lking for a time. The
Harvester kept up his work with the herbs, and the little closet for
the blue dishes was finished. They celebrated installing them by having
supper on the living-room table, with the teapot on one end, and the
pitcher full of bellflowers on the other.

The Girl took everything prescribed for her, bathed, slept all she
could, and worked for health with all the force of her frail being, and
as the days went by it seemed to the Harvester her weight grew lighter,
her hands hotter, and she drove herself to a gayety almost delirious. He
thought he would have preferred a dull, stupid sleep of malaria. There
was colour in plenty on her cheeks now, and sometimes he found her
wrapped in the white shawl at noon on the warmest days Medicine Woods
knew in early August; and on cool nights she wore the thinnest clothing
and begged to be taken on the lake. The Careys came out every other
evening and the doctor watched and worked, but he did not get the
results he desired. His medicines were not effective.

"David," he said one evening, "I don't like the looks of this. Your wife
has fever I can't break. It is eating the little store of vitality she
has right out of her, and some of these days she is coming down with a
crash. She should yield to the remedies I am giving her. She acts to
me like a woman driven wild by trouble she is concealing. Do you know
anything that worries her?"

"No," said the Harvester, "but I'll try to find out if it will help you
in your work."

After they were gone he left the Girl lying in the swing guarded by the
dog, and went across the marsh on the excuse that he was going to a bed
of thorn apple at the foot of the hill. There he sat on a log and tried
to think. With the mists of night rising around him, ghosts arose he
fain would have escaped. "What will you give me in cold cash to tell you
who she is, and who her people are?" Times untold in the past two weeks
he had smothered, swallowed, and choked it down. That question she had
wanted to ask----was it for a girl she had known, or was it for herself?
Days of thought had deepened the first slight impression he so bravely
had put aside, not into certainty, but a great fear that she had meant
herself. If she did, what was he to do? Who was the man? There was a
debt she had to pay if he asked it? What debt could a woman pay a man
that did not involve money? Crouched on a log he suffered and twisted
in agonizing thought. At last he ar