d
expected, it was not long before he saw Rose go across the courthouse
yard toward her office on the north side of the square. He liked the
swift, easy way in which she walked. She had been walking the first time
he had ever seen her, thirteen years before, when her father had led his
family uptown from the station, the day of their arrival in Fallon.

Patrick Conroy had come from Sharon, Illinois, to perform the thankless
task of starting a weekly newspaper in a town already undernourishing
one. By sheer stubbornness he had at last established it. Twelve hundred
subscribers, their little printing jobs, advertisers who bought liberal
portions of space at ten cents an inch--all had enabled him to give his
children a living that was a shade better than an existence. He had died
less than a year ago, and Martin, like the rest of the community, had
supposed the Fallon Independent would be sold or suspended. Instead, as
quietly and matter-of-factly as she had filled her dead mother's place
in the home while her brothers and sisters were growing up, Rose stepped
into her father's business, took over the editorship and with a boy to
do the typesetting and presswork, continued the paper without missing
an issue. It even paid a little better than before, partly because it
flattered Fallon's sense of Christian helpfulness to throw whatever
it could in Rose's way, but chiefly because she made the Independent a
livelier sheet with double the usual number of "Personals."

Yes, decidedly, Rose had force and push. Martin's mind was made up. He
would drop into the Independent ostensibly to extend his subscription,
but really to get on more intimate terms with the woman whom he had
now firmly determined should become his wife. He drew a deep breath
of relaxation and finished the glass of sweetness with that sense of
self-conscious sheepishness which most men feel when they surrender to
the sticky charms of an ice-cream soda. A few minutes later he stood
beside Rose's worn desk.

"How-do-you-do, once more, Miss Rose of Sharon. You're not the Bible's
Rose of Sharon, are you?" he joshed a bit awkwardly.

"If I were a rose of anywhere, I'd soon wilt in this stuffy little
office of inky smells," she answered pleasantly. "A rose would need
petals of leather to get by here."

"A rose, by rights, belongs out of doors,"--Martin indicated the
direction of his farm--"out there where the sun shines and there's no
smells except the rich, healt