superintended
the dairy and the housework, with one small servant-maid at her beck
and call. And John tackled the gardens, hiring a boy or two in the
fruit-picking season, or to carry water in times of drought. So they
lived for two years tranquilly. As for happiness--well, happiness
depends on what you expect. It was difficult to know how much John
Penaluna (never a demonstrative man) had expected.

As far as folks could judge, John and Hester were happy enough. Day
after day, from sunrise to sunset, he fought with Nature in his small
wilderness, and slowly won--hewing, digging, terracing, cultivating,
reclaiming plot after plot, and adding it to his conquests. The slope
was sunny but waterless, and within a year Hester could see that his
whole frame stooped with the constant rolling of barrels and carriage
of buckets and waterpots up and down the weary incline. It seemed to
her that the hill thirsted continually; that no sooner was its thirst
slaked than the weeds and brambles took fresh strength and must be
driven back with hook and hoe. A small wooden summer-house stood in
the upper angle of the cliff-garden. John's father had set it there
twenty years before, and given it glazed windows; for it looked down
towards the harbour's mouth and the open sea beyond. Before his death
the brambles grew close about it, and level with the roof, choking the
path to it and the view from it. John had spent the best part of a
fortnight in clearing the ground and opening up the view again. And
here, on warm afternoons when her house work was over, Hester usually
sat with her knitting. She could hear her husband at work on the
terraces below; the sound of his pick and mattock mingled with the
clank of windlasses or the tick-tack of shipwrights' mallets, as she
knitted and watched the smoke of the little town across the water, the
knots of idlers on the quay, the children, like emmets, tumbling
in and out of the Mayows' doorway, the ships passing out to sea or
entering the harbour and coming to their anchorage.

One afternoon in midsummer week John climbed to his wife's
summer-house with a big cabbage-leaf in his hand, and within the
cabbage-leaf a dozen strawberries. (John's strawberries were known by
this time for the finest in the neighbourhood.) He held his offering
in at the open window, and was saying he would step up to the house
for a dish of cream; but stopped short.

"Hullo!" said he; for Hester was staring at him rigidl