"What is it, Isabel?" Oliver was asking her, with concern.

She had caught herself up, and she laughed in a sorry mirth.

"Nothin'," she said. "You catch the colt."

They walked out of the field in silence. At the stone wall he paused.

"Isabel," he said solemnly,--and with that double sense she had had all
through the interview, she thought this was the look she had seen on his
grandfather's face when he led in prayer,--"Isabel, you'd ought to spoke
to me before. Why, I've been tryin' to get ahead so 's to make her
comfortable, when--we set up housekeepin'."

Isabel was not sure whether he meant her or Ardelia. At any rate, it was
the woman to whom he was determined to be loyally kind. She also paused
and looked at him with earnest eyes. It was the last moment in all her
life to convince and alter him.

"Don't you see, Oliver," she urged, "that's what folks are together for,
chiefly, to have a good time. I don't mean they've got to be on the go
from mornin' till night. They've got to work hard, too. Why, what's
'Delia marryin' you for, anyways. 'Tain't to stay at home and work, day
in, day out. She can do that now, right where she is. 'Tain't so 's she
can see you workin'. She can take her mother's spy-glass and have that,
too, till she's sick to death of it. You go along, Oliver, and catch the
colt."

He looked at her very kindly, gratefully, too, perhaps, and turned away
toward the live-oak field. But Isabel, hurrying homeward, stopped and
called him.

"Oliver, you say your mother's gone?"

"Yes."

"She lay your things out?"

"No, I guess not. I told her I wa'n't goin'."

"Well, I'll see to it as I run along."

Laying out the things of the men folks of the family was rigidly
observed in this household, where Oliver was regarded as the cherished
head. He had been brought up to a helpless lack of acquaintance with his
best clothes. He knew them only as lendings apt to constrict him a
little when he got them on, and to rouse in his mother a tendency to
make unwelcome remarks about his personal charms. Where they lived,
between those times of warfare, he scarcely knew.

Isabel laughed a little to herself, in a rueful fashion, as she hurried
along the road. Her own swain was waiting for her, but not for that
would she abjure the quest. She ran up Oliver's driveway and, without
pausing, opened the blind where the key, she knew, was hidden, and
snatched it forth. She unlocked the door and crossed the kitch