finger, and was never ashamed of it. It's a year and eight
months old now, and no baby was ever better cared-for. Antonia is a
natural-born mother. I wish she could marry and raise a family, but I
don't know as there's much chance now.'

I slept that night in the room I used to have when I was a little boy,
with the summer wind blowing in at the windows, bringing the smell of
the ripe fields. I lay awake and watched the moonlight shining over the
barn and the stacks and the pond, and the windmill making its old dark
shadow against the blue sky.

IV

THE NEXT AFTERNOON I walked over to the Shimerdas'. Yulka showed me
the baby and told me that Antonia was shocking wheat on the southwest
quarter. I went down across the fields, and Tony saw me from a long way
off. She stood still by her shocks, leaning on her pitchfork, watching
me as I came. We met like the people in the old song, in silence, if not
in tears. Her warm hand clasped mine.

'I thought you'd come, Jim. I heard you were at Mrs. Steavens's last
night. I've been looking for you all day.'

She was thinner than I had ever seen her, and looked as Mrs. Steavens
said, 'worked down,' but there was a new kind of strength in the gravity
of her face, and her colour still gave her that look of deep-seated
health and ardour. Still? Why, it flashed across me that though so much
had happened in her life and in mine, she was barely twenty-four years
old.

Antonia stuck her fork in the ground, and instinctively we walked toward
that unploughed patch at the crossing of the roads as the fittest place
to talk to each other. We sat down outside the sagging wire fence that
shut Mr. Shimerda's plot off from the rest of the world. The tall red
grass had never been cut there. It had died down in winter and come up
again in the spring until it was as thick and shrubby as some tropical
garden-grass. I found myself telling her everything: why I had decided
to study law and to go into the law office of one of my mother's
relatives in New York City; about Gaston Cleric's death from pneumonia
last winter, and the difference it had made in my life. She wanted to
know about my friends, and my way of living, and my dearest hopes.

'Of course it means you are going away from us for good,' she said with
a sigh. 'But that don't mean I'll lose you. Look at my papa here; he's
been dead all these years, and yet he is more real to me than almost
anybody else. He never goes out of my l