She caught the look of entreaty in the eyes of the girls and the doubt in the eyes of their mother, and added, “Now I think of it, I could go out there myself just as well as not. There isn’t anything so very much going on at our house to-morrow, and I’d be right glad to take a hand in it. I’ll risk it but what the girls and I can manage.”
Manage! There was no question on that score. Mrs. Northmore’s eyes grew moist and she opened her lips to speak, but her good friend was before her, her pleasant face at that moment the express image of neighborly kindness. “Now, with all you’ve done for us, you and the doctor, to make a fuss over a little thing like this!” she said. And Mrs. Northmore, with the grace which can receive as well as render a favor, accepted the offer without a protest.
That was how it happened that Esther and Kate Northmore went to the harvesting at the farm, in their mother’s stead, the next morning. Kate, at least, carried no anxiety, but Esther, as the older, could not lay aside some uneasiness, not so much lest things should go wrong as lest their generous friend might be too much burdened, and the thought of all there was to do lent an unusual gravity to her sensitive face.
It was a perfect July day, with the sky an unbroken blue except for the clouds which floated like golden chaff high in the zenith. The great machine, flaming in crimson against a background of gold, stood among the ripened sheaves, and a score of sunburned men urged the labor which had begun betimes.
Ah, there is no harvest like this of the wheat. It comes when the year is at its flood, and the sun, rejoicing as a strong man to run a race, holds long on his course against the slow-creeping night. What ingathering of the later months, when the days have grown short and chilly, can match it in joy? The one is like the victory that comes in youth, when the success of to-day seems the promise for to-morrow; the other is the reward that comes to the worn and enfeebled man, who whispers in the midst of his gladness: “How slight at best are the gains of life!”
Esther was too young to moralize and too busy with the very practical work of helping with the dinner to grow poetical over the harvest scene, but the beauty of it did hold her for a minute with a long admiring gaze as she stood by the well, where she had gone for a pitcher of fresh water.
A man in gray jeans had hurried from the edge of the field at sight of her, to lower the buckets hanging from the old-fashioned windlass. She detained him a moment when he had handed her the dripping pitcher.
“We couldn’t have had a better day than this, could we?” she said. “And what a good thing it is that you and father decided to put in the wheat! He was speaking of that at breakfast this morning, and he says it was all your doing. There was such a poor crop last year that for his part he was almost afraid to try it again.”
The man’s face shone with gratified pride. “Well, I reckon the doctor ain’t fretting over it much now that I had my way,” he said. And then he added modestly: “But I might have missed it. You never can tell how a crop’ll come out till you see the grain in the measure.”
“Well, we’re seeing that to-day,” said the girl. “How much will there be?”