er pitchfork, watching me as I
came. We met like the people in the old song, in silence, if not in tears.
Her warm hand clasped mine.

"I thought you'd come, Jim. I heard you were at Mrs. Steavens's last
night. I've been looking for you all day."

She was thinner than I had ever seen her, and looked, as Mrs. Steavens
said, "worked down," but there was a new kind of strength in the gravity
of her face, and her color still gave her that look of deep-seated health
and ardor. Still? Why, it flashed across me that though so much had
happened in her life and in mine, she was barely twenty-four years old.

Antonia stuck her fork in the ground, and instinctively we walked toward
that unploughed patch at the crossing of the roads as the fittest place to
talk to each other. We sat down outside the sagging wire fence that shut
Mr. Shimerda's plot off from the rest of the world. The tall red grass had
never been cut there. It had died down in winter and come up again in the
spring until it was as thick and shrubby as some tropical garden-grass. I
found myself telling her everything: why I had decided to study law and to
go into the law office of one of my mother's relatives in New York City;
about Gaston Cleric's death from pneumonia last winter, and the difference
it had made in my life. She wanted to know about my friends and my way of
living, and my dearest hopes.

"Of course it means you are going away from us for good," she said with a
sigh. "But that don't mean I'll lose you. Look at my papa here; he's been
dead all these years, and yet he is more real to me than almost anybody
else. He never goes out of my life. I talk to him and consult him all the
time. The older I grow, the better I know him and the more I understand
him."

She asked me whether I had learned to like big cities. "I'd always be
miserable in a city. I'd die of lonesomeness. I like to be where I know
every stack and tree, and where all the ground is friendly. I want to live
and die here. Father Kelly says everybody's put into this world for
something, and I know what I've got to do. I'm going to see that my little
girl has a better chance than ever I had. I'm going to take care of that
girl, Jim."

I told her I knew she would. "Do you know, Antonia, since I've been away,
I think of you more often than of any one else in this part of the world.
I'd have liked to have you for a sweetheart, or a wife, or my mother or my
sister--anything that a woman can be