coats to town, but they ate in their
striped shirts and suspenders. They were grown men now, and, as
Alexandra said, for the last few years they had been growing more
and more like themselves. Lou was still the slighter of the two,
the quicker and more intelligent, but apt to go off at half-cock.
He had a lively blue eye, a thin, fair skin (always burned red to
the neckband of his shirt in summer), stiff, yellow hair that would
not lie down on his head, and a bristly little yellow mustache,
of which he was very proud. Oscar could not grow a mustache; his
pale face was as bare as an egg, and his white eyebrows gave it an
empty look. He was a man of powerful body and unusual endurance;
the sort of man you could attach to a corn-sheller as you would
an engine. He would turn it all day, without hurrying, without
slowing down. But he was as indolent of mind as he was unsparing
of his body. His love of routine amounted to a vice. He worked
like an insect, always doing