n't forgive myself this winter if you
should be forced to send orders only partly filled because I fell ill
and hindered you. Please go and gather all you possibly will need of
everything you take at this season, only remember!"

"There is no danger of my forgetting. If you are going to send me away
to work, you will allow me to kiss your hand before I go, fair lady?"

He did it fervently.

"One word with you, Harmon," he said as he left the room.

Doctor Harmon arose and followed him to the gold garden, and together
they stood beside the molten hedge of sunflowers, coneflowers,
elecampane, and jewel flower.

"I merely want to mention that this is your inning," said the Harvester.
"Find out if you are essential to the Girl's happiness as soon as you
can, and the day she tells me so, I will file her petition and take a
trip to the city to study some little chemical quirks that bother me.
That's all."

The Harvester went to the dry-house for bags and clipping shears, and
the doctor returned to the sunshine room.

"Ruth," he said, "do you know that the Harvester is the squarest man I
ever met?"

"Is he?" asked the Girl.

"He is! He certainly is!"

"You must remember that I have little acquaintance with men," said she.
"You are the first one I ever knew, and the only one except him."

"Well I try to be square," said Doctor Harmon, "but that is where
Langston has me beaten a mile. I have to try. He doesn't. He was born
that way."

The Girl began to laugh.

"His environment is so different," she said. "Perhaps if he were in a
big city, he would have to try also."

"Won't do!" said the doctor. "He chose his location. So did I. He is a
stronger physical man than I ever was or ever will be. The struggle
that bound him to the woods and to research, that made him the master
of forces that give back life, when a man like Carey says it is the
end, proves him a master. The tumult in his soul must have been like a
cyclone in his forest, when he turned his back on the world and stuck to
the woods. Carey told me about it. Some day you must hear. It's a story
a woman ought to know in order to arrive at proper values. You never
will understand the man until you know that he is clean where most of
us are blackened with ugly sins we have no right on God's footstool to
commit and not so much reason as he. Every man should be as he is, but
very few are. Carey says Langston's mother was a wonderful element in
the formation o