uded.

"Well, out with it," she encouraged. "What are you thinking?"

To Saxon's surprise, he answered directly, and to her double surprise,
his criticism was of a nature which had never entered her head.

"It's just a trick," Billy expounded. "That's what I was gettin' at--"

"But a paying trick," Mrs. Mortimer interrupted, her eyes dancing and
vivacious behind the glasses.

"Yes, and no," Billy said stubbornly, speaking in his slow, deliberate
fashion. "If every farmer was to mix flowers an' vegetables, then every
farmer would get double the market price, an' then there wouldn't be any
double market price. Everything'd be as it was before."

"You are opposing a theory to a fact," Mrs. Mortimer stated. "The fact
is that all the farmers do not do it. The fact is that I do receive
double the price. You can't get away from that."

Billy was unconvinced, though unable to reply.

"Just the same," he muttered, with a slow shake of the head, "I
don't get the hang of it. There's something wrong so far as we're
concerned--my wife an' me, I mean. Maybe I'll get hold of it after a
while."

"And in the meantime, we'll look around," Mrs. Mortimer invited. "I want
to show you everything, and tell you how I make it go. Afterward, we'll
sit down, and I'll tell you about the beginning. You see--" she bent her
gaze on Saxon--"I want you thoroughly to understand that you can succeed
in the country if you go about it right. I didn't know a thing about
it when I began, and I didn't have a fine big man like yours. I was all
alone. But I'll tell you about that."

For the next hour, among vegetables, berry-bushes and fruit trees, Saxon
stored her brain with a huge mass of information to be digested at her
leisure. Billy, too, was interested, but he left the talking to Saxon,
himself rarely asking a question. At the rear of the bungalow, where
everything was as clean and orderly as the front, they were shown
through the chicken yard. Here, in different runs, were kept several
hundred small and snow-white hens.

"White Leghorns," said Mrs. Mortimer. "You have no idea what they netted
me this year. I never keep a hen a moment past the prime of her laying
period--"

"Just what I was tellin' you, Saxon, about horses," Billy broke in.

"And by the simplest method of hatching them at the right time, which
not one farmer in ten thousand ever dreams of doing, I have them laying
in the winter when most hens stop laying and when eggs ar