XV.
Part of Matt Hilary's protest against the status in which he found himself a swell was to wash his face for dinner in a tin basin on the back porch, like the farm-hands. When he was alone at the farm he had the hands eat with him; when his mother and sister were visiting him he pretended that the table was too small for them all at dinner and tea, though he continued to breakfast with the hands, because the ladies were never up at his hour; the hands knew well enough what it meant, but they liked Matt.
Louise found him at the roller-towel, after his emblematic ablutions. "Oh, is it so near dinner?" she asked.
"Yes. Where is Maxwell?"
"I left him up at the camp." She walked a little way out into the ground-ivy that matted the back-yard under the scattering spruce trees.
Matt followed, and watched the homing and departing bees around the hives in the deep, red-clovered grass near the wall.
"Those fellows will be swarming before long," he said, with a measure of the good comradeship he felt for all living things.
"I don't see," said Louise, plucking a tender, green shoot from one of the fir boughs overhead, "why Mr. Maxwell is so hard."
"Is he hard?" asked Matt. "Well, perhaps he is."