"Is he very ill?"
The girl shrugged her shoulders. "Who knows? There is no doctor near, and his mother is poor. We are fighting it out together."
There was something heroic in her cool acceptance of her hard life. He was silent for a moment, and then he said: "Would you have time to read my book to-night?"
"Oh, if I might," she said eagerly, "but you haven't it with you."
"I will bring it," he told her, "after supper."
"But," she protested.
"There are no 'buts,'" he said, smiling; "if you will read it, I will get it to you."
The sky had darkened, and, as he went toward home, he faced clouds in the southeast.
"It is going to rain," Otto Brand prophesied as they sat down to supper.
The other three men hoped that it would not. Already the ground was soaked, making the cutting of corn impossible, and another rain with a frost on top of it would spoil all chance of filling the silo.