One morning, in herding a refractory hen, who had strayed with her brood out among the young oats, Brooke had found herself close by the spot where Henry Maarten was planting potatoes, and, half laughing and wholly out of breath, she called to him for help, which call he answered by catching the clucking, scratching hen, while she gathered the brood in her apron, and he followed her silently back to the chicken yard at a respectful distance.
Having put the chicks safely in a coop, Brooke pointed out a shorter way across the flower garden by which Maarten might return to his work. Seeing that he paused by the straggling clumps of early tulips and daffodils that were already in bloom, and thinking they might be reminding him of some other garden for which he was homesick, she bade him gather as many as he wished, asked him if he was fond of flowers, and whether he would not like some roots, seeds, or cuttings for his little place, saying in a friendly way, to put him at his ease, for he always seemed to dread her presence, “They tell me you are painting and repairing to make a home at the Bisbee place for some one who is coming over in the autumn. Nothing is so homelike to a woman as growing flowers.”
Pulling his hat over his eyes with a gesture of embarrassment rather than because the sun was bright, he said, in carefully pronounced musical English, with a decided foreign accent: “And they told you that I make a home for a sweetheart who comes? Yes, I had thought to; but if she comes not, what then?”
“But why should she not come? Surely she will if she has promised, and knows that you work for her,” said Brooke, insensibly adopting his pronunciation and speaking with ready confidence in the faith of woman born of her own temperament.
“She has not promised it,” he faltered, looking down at the tulips and again pulling his hat betwixt himself and his young questioner, as if he feared that if she saw his eyes she might penetrate too far into his innermost feelings.
“She knows you are working for her?”
“No, not even that.”
“At least she believes that you care?” persisted Brooke, too direct and sympathetic to realize at once that she might be probing a wound.
“I once dared to think so, but since I have come away, the word has travelled that perhaps her liking may be for another.”
“Why, doesn’t she know her own mind?” said Brooke, half to herself, all at once becoming the self-appointed champion of her farmer-on-shares, and not realizing until after the words had left her lips that she was herself too young a woman to be a safe adviser to so young a man, and she blushed hotly.