At last he understood the look in her eyes as she watched it and the thoughts that enthralled her.
Sometimes when we strive for a thing and set our hearts on it, it holds itself aloof from us. When we cease to strive, it comes.
But that is among the many strange ways of Providence which seems to rule us blindly, but which is not so blind, perhaps, after all, as it seems.
Another of its ways most incomprehensible is to bring us what we have longed for a little too late sometimes.
But this is the story of Seth, and this is the way of its happening:
It was early in a mild and beautiful spring when the corn was young. It stood shoulder high, lusty and strong and green. What with the unwonted mildness of the weather and the absence of the usual storms and the proneness of the clouds to deposit themselves about in gentle showers, the crop promised fair to rival any crop that Seth had ever raised on the Kansas prairies.
He hoed and toiled and smiled and listened to the rustling of the corn, for he had made up his mind.
When the harvest was at an end he would sell the crop and the place for what it would bring, and go back home. He would go back to his wife and home!
The rustling of the corn was music in his ears. It was more. It was like the glad hand of young Love; for with the crops so fine and the harvest so rich, when he went back home to her, he would not go empty-handed and unwelcome.
He was going back once more to his Kentucky home.