t had been the vision of a man lost to the country of his dreams
and destined to eternal exile. Now all these aches and agonies of the
past were lulled by the surge of tired muscles. He worked like a fury
and the colonel, according to his strength, worked with him. They talked
little, and chiefly about the weather prospects and the ways of the
earth. Sometimes Anne would appear, and gently draw the colonel in, to
advise her about something, and being in, he was persuaded to an egg-nog
or a nap. But he also was absorbed, she saw, though he went at a slower
pace than Jeff. He who had been old seemed to be in physical revolt; he
was not sitting down to wait for death. He was going to dig the ground,
even if he dug his grave, and not look up to see what visitant was
waiting for him. It might be the earthly angel of a renewed and sturdy
life. It might be the last summoner. But death, he told himself stoutly,
though in a timorous bravado, waited for all.

Jeffrey's manuscript was laid aside. On Sundays he was too tired to
write, too sleepy at night. For Lydia and Anne, it was, so far as family
life went, a time of arrested intercourse. Their men were planting and
could not talk to them, or tired and could not talk then. The colonel
had even given up pulling out classical snags for Mary Nellen. He would
do it in the evening, he said; but every evening he was asleep. Lydia
had developed an astounding intimacy with Madame Beattie, and Anne was
troubled. She told Alston Choate, who came when he thought there was a
chance of seeing her alone, because he was whole-heartedly sorry for
her, at the mercy of the vagaries of the little devil, as he permitted
himself to call Lydia in his own mind.

"Madame Beattie," Anne said, "isn't a fit companion for a young girl.
She can't be."

Alston remembered the expression of satiric good-humour on Madame
Beattie's face, and was not prepared wholly to condemn her. He thought
she could be a good fellow by habit without much trying, and he was very
sure that, with a girl, she would play fair. But if he had heard Madame
Beattie this morning in June, as she took Lydia to drive, he might not
have felt so assured. These drives had become a matter of custom now. At
first, Madame Beattie had taken Denny and an ancient victoria, but she
tired of that.

"The man's as curious as a cat," she said to Lydia. "He can move his
ears. That's to hear better. Didn't you see him cock them round at us?
Can you dr