may as well let me get that milk out of your bag.
It will give you trouble through the night if you don't."

Henley turned his horse into one of the stalls, and fed him with fodder
and corn in the ear, and came and leaned on the fence behind her. She
was now crouched down beside the cow; he could see her brown, tapering
arms and wrists against the cow's flank, and hear the milk as it ran
into her tin pail with a sharp, intermittent sound. Above the back of
the cow, of which she seemed a part in the thickening darkness, loomed
up her cottage. There was a yellow light in the kitchen from a bank of
blazing logs in the wide-open fireplace. Henley waited till she had
finished and stood up.

"Hard at it," he jested. "Day or night, it's all the same to you. I
wonder if you work when you are asleep."

"Huh," she laughed, as she advanced toward him, her pail swinging by her
side. "This is my reception-day, and this is my parlor. Won't you come
in and set awhile? Take that rocking-chair over near the piano--or
maybe you'd rather smoke in the bay-window, where you can get fresh
air."

"What's the joke now?" he inquired. "I'm not exactly on."

"Why, you see, you are the second beau I've had right here in the mud,
and with these dirty clothes on, in the last ten minutes."

"The second?" he said, wondering what she was driving at.

"Yes," she made answer, as she rested her pail at her feet and stood
smiling blandly at him. "Hank Bradley has just left. He come over to
invite me to go with a party of girls and boys to the Springs day after
to-morrow. I wish I knew exactly what to do in a case like that. I want
to go--my! I want to go so bad I hardly know what to do. Mother and Aunt
Mandy both think I ought to accept such invitations. I know folks talk
about Hank, and say all sorts of things about girls he goes with. But he
says he has quit drinking and gambling and wants to settle down. His
sister, Mrs. Bailey, is going along to give respectability to it, and it
is to be a great blow-out. I've never been on such a trip; they say
there is a lot of fashionable Atlanta folks at the hotel, and a fine
band, a ten-pin alley, and a lawn-tennis court, and I hardly know what
all."

"Hank Bradley? Good gracious!" Henley said, but he could think of
nothing further that would voice the protestations running wildly
through his brain.

"Oh, I see you'll oppose it, too," she sighed. "I reckon I've just been
trying to make myself believe I