luncheon they all departed and left me to my afternoon's work.
Matthew lingered behind the others and helped me feed the old red ally and
Mrs. Ewe and Peckerwood Pup.

"I was talking to Evan Baldwin at the club after his first lecture the
other night and, Ann, I believe I'll be recruited for the plow as well as
for the machine-gun. I'm going to buy some land out there back of the
Beesleys' and raise sheep on it. He says Harpeth is losing millions a year
by not raising sheep. I'm going to live at Riverfield a lot of the time and
motor back and forth to business. Truly, Ann, the land bug has bit me
and--and it isn't just--just to come up on your blind side. But, dear, now
don't you think that it would be nice for me to live over here with you as
a perfectly sympathetic agricultural husband?"

"I needed a husband so much more yesterday to help with the pruning of the
rose-vines than I do to-day, Matthew," I answered with a laugh. Matthew's
proposals of marriage are so regular and so alike that I have to avoid
monotony in the wit of my answers.

"I'm never in time to do a single thing on this place, and I don't see how
everything gets done for you without my help. Who helps you?"

"Everybody," I answered. I had never had the courage to break Adam to
Matthew in the long weeks I had been seeing them both every day, and of
course Pan had never come out of the woods when Matthew or any of the rest
were there. "I'll tell you what you can do for me," I said, with a sudden
inspiration about getting rid of him, for the red-headed Peckerwood had
promised to come and put some kind of hoodoo earth around the peonies and
irises and pinks in my garden, also to bud some kind of a new rose on one
of the old blush ones, and I wanted the place quiet so he would venture
out of his lair. "You can go on to town and look after Polly carefully. She
is going in with Bess for the first time since their infatuation, and I
want her eyes to open gradually on the world out over Paradise Ridge."

"Ann, ought they ever to open?" asked Matthew, suddenly, with the color
coming up to the roots of his hair and burning in his ears like it still
does in Bud Corn-tassel's when he comes over to see or help me or to bring
me something from Aunt Mary, his mother. "Bess is one of the best of
friends I've got in the world, but I just--just couldn't see Corn-tassel
dancing in some man's arms in the mere hint of an evening gown that Bess
occupied while fox-trotti