“Is it your house?”
“My mother’s and mine,” he replied.
She turned the full battery of her eyes upon him. “Why haven’t you come up to see a fellow?” she asked. “I’ve been awfully lonesome here.”
He was not at all disconcerted, as she had expected him to be. “I hadn’t thought of it,” he said. “I’m pretty busy.”
“You’ll think of it now, won’t you?” she begged prettily. She was, this morning, in a reckless mood; she had been, was still, a spoiled child.
“I might,” he assented, and she thought again there was a smile deep hidden in his eyes.
“I’m used to having boys crazy to come and see me,” she said wistfully; and he did smile; and she was satisfied with this much of victory, and turned and ran away. She ran prettily, and she knew her skirts were none too long. From the border of the orchard, she looked back and lifted her hand to him. He touched his hat in a restrained fashion by way of response; and she ascended the hill, at peace with the world again.
And this was the first encounter between the tender of trees and Lucia Moore.
II
Her father had bought the farm during the winter from Dan Howe, who moved away to Augusta. Dan, Fraternity said, made a good thing out of it. He had paid eighteen hundred, two years before, and had sold off three hundred dollars’ worth of hard wood for ship timbers, carted to Camden. The price Moore paid him was thirty-three hundred dollars. Moore had thought the figure high; but there was in the man a hunger for contact with the soil. His father had been a farm boy, had harked back to his youthful days in reminiscence during his later years. His death left Moore some fifty-two hundred dollars, and made it possible for him to escape from the small store he had run for years in Somerville, at a yearly profit less than he might have earned as salary. He and his wife had perceived, by that time, that Lucia—they had christened her Lucy—was a problem in need of solving. Lucia liked moving pictures, and dancing, and boys, and she was not strong. Country life, they thought, would be good for her; and Moore did not cavil at Dan Howe’s price. Save for a few hundred dollars, he put the remainder of his legacy, and his own savings, into a newly organized automobile company which seemed to him promising, and came to the hills above Fraternity.