They go on from a
quarter-section and a team of oxen to the biggest farm they can handle,
and every fresh furrow they cut enriches all of us. The other kind want
to sit down in the dirt and take life easily, as they've always done.
The dirt worries everybody else, and we've no use for them. By and by
our Legislature will have to wake up and stop them from getting in."

He went on with his dinner, but his observations left Agatha thoughtful.
She was beginning to understand one side of Wyllard's character. He, it
seemed, stood for practical efficiency. There was a driving force in him
that made for progress and order. It was apparently his mission to
straighten things out. Some persons of his kind, she reflected, now and
then made a good deal of avoidable trouble; but there was in this man,
at least, a half-whimsical toleration, which rendered that an unlikely
thing in his particular case. Besides, she had already recognized that
she was in some respects fortunate in having such a man for her
companion.

Her deck chair was always set out in the most sheltered and comfortable
place. If there was anything to be seen he almost invariably appeared
with a pair of powerful glasses. She was watched over, her wishes were
anticipated, and the man was seldom obtrusively present when she felt
disposed to talk to somebody else. It struck her that she had thought a
great deal about him during the last few days, and rather less than
usual about Gregory, which was partly the reason she did not walk up and
down the deck with him, as usual, after dinner that evening.

Three or four days later, the _Scarrowmania_ ran into the Bank fog, and
burrowed through it with whistle hooting dolefully at regular intervals.
Now and then an answering ringing of bells came out of the clammy vapor,
and the half-seen shape of an anchored schooner loomed up, rolling
wildly on gray slopes of sea. Once, too, a tiny dory, half filled with
lines and buoys, slid by plunging on the wash flung off by the
_Scarrowmania's_ bows, and Agatha understood that the men in her had
escaped death by a hairsbreadth. They were cod fishers, Wyllard told
her, and he added that there was a host of them at work somewhere in the
sliding haze. She imagined, now and then, that the fog had a depressing
effect on him, and that when the dory lay beneath the rail there had
been an unusual look in his face.

A breeze came out of the northwest, with the sting of the ice in it, but
the