even her daughters. Jacques was
coming back to her! She said the words over and over to herself, till
they rang through her head like the refrain of a song. All the years
between them, the long, lonely, weary years, filled with work and with
the sort of happiness that comes from successful endeavor,--these were
suddenly as naught, and she was a girl again, a wistful, dreaming girl
with a baby in her arms, listening there in her garden for the
pit-a-patter of her lover's horse.

She closed her eyes. Presently the voice of the graphophone broke in
upon her dreams, and she became aware of the dancers that passed and
repassed the lighted windows; among them a man in spectacles, guiding
and being guided by a determined young person in apple-green, his face
flushed and earnest, his grizzled hair somewhat awry. "Why--it's Jim
Thorpe!" she thought, with a stab of remorse. "I'd forgotten him. But
he's dancing, he's enjoying himself like a boy. Bless that thoughtful
girl of mine! She's made him look ten years younger. Dear, faithful old
Jim!"

Her heart was open to all the world just then. She went to the window
and smiled in at him tenderly.

Perhaps it was just as well that James Thorpe could not see that smile,
and misunderstand it.

CHAPTER XI

Late summer in Kentucky; deep, umbrageous woodlands fragrant with fern,
dreaming noons, shimmering in the heat, with the locust drowsily
shrilling; warm and silver nights, made musical by the loves of many
mocking-birds; the waste places green tangles of blossoming weed, the
roads a-flutter with hovering yellow butterflies, over all the land a
brooding hush, not the silence of idleness, of emptiness, but of life,
intense and still as a spinning top is still. Beneath it those who
listen are aware of a faint, constant stirring, a whisper of green and
eager things pushing themselves up from the fecund soil.

More than ever before was Kate aware of the sympathy that bound her to
these fields of hers, soon to be hers no longer. She could not keep away
from them. Early and late the Madam and her racking mare were to be seen
about the roads and lanes, inspecting dairies, stables, hog-pens,
poultry-yards, watching the field-hands at their labor, hearing in
person the requests and complaints of tenants. Much of her phenomenal
success was due to personal supervision, as she knew; even, perhaps to
personal charm, for field-hands and tenants are alike human. Now the
executive habit