romantic--this sitooation. This is it. Here I be, loving the ground
she walks on, as I've always done, and I can't let on that I do
because I'm a poor ne'er-do-well as ain't fit to look at her, an
independent woman with property. And she's a-showing kindness to me
for old times' sake, and piercing my heart all the time, not knowing.
Why, it's romance with a vengeance, that's what it is. Get up, my nag,
get up."

Thereafter Jed called at the Adams place every week. Generally he
stayed to tea. Mattie always bought something of him to colour an
excuse. Her kitchen fairly glittered with new tinware. She gave Selena
the overflow by way of heaping coals of fire.

After every visit Jedediah held stern counsel with himself and decided
that he must not call to see Mattie again--at least, not for a long
time; then he must not stay to tea. He would struggle with himself all
the way down the poplar hill--not without a comforting sense of the
romance of the struggle--but it always ended the same way. He turned
in under the willows and clinked musically into Mattie's yard. At
least, the rattle of the tin-wagon sounded musically to Mattie.

Meanwhile, Selena watched from her window and raged.

Amberley people shrugged their shoulders when gossip noised the matter
abroad. But, being good-humoured in the main, they forebore to do more
than say that Mattie Adams was free to make a goose of herself if it
pleased her, and that Jed Crane wasn't such a fool as he looked. The
Adams farm was one of the best in Amberley, and it had not grown any
poorer under Mattie's management.

"If Jed walks in there and hangs up his hat he'll have done well for
himself after all."

This was Selena's view of it also, barring the good nature. She was
furious at the whole affair, and she did her best to make Mattie's
life a burden to her with slurs and thrusts. But they all misjudged
Jed. He had no intention of "walking in and hanging up his hat"--or
trying to. Romantic as he was, it never occurred to him that Mattie
might be as romantic as himself. She did not care for him, and anyhow
he, Jed, had a little too much pride to ask her, a rich woman, to
marry him, a poor man who had lost all caste he ever possessed by
taking up tin-peddling. Jed was determined not to "persoom." And, oh,
how deliciously romantic it all was! He hugged himself with sorrowful
delight over it.

As the summer waned and the long yellow leaves began to fall thickly
from the wil