In this slow progress they presently came upon a somewhat nondescript figure at work in a potato-patch. It wore blue jeans overall trousers, surmounted by what had once been a leghorn picture-hat, from which straggled a lock or two of sparse gray hair.
Mr. Nikolai stared at this figure for a puzzled moment; and then burst out laughing.
"Why, Ellen Neal! I did not recognize you as a farmerette."
"Land sakes!" She sat down abruptly among the potato-plants, whether out of surprise or for purposes of concealment it is impossible to state.
But her welcome when it came was for once not grudging. Perhaps she recalled a certain timely offer of help; or perhaps this graybeard, with his slight, tired stoop and his lined eyes, no longer seemed to her a menace to the sheepfold. Be that as it may, her greeting was not outdone in warmth even by Archie's.
"I've simply got to tell Joan!" cried Archie. "She'll never forgive me if I don't interrupt her just this once."
"Not when it is coming like that," forbade Nikolai, listening to the rapid click of a typewriter from the house beyond. "Neither battle, murder, nor sudden death must be allowed to interfere with a flow of thought that is coming a hundred words to the minute."
"Well, I suppose you know," conceded the husband, reluctantly—
An hour later, however, Ellen took matters into her own hands. She appeared at the kitchen door (dressed, Nikolai was flattered to observe, in a costume of purple crêpe with Battenburg touches), and loudly rang a dinner-bell.
"That'll fetch her! Joan ain't ever too much up in the clouds to hear a dinner-bell; and I don't mean to have my jelly-omelette kep' waitin' on no flows of thought," she remarked.