she look?"

"How's who look?"

"Annie Darling."

"I can't tell how folks look," said Wilfred. He spoke roughly, and she
glanced at him in a calculated show of surprise. "Why, you've seen her.
She was at the meetin' the night I walked home with you."

"Was she?" said Lily. "Well, I never noticed the folks here very much
till I begun to get acquainted."

But she had brought back to him a picture he had been forgetting: Annie,
standing in her garden, sweet, serious, and so kind. He had hardly
thought before of Annie's looks. People never spoke of them when they
were recalling her. She was simply a person they liked to live beside.

The next morning Jim was at Mrs. Marshall's before breakfast--almost
before light, she thought, because through her last nap she had heard
his hoe clicking, and when she went out, there was the track of his
wheelbarrow through the dew, and the liberated peonies, free of grass,
stood each in its rich dark circle of manure.

A little later the Miller twins saw him coming, and Sophy was at the
door awaiting him.

"Don't you want a cup o' tea?" she asked.

Sophy looked quite eager. It seemed to her that, with the garden
resurrected, something was going to happen. Jim shook his head.

"I'll dig round them rose-bushes," said he. "Then I'll go an' git some
dressin'."

"I'll pay for it," said Sophy. "You sha'n't have that to do."

"It's no consequence," returned Jim indifferently. "I can git all I want
out o' Squire's old yard. I pay him for it in the fall, cobblin'. It's
no great matter, anyways."

Sophy disappeared into the house, and came out again, hurriedly, with a
trowel in her hand.

"I don't know but I'll work a mite myself," she said, "if you was to
tell me where 'twas worth while to begin."

"Don't ye touch the spring things," said Jim briefly. He was loosening
the ground about the roses, with delicacy and dispatch. "Let it be as it
may with 'em this year. Come November, we'll overhaul 'em. You might see
if you can git some o' the grass out o' that monkshood over there."

Sophy, in her sun-bonnet, bent over her task, and for an hour they
worked absorbedly. Suddenly she looked up, to find herself alone. But
there were voices in the other yard. He was working for Eliza. But Eliza
was not helping him. She walked back and forth--Sophy could see her
passing the cracks in the high board-fence--and once she called to Jim
in a nervous voice, "I wisht you'd go away."

Jim apparent