d the dirt spread to the necessary
consistency. Now he was nearing the cookstove where the woman sat.

"I'd hate to worry you any, Jess," he said, in a gentle, apologetic
voice, "but I'm right up to this patch. If you'd kind of lift your
feet, an' tuck your skirts around you some, guess you could go right
on reading your fiction."

The woman looked up with a peevish frown. Then something like a
pitying smile warmed her expression. She was a handsome creature, of a
large, somewhat bold type, with a passionate glow of strong youth and
health in every feature of her well-shaped face. She was taller than
her diminutive husband, and, in every detail of expression, his
antithesis. She wore a dress with some pretensions to display, and
suggesting a considerable personal vanity. But it was of the tawdry
order that was unconvincing, and lacked both refinement and tidiness.

Scipio followed up his words with a glance of smiling amiability.

"I'm real sorry--" he began again.

But she cut him short.

"Oh, bother!" she exclaimed; and, thrusting her slippered feet upon
the stove, tucked her skirts about her. Then, utterly ignoring him,
she buried herself once more in her book.

The mop flapped about her chair legs, the water splashed the stove.
Scipio was hurrying, and consequently floundering. It was his endeavor
not to disturb his wife more than was necessary.

Finally he wrung out his mop and stood it outside the door in the sun.
He emptied his bucket upon the few anaemic cabbages which grew in an
untidy patch at the side of the hut, and returned once more to the
room.

He glanced round it with feeble appreciation. It was a hopeless sort
of place, yet he could not detect its shortcomings. The rough,
log-built walls, smeared with a mud plaster, were quite unadorned.
There was one solitary opening for a window, and in the center of the
room was a roughly manufactured table, laden with the remains of
several repasts. Breakfast was the latest, and the smell of coffee and
fried pork still hung about the room. There were two Windsor chairs,
one of which his wife was occupying, and a ramshackle food cupboard.
Then there were the cookstove and a fuel box, and two or three iron
pots hanging about the walls.

Out of this opened a bedroom, and the rough bedstead, with its tumbled
blankets, was in full view where Scipio stood. Although the morning
was well advanced the bed was still unmade. Poor as the place was, it
might, in th