phone operator. Sometimes as many as two people in a week
bought railroad tickets; sometimes a month would pass without anybody
either sending or receiving a telegram. Telephone calls were a little
more frequent.

So the girl had little to do there at her sunny open window, where
mignonette and heliotrope and nasturtiums bloomed in pots, and the big
bumble bees came buzzing and plundering the little window garden. And,
except on Sundays, Marque had little leisure to observe her, although in
the long late June evenings it was still light at eight o'clock, and he
had, without understanding how or why, formed the habit of coming down to
the deserted station platform to smoke his pipe and sometimes to fish in
the shallow waters of Willow Brook, and watch the ripples turn from gold
to purple, and listen to a certain bird that sat singing every day at
sunset on the tip of a fir-balsam across the stream--a black and white
bird with a rosy pink chest.

So lovely the evening song of this bird that Marque, often watching the
girl askance, wondered that the surprising beauty of the melody never
caused her to lift her head from book or sewing, or even rise from the
table and come out to the doorway to listen.

But she never did; and whether or not the bird's singing appealed to her,
he could not determine.

Nobody in the little gossiping hamlet of Caranay seemed to know
more than her name; he himself knew only a few people--men who,
like himself, worked on the Willett place with hoe and rake and
spraying cart and barrow--comrades of roller and mower and weed-fork and
mole-trap--dull-witted cullers of dandelion and rose-beetle. And mostly
their names were Hiram.

These had their own kind in the female line to "go with"--Caranay being
far from the metropolis, and as yet untroubled by the spreading feminine
revolution. Only stray echoes of the doings had as yet penetrated to
Caranay daisy fields; no untoward consequences had as yet ensued except
that old Si Dinglebat's wife, after reading the remains of a New York
paper found on the railroad track, had suddenly, and apparently in a fit
of mental aberration, attacked Si with a mop, accompanying the onslaught
with the reiterated inquiry: "Air wimmen to hev their rights?"

That was the only manifestation of the welt-weh in Caranay--that and the
other welt on Si's dome-like and knobby forehead.

He encountered Marque that evening after supper as that young man, in
clean blue jeans