and could not have it.
She paused a moment at the crossing of the roads, the frown of
consideration again upon her brow. "Makes me mad," she said to herself,
but half absently, as if that were not the issue at all. Then she turned
her back on her own home-road and the house where her starched dress was
awaiting her, and where Jim Bryant would presently call to take her to
Poole's Woods, and walked briskly down the other way.

Isabel stopped at the acre field, but she had no idea of what she meant
to say when she was there. Oliver was digging potatoes, as she knew he
would be, and she recognized the bend of the back, the steady stress of
one who toiled too long and too unrestingly, so that his very pose spoke
like a lifelong purpose. She stood still for a moment or two before he
saw her, gazing at him. Old tenderness awoke in her, old angers also.
She remembered how he had made her suffer in the obstinate course of his
own will, and how free she had felt when at last she had broken their
engagement and seen him drift under Ardelia's charm. But he would always
mean something to her more than other men, in a fashion quite peculiar
to himself. She had agonized too much over him. She had protected him
too long against the faults of his own nature, and now she could not be
content unless, for his sake, she protected Ardelia a little also.
Suddenly he lifted himself to rest his back, and saw her. They stood
confronting each other, each with a sense of familiarity and pain.
Oliver was a handsome fellow, tall, splendidly made, with rich, warm
coloring. He looked kindly, but stolidly set in his own way.

"That you, Isabel?" he asked awkwardly.

They had met only for a passing word since the breaking of their troth.

"Yes," said Isabel briefly. "I've got to speak to you. Wait a minute.
I'll come in by the bars, and you meet me under the old cherry. It'll be
shady there."

She turned back to the bars, ducked deftly under, and, holding her
skirts from the rough land, made her way to the cherry in the corner of
the lot. Oliver wonderingly followed. She felt again that particular
anger she reserved for him, when she saw him stalking along, hoe in
hand. It was a settled tread, with little spring in it, and for the
moment it seemed to her a prophecy of what it would be when he was an
old man, with a staff instead of the hoe. She was waiting for him under
the tree.

"Oliver," she began, speaking out of an impulse hardly yet approve