“You haven’t told me yet if you will accept the position I spoke of.”
He passed his hand over his clean-shaven chin, a trick he had inherited from his father, and surveyed her steadily from under meditative brows.
“In the first place, I’m not a landscape gardener, Miss Orr,” he stated. “That’s the sort of man you want. You can get one in Boston, who’ll group your evergreens, open vistas, build pergolas and all that sort of thing.”
“You appear to know exactly what I want,” she laughed.
“Perhaps I do,” he defied her.
“But, seriously, I don’t want and won’t have a landscape-gardener from Boston—with due deference to your well-formed opinions, Mr. Dodge. I intend to mess around myself, and change my mind every other day about all sorts of things. I want to work things out, not on paper in cold black and white; but in terms of growing things—wild things out of the woods. You understand, I’m sure.”
The dawning light in his eyes told her that he did.
“But I’ve had no experience,” he hesitated. “Besides, I’ve considerable farm-work of my own to do. I’ve been hoeing potatoes all day. Tomorrow I shall have to go into the cornfield, or lose my crop. Time, tide and weeds wait for no man.”
“I supposed you were a hunter,” she said. “I thought—”
He laughed unpleasantly.