d. Perhaps her little
boys would like to pick them; anyhow, some sort of an inducement had to
be held out.

Outside his window was a duck-pond, thin sheets of ice still floating in
broken pieces on its surface; behind the duck-pond was the dairy; and on
either side of the yard were cow-sheds and pig-styes. The farm carts
stood in a peaceful Sunday row down one side, and at the other end of
the yard, shutting out the same view of the sea and island that Anna saw
from her bedroom window, was a mountainous range of manure. When Trudi
came, she never entered the rooms on this side of the house, because, as
she explained, it was one of her peculiarities not to like manure; and
she slept and ate and aired her opinions on the west side, where the
garden lay between the house and the road. She never would have come to
Lohm at all, not being burdened with any undue sentiment in regard to
ties of blood, if it had not been necessary to go somewhere in the
summer, and if the other places had not been beyond the resources of the
family purse, always at its emptiest when the racing season was over and
the card-playing at an end. As it was, this was a cheap and convenient
haven, and her brother Axel was kind to the little boys, and not too
angry when they plundered his apple-trees, damaged the knees of his
ponies, and did their best to twist off the tails of his disconcerted
sucking-pigs.

He was the eldest of three brothers, and she came last. She was
twenty-six, and he was ten years older. When the father died, the land
ought properly to have been divided between the four children, but such
a proceeding would have been extremely inconvenient, and the two younger
brothers, and the sister just married, agreed to accept their share in
money, and to leave the estate entirely to Axel. It was the best course
to take, but it threw Axel into difficulties that continued for years.
His father, with four times the money, had lived very comfortably at
Lohm, and the children had been brought up in prosperity. For eight
years his eldest son had farmed the estate with a quarter the means, and
had found it so far from simple that his hair had turned grey in the
process. It needed considerable skill and vigilance to enable a man to
extract a decent living from the soil of Lohm. Part of it was too boggy,
and part of it too sandy, and the trees had all been cut down thirty
years before by a bland grandfather, serenely indifferent to the opinion
of p