h you'd be serious."

"I am serious. Perhaps it's a throwback, Winifred. There is farmer blood
in my veins."

It was something deeper than that. It was his virile joy in
fundamentals. He loved his golden-eared Guernseys and his black
Berkshires and his White Wyandottes--not because of their choiceness but
because they were cows and pigs and chickens; and he kept a pair of
pussy cats, half a dozen dogs, and as many horses, because man
primitively had made friends of the dumb brutes upon whom the ease and
safety of his life depended.

There was, rather strangely, something about Anne which fitted in with
this atavistic idea. She was, more than Winifred, a hearthstone woman. A
man might carry her over his threshold and find her when he came home o'
nights. It was hard to visualize Winifred as waiting or watching or
welcoming. She was always going somewhere with an air of having
important things to do, and coming back with an air of having done them.
Maxwell felt that these important things were not connected in any way
with domestic matters. One did not, indeed, expect domesticity of
Winifred.

Thus Anne, drawing upon him by mysterious forces, drew him also by her
beauty and a certain wistfulness in her eyes. He had once had a dog,
Amber Witch, whose eyes had held always a wistful question. He had
tried to answer it. She had grown old on his hearth, yet always to the
end of her eyes had asked. He hoped now that in some celestial hunting
ground she had found an answer to that subtle need.

He told Anne about Amber Witch. "I have one of her puppies on my farm."

She was much interested. "I've never had a dog; or a cat."

He had, he said, a big pair of tabbies who slept in the hay and came up
to the dairy when the milk was strained. There were two blue porcelain
dishes for their sacred use. There was, he said, milk and to spare. He
grew eloquent as he told of the number of quarts daily. He bragged of
his butter. His cheeses had won prizes at county fairs. As for
chickens--they had fresh eggs and broilers without end. He had his own
hives, too, white-clover honey. And his housekeeper made hot biscuit. In
a month or two there'd be asparagus and strawberries. Say! Yes, he was
eloquent.

Anne was hungry. There had been a meagre dinner that evening. The other
girls had not seemed to care. But Anne had cared.

"I'm starved," she had said as she had surveyed the table. "Let's pawn
the spoons and have one square meal."