cided deliberately, "wants me to help in the store. I
can't go to Wells."

"He can't get on alone now Maggie's gone. We need your board money to
run the house at all. Dan was wild to get away from Green River, but in
two years he's got no farther than Wells, and ten dollars a week. I know
we ought to leave you free to start yourself, if we can't give you a
start, but----"

"Is that all you want to tell me?"

She put out an unaccustomed arm and pulled him awkwardly close. He came
obediently, and patted her shoulder stiffly but did not kiss her. "I
know what this means," she asserted, and showed a rapidly forming
intention of crying on his shoulder. "It hurts me like it does you."

[Illustration: "'_I know what this means,' she asserted_'"]

"It don't hurt me. I ought to have seen it myself. I ought not to have
planned to go. It's all right, mother. Is that all?"

"All? It's enough. I was awake half the night planning to break it to
you."

"You broke it all right. I'll be going." He shook out his crushed
cap, and adjusted it with dignity, looking at her calmly out of
impenetrable eyes, like a young prince ending an audience, with more
power behind him than he knew, kissed her gravely on the cheek with cool
young lips, and opened the door, and walked off into the sunshine.

"It's the girl," said his mother, but not until the door had closed
behind him. "No girl is good enough to do what she's done to you." Then
she selected the frilliest of Maggie's blouses, which had dried while
she talked, and spread it on the ironing table to sprinkle again.

Neil did not look like a young man crossed in love, or a young man with
his future wrecked by a word. He did not give a backward glance to the
little brown house with the sun on its many-paned windows, or seem to
hear the children's voices from the old barn behind the house--the
favourite refuge of the little Bradys when they were banished from the
kitchen--that echoed after him in the clear morning air, shrill and then
fainter as he left the place behind.

He had settled into his usual pace for this familiar walk--a steady
stride that you could fit the unmanageable parts of a Latin verb to the
rhythm of, or the refractory words of a song; but it was not a usual
day. It was the first warm day of that April, warmer already, with the
goading urge of spring in the softening air that frets and troubles with
new desires and a sense of unfitness for them at once, and will not