CHAPTER X.
From the day when he took the farmers of his county to see how another man had harnessed the creek which ran wild through his pastures, setting it to work to cut the wood, and grind the grain and to run every hand machine from the fanning-mill to the grindstone, the Agricultural Representative began to see visions.
“Did you ever see anything like it?” one man exclaimed when they were going over the details afterwards. “There wasn’t a darned crank on the place. The thing must do more than one man’s work, and the most soul-aggravatin’ part of the work at that. Now at our place there’s just the boy and me to do everything, and we’re prowlin’ around the barn with a lantern till nine o’clock most nights. We get a man for a month or two sometimes, but the wife isn’t strong and it makes more work for her. Besides, as wages go now it doesn’t pay. I know Jim gets discouraged sometimes. He has a fair schooling and the wages he could get in town must look pretty good compared with what we turn in in actual cash from the farm; a boy doesn’t see what capital’s being laid away in the place every year. If he’s half alive he knows he’s living the
best part of his life now; and he isn’t going to waste it all laying up something for a time when he can’t enjoy it.
“I’ve tried to keep Jim at home by giving him a calf or a colt once in a while, like my father used to do, but if a boy has to feed calves and curry colts long after the hour when every other working man has hung up his overalls, he gets sick of them. I never saw a boy sick of tinkerin’ around a gasoline engine or a motor, though. If Jim goes his mother and I might as well go too, and we’re so used to the old place now that I guess we’d never get over being homesick if we left it. I wish you’d come up and measure the flow of our creek.”
Another evening one of the young men who had taken the junior farmers’ course in the winter came into the agricultural office looking rather embarrassed.
“It’s about the water-power,” he began.
“Oh, yes,” Billy encouraged. He wasn’t thinking of much except water power these days and was glad of an opportunity to unload his enthusiasm. Besides, the boy had just commenced farming on a place of his own, and the agricultural adviser knew that young blood moves more quickly in adopting reforms. “I should think you’d have a pretty good force from that hill of yours,” he said. “What did you think of doing?”
“Well, you see,” the boy stammered, “it’s like
this. I ain’t just sure what’s the best way. I want to get married and I don’t know what to do.”
The Representative stared. He had had varied requests for advice since he came to stand for the Department of Agriculture in the community, but this was something new. Under his quizzical grin the boy reddened painfully. He had never seen the Representative’s steady brown eyes hold such a glint of amusement, and he was afraid he was going to laugh.
“I’m sorry,” Billy said without looking particularly sympathetic, “but I don’t know much about it myself. It would just be a case of the blind leading the blind.”
“Oh!” The boy began to grasp things; then he roared. “I guess you’ll learn,” he admitted dryly. “Leastways you don’t strike the neighborhood up around ‘The Heights’ as one that wasn’t interested.”
Billy felt his own face warming up. “The Heights” was the section surrounding the Evison estate, and in his evening spins over the country roads he had often met his client jogging quietly along in a rubber-tired buggy, his feet stretched out comfortably on the dashboard and his interest evidently very much absorbed in a white-robed presence beside him. Billy felt that they had a singularly common interest, and he shook hands with him across the table.
“Go ahead,” he said. “What has the water-power to do with your case?”
“If you’d been down at our club meetings oftener this summer you’d have known I was keeping company with the school-teacher.”
There was an unmistakable pride in the confession. The school-teacher evidently held a rather superior place in the social life of the neighborhood, and again Billy felt the nearness of a kindred interest. At the same time he interpreted something of reproach in the words “if you’d been down to our club meetings oftener....”
Unfortunately the club met on Tuesday evenings and Miss Evison seemed to be free more often on Tuesday than on other nights of the week. Frequently when he was about ready to leave the office the ’phone would ring and the familiar flute-like voice would pipe, “I was afraid you might have gone. I meant to call all afternoon and had almost forgotten.” Then the tone would drop almost to a whisper, “I’m afraid I’ve been very stingy of my time lately, but we’d have the whole evening to ourselves if you’d care to come to-night.”
Once he had been obliged to tell her that this was the night when his Junior Farmers held their meeting and that he had almost promised to be there.
“I’m so sorry,” she replied, with touching
plaintiveness. “We’re having a little euchre. Some friends from town have just dropped in. They’re very informal, and I know you’d enjoy it. You couldn’t leave your precious young farmers for just one night?”
“I’ve done that so many nights. Perhaps I could leave the meeting early and call on the way home?”
She was unmistakably hurt.
“Oh, no; don’t trouble,” she answered quickly. “I wouldn’t think of having you do such a thing. It doesn’t matter. I just thought perhaps you’d like to come.”
Another time he had asked her to come with him. It was an evening when girls attended.
“You know,” she said, “it’s very sweet of you to offer to take me right into your Holy-of-Holies to hear how they feed their calves and the like, but it would be casting your pearls before a very ungrateful little pig. I wouldn’t enjoy it a bit. And I think, too, if you’ll take an experienced person’s advice, that you’re getting too much of it yourself. Do you know that you’ve talked to me an hour now, about waterwheels?”
“I’m sorry.”
“I like to hear about them, and what you’re doing and everything, but don’t you think if you work all day at that sort of thing, it’s enough without running to meetings at night? It doesn’t leave you any time for social interests at all.
I’m sure you wouldn’t have any trouble in getting into the Country Club, and the people there are so different. Most of the members are men and women of wide social experience.”
Billy knew something of their social experience, but he didn’t tell her. Neither did he make any effort to gain admittance to the club, but he did spend more evenings attending theatres and motoring excursions than was good for his Junior Farmers’ Society. He felt that he deserved the unconscious reproof, “If you’d been at our meetings oftener,” from this young man whose aspirations were, after all, so like his own. Evidently, however, his friend’s efforts had accomplished something, while his case was as uncertain as ever.
“You’re going to marry the teacher, then?” he asked.
“Yes.” There was no doubt about that. “She isn’t afraid to go on a farm because she doesn’t know anything about it. She’d always lived in town before she came here, but she’s crazy about the country, and no gush about it either. She takes the kids to the woods and has them making gardens at the school, and all that. When I bought the farm every old wiseacre in the settlement came and said: ‘You’re making a mistake. That girl’s never done farm work and wouldn’t stand it for a year.’ I could have wrung their necks. I didn’t want to marry any girl to have
her help to support the place. I thought I could make things so she wouldn’t have to work any harder to take care of a home out here than she would in town. There was no person I could ask about it until you brought that girl out to the farm excursion. I didn’t know what she’d think, but I didn’t suppose I’d ever see her again, anyway, so I asked her if she thought a fellow had any right to take a girl who didn’t know anything about farming out to a place like mine, and if she thought a farm house could be made just as comfortable and handy as a place in town. She’s some girl that. She never smiled, and she didn’t seem surprised—she was a sight more considerate than some other people I know. She said that a girl worth having wouldn’t be afraid to take a chance on a few hardships with a man, but that the work on an average farm with no conveniences at all was too hard for any woman. Then she showed how an ordinary house could be made a regular doves’ nest for the price of an automobile.”
Billy was thinking of his own inquiry on the way to the station. It struck him with a certain grim amusement that she would be rather impressed with the prevailing sentiment. And she had said: “A girl worth having wouldn’t be afraid to take a chance on a few hardships with a man.” She hadn’t told him that.
When he came out of his reverie the boy was still talking.
“So I thought if you’d come and measure the flow of the creek,” he was saying, “I’d know what to do. If there isn’t enough water power, I’ll get a gasoline engine big enough to pump water for a bathroom and do the power work around the house, anyway.”
A few other inquiries for power systems came in, but their motives were more purely economic. The labor problem was becoming more baffling every year; hired men were expensive, and they wouldn’t stay. The water power, once installed, would cost nothing; it would work all day and all year until the bed of the stream was worn level. Billy knew that once started the fever was bound to spread, and he had visions.
When his car climbed the hills at sunrise, as it often did now that the work was pressing, with school fairs and marketing associations busy disposing of the year’s harvests, he frequently saw a round-shouldered, blue-overalled boy, half awake, plodding out to the barn. He remembered well the sleepy stupidness, the torturing ache of the body weakened by the fever of growth, and stiffened by long hours of a man’s work. Some day, he believed, every farm in the district would have mechanical power doing the heartbreaking drudgery which was making boys shiver at the thought of farming all their lives. Occasionally
a woman coming from the barn with her milk-pails and a fretful little toddler or two tagging along after her would startle him with a crowd of memories which he had been trying hard to forget. Whatever changes might come now, he would always have to remember that until he was old enough to do it himself, nothing had been done to make things easier for his mother. In the evenings when he drove home late and saw families still struggling with belated chores, he had a dream of a time when every farm would have regular hours, when the family would gather in the evenings not too tired to enjoy each other, when the mothers of the farms, famed in all history for giving the world its sturdiest, brainiest children, would have time to give their best to all their children, to put their best work on the black sheep, or misfits, or handicapped, or delicate ones, for whom there is little special provision in the country outside their own homes.
A speaker at a political meeting in the town hall had recently expressed something of the same ideas. “There is a movement for better things among the farmers’ wives,” he said. “The idea is finding recognition among them that all the prizes of progress are no longer to be allowed to go to the man-life on the farm while the woman-life is left to vegetate. The woman on the farm must bear the oncoming hosts of strong
men, or they will not be borne. And unless the farm women can live under conditions which make for happiness, health and pride our whole nation will be weakened by ill-health, unhappiness, and unrest of the mothers and wives.”
A few of the more adventurous women had accompanied their husbands to hear the speaker, but they gave little sign of their approval or disapproval of his sentiments. A week or two later Mrs. Burns called at the agricultural office to see if the Representative would have time, with all the community water-power demands, to help do something for the children. Billy hoped he would have time. Recollections of certain experiences of his own childhood on the Swamp Farm had left his sympathies quick for any youngster suffering possibly some of the same tribulations. Yet he knew the homes in the neighborhood pretty well, and he knew that child-labor could not be called an evil of the section, except in the backward crevices of the hills, and in the best counties of the province there are “way-back” places where a lot of evils go unmolested. Even on one of the leading farms near the town, where the children of the family were perhaps over cared for, there was a “Home-boy,” stolid, stunted, stupid-looking, who couldn’t talk plain, and who went around with his mouth open and a painful, bitter look about his eyes. Billy had misgivings as to how things
were going with him. He felt ready to support any movement which Mrs. Burns might have in mind.
“You remember hearing that political speaker say that the woman on the farm gave the world its sturdiest children?” she began. “Well, after what I had seen in hospital work, and what I’ve seen right around home, I wondered. Last week we had a doctor talk to us at the Women’s Institute, and he showed us that the tradition that children brought up in the country are healthier than children brought up in the city is all a lie. He showed us that while the death rate in the cities has been going down steadily for the last ten years, in the country it maintains a pretty straight line. The beginning of most of it starts with the children. In the country we don’t go to doctors or dentists or oculists until the case gets desperate; it’s a good deal of trouble to go, and often the cost has to be considered. Most people have never been taught that “little” things like enlarged tonsils or bad teeth can become very serious.
“I was in a house the other day when one of the girls came home from school crying with a toothache. She had been suffering for weeks, but they said it was only a first tooth; it would soon come out itself. She had never gone to a dentist in her life, and her front teeth were so crooked as to be a disfigurement. If something
isn’t done soon she will have to go through her whole life disfigured. It isn’t fair.
“One of our neighbor’s boys had always been considered stupid. The teachers didn’t know what was wrong with him; he just didn’t grasp things. He also made a great deal of amusement for the school by his awkwardness; he couldn’t walk across the room without bumping into things. They have just by accident discovered that he’s nearly blind. The oculist can do a good deal for him even yet, but he can never bring his sight back perfectly, and his school years have been wasted. That could have been prevented.
“In a garden in our little village at home, a young woman with a twisted back works all day with the flowers—they are the closest friends she has. I’ve noticed that she is always there in the morning and afternoon when the school children go past. They pick the flowers through the fence and go on unrebuked, and I’ve seen her stand watching them up the road, especially the little five-year-olds, with tears in her eyes and a look almost rebellious. She won’t ever have any children, you see. And it’s all because no one noticed the curvature when it was just beginning and could have been straightened. She was sent to school to sit in the same old painful seat day after day so she might ‘pass the entrance.’
“Just one other case. On the farm next ours, a girl with brown eyes like a Madonna’s, and the
proverbial crown of red-gold hair, is suffering everything from the consciousness of a cruel disfigurement. When she was three years old an adenoid growth blocked the natural breathing passage, and the only thing left for her to do was to keep her mouth open and catch whatever air she could. Of course, the result was that the upper jaw narrowed and the teeth protruded, taking the character entirely away from the lower part of the face. She kept having colds, and became so deaf that when she was about grown up it was necessary to operate and remove the growth. Her hearing came back pretty well, but the natural lines of her face will never come back. An operation at the beginning would have changed her whole life.
“Now we want to have a doctor come and examine the children in the schools, and then if there’s anything wrong we want to have a clinic and get them taken care of. We don’t know just how to go about it. Will you help us?”
The Representative was not indifferent or pessimistic. He knew that other Women’s Institutes had engineered Medical Examination campaigns in the public schools, that they had even held school clinics, and brought a surgeon to operate on the youngsters who needed it, and he knew that in some way the Department of Agriculture stood back of them in the undertaking. That was as far as his interest had gone.
As for helping personally with the procedure, he would rather blunder into a hornets’ nest than get mixed up in the detail of a women’s organization. As usual, when he needed help, he thought of Ruth. She would understand just how to map out the whole campaign. She was working for the Department, and if Mrs. Burns would write, no doubt they would send her. Of course, he would be pleased to give any incidental help he could.
Ruth came and outlined the plan. The Institute would first have to get the school board’s consent to let them go on with the work. Then they could get the local doctors to look the children over and see if there were any suffering from the troubles that could be remedied. If they could have a nurse to help with the inspection and to visit the homes in a neighborly way and report what the kiddies needed, so much the better. If they wanted to make the campaign of real, practical help, they could hold a clinic and have the children actually treated.
It was well on in December before the clinic could be arranged, and the general excitement kept the telephones busy and caused considerable delay in picking the geese for the Christmas market. Mrs. Burns had offered to turn her house into a hospital for the day and other members of the Institute were contributing supplies of sheets and towels for the occasion. Mrs.
Evison had dropped in at an Institute meeting to express her delighted approval of the plan and to say that her daughter would be pleased to drive their car all day, if necessary, to fetch the children to and from the clinic. Billy placed the Department of Agriculture’s car at their service, praying in secret that they wouldn’t send him out alone with any of the patients. A surgeon, young, but notoriously successful, was being brought from the city, and Ruth was coming to help.
On the evening before the day of the clinic, when Billy was driving home, he overtook the “Home boy” trudging up to the village to get what little social color he could from the gossip of the regular store roosters. He climbed into the car with his accustomed sullenness—or what was generally considered sullenness. Billy knew it was only a painful self-consciousness dulled a little by dragging dog-tiredness. He was breathing audibly through his distorted mouth, and his deafness gave a stupid look to his face.
“Why don’t you come up to our Junior Farmers’ meetings?” the Representative began.
The boy didn’t look up.
“They ain’t for the likes of me,” he said.
“Of course they are,” the Representative declared, warmly. “What do you mean?”
“Oh, I don’t mean that your fellows are snobs,” the boy admitted, “but there’s a difference, and
you know it. They’re used to being out. They can make speeches and talk, and me—I can’t talk.”
Billy had never realized before how the boy’s pride had suffered through his affliction. He wondered if the school clinic would admit him; or, what would be more difficult, whether he could persuade him to go. He made the proposition as tactfully as he could.
“I don’t belong there, neither,” the boy replied. “I’ve never gone to school, and, anyway, I ain’t in the same class. I don’t know any of the folks except the men I meet at threshin’s. Jim that come out here the same time I did, it’s different with him. At the place where he works, they don’t make much difference by him. But the folks at the Home thinks if they once gets us out to what they call the ‘green country,’ they’ve sort of landed us in ’eaven. Men send in for ‘a boy to do chores,’ but we know it’s a hired man they want. ‘Course it’s different with Jim, but then I’m different to Jim. If you can’t talk an’ you can’t hear, an’ your mouth hangs open, you can’t expect folks to want you around more-n-s necessary.”
Billy had never tried so hard to argue anyone out of a mistaken idea. His own experience had given him an insight into a boy’s sensitiveness at the time when life is opening a strange world to him, and he needs a confidant, and he had
not forgotten how the “Representative” in his county at home had given him confidence. He determined to stay right with this boy until he saw him past the turning-place. When he let him out of the car at the store rendezvous, he urged:
“Now, you’ll come to-morrow and let them fix you up? I’ll go with you.”
The boy eyed him shrewdly for a minute, then his face softened.
“I guess you’re all right,” he conceded. “I guess you wouldn’t take it as any trouble, but that’s not sayin’ what the others ’ud think. I’ll think it over. If I can bring myself to it, I’ll call in an’ tell you before I go back.”
In the office Billy sorted over his mail, and pushed it away. Some of the letters dealt with marketing news that meant hundreds of dollars gain or loss to the community; one carried a promise of a co-operative creamery that had been one of his main ambitions for the district—but these things didn’t seem so important to-night. If the clinic to-morrow could remove one boy’s handicap and give him the chance for life that Nature meant him to have, it would be worth more than several reforms for more profitable farming. If he were not taken care of now the chances were that he would never be. He decided to walk over to the store and make
sure of seeing him before he went home. Then the phone called him.
“Oh, you are there at last!” It was the soft little purring tone that always set his pulses pounding. “Could you possibly run up for a little while?”
“I’m afraid—” he began.
“But listen,” she interrupted. “I’m going to help you to-morrow, you know, and mother and I have some plans we’d like to talk over with you. We’re delighted that you’re having such a distinguished surgeon as Dr. Knight. It’s really very unusual for him to go out of the city at all, and we thought you wouldn’t want him to go to the Village Inn—it’s quite impossible, you know, so mother thought you’d better have him come here. Dad has met him, I think, and we’d be glad to have him. Perhaps Miss McDonald would come, too, though she’s so used to going to all sorts of places.”
“All right,” he agreed, absently. “And you’re going to help”—that was the thing that impressed him. “That’s fine.”
“I’m going to drive the car all day,” she announced, emphatically.
“That’s fine,” he said again. At last she was interested. Of course, she couldn’t resist the children—she was such a feminine bit of creation.
“And I know you’re going to say you have
some state council or something on to-night,” she rattled along; then dropping her voice appealingly, “I know I’m an awful nuisance, that I’m just hindering you all the time, but I do want you to-night. Was it anything important?”
“Why, I wanted to see the boy who works at McGill’s. I was wondering if we could get him into the clinic to-morrow.”
“Oh, I’m sure we could. I’ll get Mother to speak for him. I’m so glad it was nothing urgent. I’ll expect you, then. You’ll hurry?”
Billy didn’t exactly hurry. He walked up and down the office a few times, looking more like swearing than his friends would have thought possible. Then he remembered the confession, “I know I’m just hindering your work all the time.” Now, when she was beginning to be interested, to even try to help, he was losing his temper over having a plan of his own upset. He got ready to go—which took some time—and on the way out he called at the store. They told him the boy had gone.
When Billy drove his ambulance out to the Burns farm the next morning and carried a little blanket-wrapped patient into the house, he found Ruth already there. She was bending over a cot, evidently trying to restore courage to a brave little fellow who was having a hard struggle to keep the corners of his mouth from going down. The child said something at last
and her head went down beside him on the pillow. There was an unsteady little gurgle of a laugh, so low and deep and comrady that it made him shiver a little. He had heard the little sob catch at the end of it and he was aware that it meant a good deal. When she looked up and saw him she colored warmly, then came straight to meet him in her frank, friendly way; but he thought she left him very soon to go back to her work. He would have liked to stay and watch her putting the children to bed. There was something so strong and easy in the way she lifted them; something so clever and steady in her supple hands—you could almost feel the touch in watching them; something so close and reassuring in the way she held the nervous ones. But his presence seemed to embarrass her, so he went away.
He didn’t see her again until evening. He had finished his part of the day’s programme, and had helped the doctor to pack away in the long, deep-purring Evison car the patients who required the easiest riding. He had never known Marjorie to be so adorable. She was unnecessarily solicitous for the comfort of the children, and she took orders from the doctor with a demure seriousness that was most becoming. When he tucked the rugs about her as she started off with her last convoy, she leaned down and whispered, “We’re expecting you for dinner.
You’ll bring the doctor—and Miss Macdonald, if she’ll come.”
As she bent over the wheel in her red motoring outfit, with the wind whipping a bright color in her cheeks, and her eyes dark and glowing, she seemed like nothing so much as a brilliant scarlet tanager, poised for flight. It was unreasonable, he reflected, to expect a girl like that to conform to standards set for ordinary people. Her heart was in the right place, however irresponsible she might seem sometimes. How thoughtful she had been for the children.
In the house the women were clearing away the litter from the day’s work. Ruth was still busy. Her white uniform had lost some of its crispness; her face was flushed; her hair was straying out from under her nurse’s cowl. It had been a busy day. She was testing the heat of some irons on the stove when Billy came in.
“Are you nearly through?” he asked. “Is there anything I can do? I want to take you to Evison’s for dinner.”
“I’m sorry,” she said, “but we’ve just had another patient come in. The doctor’s operating now.”
“And what are you going to do?”
“Iron his bed.”
He smiled to think she knew the homely trick; then a sharp, pained look crossed his face.
“My mother used to do that,” he said.
She put the iron down and looked at him just as she had done when she followed him home from his mother’s funeral and heard him sob out his agony for the things he couldn’t help.
“I know,” she said. “She did it for me once, too. I don’t wonder that you remember how good she was.”
The little worried wrinkle had gone from between her eyes. In some inexplicable way she seemed to be getting across to him the warmth of her sympathy, and he felt for the first time the full wonder of it. What a treasure would be there for some man to explore, and how blind and ungrateful he had been all along. He had never done anything but go to her for help. Even now she looked tired enough to go into hysterics instead of troubling to think about him, and he felt he had been nothing less than brutal. She was gathering up her irons.
“When you get that done will you come?” he begged. “We’ll drive around till you get rid of the ether you’ve been breathing all day. I didn’t think what I was getting you into.”
“But, you see, it’s a pretty bad case, and I’m going to stay all night with the boy.”
“Why can’t some of his own people stay?”
“He hasn’t any people, nor evidently any friends. He’s a boy from the Home, who works somewhere around. He came in alone at the last minute, and you could see it had been pretty
hard for him. We want to make it as easy as we can.”
She went away smiling, and Billy went out, bitterly ashamed of himself. It had been hard for the boy to come, and he hadn’t done anything to help him.
An hour later the doctor came out.
“I suppose we’re late,” he grumbled. “I don’t know whether to curse that girl or go down on my knees and worship her. I’d had about enough bad tonsils to-day without this last case, and there was no reason under the sun why we should take an outsider like that in a school clinic, but she held me right to it. Now she’s going to see him through the night.”
The evening at Evison’s held a new atmosphere for Billy. The elegant luxury of the place seemed very restful after the crowded confusion of the Burns home. Marjorie was unusually quiet and sweet and dignified. She seemed even a little shy in the presence of the notorious surgeon, listening with charming attention to all he said, but saying little herself. However, the men talked, and they talked to her and for her—Billy with his usual sincere interest; the doctor with his clever way of unconsciously saying the most complimentary things. It was quite possible that he had said them before, of course, and quite probable that he would say them again and keep right on saying them so long as people
with grown-up daughters continued to shower him with their hospitality. Several times she caught Billy watching her with the sober tenderness that he always dropped apologetically when she looked, but the doctor looked her over with a daring admiration that might mean anything or nothing. It was splendid to have Billy there, because whatever the doctor’s attitude might be, he couldn’t help seeing that another man—a rather exceptional man, too—was in earnest, and that meant a great deal for a girl sometimes. Altogether, she felt that she was being a great success.
Marjorie had an idea that men, at least men with a reputation, liked to talk about themselves, and under cover of the general table conversation, she confided to Dr. Knight that she thought it was wonderful to be able to do so much for people, especially for “the little children.” “When I see other people doing things like that, I just wonder what I’m living for,” she confessed, gravely, as though she had just been awakened to the responsibility of existence through his greatness. “It’s simply unbearable to see people suffer and do nothing to help them—especially the babies. Don’t you think it’s rather hard to be a girl?”
“What about training for a nurse?” he suggested practically.
She hadn’t expected anything like that, and she thought it was scarcely kind of him. She looked appealingly at her mother.
“I guess Marjorie’s a home girl,” the mother explained, smiling with indulgent pride at her daughter. “And, of course, her father wouldn’t think of letting her go away from home. She was at college two years ago studying domestic science and she did enjoy that so much, but we were completely lost without her. I guess we’re rather selfish.”
And the men both smiled across at her with the masculine equivalent for her mother’s expression. She had always found it most gratifying to be admired by two men at the same time.
Of course, she was “a home girl,” Billy thought, as he drove home. Every little grace of her feminine personality proclaimed her made to be taken care of, and how proud of her a man would be. He imagined with some anxiety how hard it would go with her if she ever came to a place where she wouldn’t have the consideration they gave her at home, and he found himself wondering just what manner of man this Dr. Knight was, apart from his profession. When he had left them he was turning her music and he had never known her to be so generous with her playing. He wouldn’t admit that he was jealous, but one of those proverbial little clouds the size of a man’s hand seemed to be threatening his skies.
When he passed the Burns house he saw a dim light in an upstairs window and was reminded bitterly again of his neglect of the Home boy. However, Ruth would take care of him. He could see her shadow moving against the blind now, and he thought how tired she must be. He didn’t know that her tiredness had gone, leaving something infinitely more painful in its place.
Under the anesthetic the boy had mumbled something about the “agricultural man” who had told him to come.
“Mr. Withers takes an interest in everything,” Mrs. Burns had remarked. “He’s an exceptionally fine young man. There’s just one thing that’s spoiling his work a little. He’s very much in love with Miss Evison. You can imagine how seriously he would take anything like that, and it interferes with his work sometimes.”
It was then that Ruth forgot her tiredness. She only ached for her own room at home where she could be alone for a while.