Joe was able to see now how little deserving Isom was of any such blessing as Ollie, how ill-assorted they were by nature, inclination and age. But God had joined them, for what pains and penances He alone knew, and it was not the work of any man to put them apart.

At the edge of a hazel coppice, far away from the farmhouse that sheltered the object of his tender thoughts and furtive desires, Joe sat among the first fallen leaves of autumn, fighting to clear himself from the perplexities of that disquieting situation. In the agony of his aching conscience, he bowed his head and groaned.

A man’s burden of honor had fallen upon him with the disclosure of a man’s desires. His boyhood seemed suddenly to have gone from him like the light of a lamp blown out by a puff of wind. He felt old, and responsible to answer now for himself, since the enormity of his offense was plain to his smarting conscience.

And he was man enough to look after Morgan, too. He would proceed to deal with Morgan on a new basis, himself out of the calculation entirely. Ollie must be protected against his deceitful wiles, and against herself as well.

Joe trembled in his newer and clearer understanding of the danger that threatened her as he hastened back to the barn-yard to take up his neglected chores. The thought that Morgan and Ollie were alone in the house almost threw him into a fever of panic and haste.

He must not be guilty of such an oversight again; he must stand like a stern wall between them, and be able to account for his trust to Isom with unclouded heart.

CHAPTER V
THE SECRET OF THE CLOVER

Until the time he had entered Isom Chase’s house, temptation never had come near Joe Newbolt. He never had kissed a maiden; he never had felt the quickening elixir of a soft breast pressed against his own. And so it fell that the sudden conception of what he had unwittingly come to, bore on him with a weight which his sensitive and upright mind magnified into an enormous and crushing shame. While his intention could bear arraignment and come away with acquittal, the fact that he had been perverted enough in the grain, as he looked at it, to drift unknowingly into love with another man’s wife, galled him until his spirit groaned.

Isom did not return that evening; the conclusion of his household was that he had been chosen on a jury. They discussed it at supper, Ollie nervously gay, Morgan full of raucous laughter, Joe sober and grudging of his words.