her with understanding
eyes.

"I know," he said. "That's the way I thought of it at first. Maybe I've
just got used to the idea, but it doesn't seem so bad to me now. Here
are you, drudging for other people when you ought to have a place all
your own--and not gettin' younger any more than I am. Here's both of us
lonely. I'd be a good husband to you, Till--because, whatever it'd be in
law, I'd be your husband before God."

Tillie cowered against the door, her eyes on his. Here before her,
embodied in this man, stood all that she had wanted and never had. He
meant a home, tenderness, children, perhaps. He turned away from the
look in her eyes and stared out of the front window.

"Them poplars out there ought to be taken away," he said heavily.
"They're hell on sewers."

Tillie found her voice at last:--

"I couldn't do it, Mr. Schwitter. I guess I'm a coward. Maybe I'll be
sorry."

"Perhaps, if you got used to the idea--"

"What's that to do with the right and wrong of it?"

"Maybe I'm queer. It don't seem like wrongdoing to me. It seems to
me that the Lord would make an exception of us if He knew the
circumstances. Perhaps, after you get used to the idea--What I thought
was like this. I've got a little farm about seven miles from the city
limits, and the tenant on it says that nearly every Sunday somebody
motors out from town and wants a chicken-and-waffle supper. There ain't
much in the nursery business anymore. These landscape fellows buy their
stuff direct, and the middleman's out. I've got a good orchard, and
there's a spring, so I could put running water in the house. I'd be good
to you, Tillie,--I swear it. It'd be just the same as marriage. Nobody
need know it."

"You'd know it. You wouldn't respect me."

"Don't a man respect a woman that's got courage enough to give up
everything for him?"

Tillie was crying softly into her apron. He put a work-hardened hand on
her head.

"It isn't as if I'd run around after women," he said. "You're the only
one, since Maggie--" He drew a long breath. "I'll give you time to think
it over. Suppose I stop in to-morrow morning. It doesn't commit you to
anything to talk it over."

There had been no passion in the interview, and there was none in
the touch of his hand. He was not young, and the tragic loneliness of
approaching old age confronted him. He was trying to solve his problem
and Tillie's, and what he had found was no solution, but a compromise.

"To-morro