tell me!"

'She sat down on the drawside, out of sight of the house. "He's run away
from me," she said. "I don't know if he ever meant to marry me."

'"You mean he's thrown up his job and quit the country?" says I.

'"He didn't have any job. He'd been fired; blacklisted for knocking down
fares. I didn't know. I thought he hadn't been treated right. He was
sick when I got there. He'd just come out of the hospital. He lived with
me till my money gave out, and afterward I found he hadn't really been
hunting work at all. Then he just didn't come back. One nice fellow at
the station told me, when I kept going to look for him, to give it up.
He said he was afraid Larry'd gone bad and wouldn't come back any more.
I guess he's gone to Old Mexico. The conductors get rich down there,
collecting half-fares off the natives and robbing the company. He was
always talking about fellows who had got ahead that way."

'I asked her, of course, why she didn't insist on a civil marriage at
once--that would have given her some hold on him. She leaned her head
on her hands, poor child, and said, "I just don't know, Mrs. Steavens. I
guess my patience was wore out, waiting so long. I thought if he saw how
well I could do for him, he'd want to stay with me."

'Jimmy, I sat right down on that bank beside her and made lament.
I cried like a young thing. I couldn't help it. I was just about
heart-broke. It was one of them lovely warm May days, and the wind was
blowing and the colts jumping around in the pastures; but I felt bowed
with despair. My Antonia, that had so much good in her, had come home
disgraced. And that Lena Lingard, that was always a bad one, say what
you will, had turned out so well, and was coming home here every summer
in her silks and her satins, and doing so much for her mother. I give
credit where credit is due, but you know well enough, Jim Burden, there
is a great difference in the principles of those two girls. And here it
was the good one that had come to grief! I was poor comfort to her. I
marvelled at her calm. As we went back to the house, she stopped to feel
of her clothes to see if they was drying well, and seemed to take pride
in their whiteness--she said she'd been living in a brick block, where
she didn't have proper conveniences to wash them.

'The next time I saw Antonia, she was out in the fields ploughing corn.
All that spring and summer she did the work of a man on the farm; it
seemed to be an understood