the glare from their
dangling porch lights. Light was so plentiful, at this factory of
light, that even the Hopps' barnlike home blazed with a dozen
"thirty-twos."

"Nothing like having a little light on the subject, Mr. Fo'ster," said
Mrs. Tolley, coming out to the porch. The Vorses had small children
that they could not leave very long alone; so, when Min and her mother
had reduced the kitchen to orderly, warm, soap-scented darkness every
night, and wound the clock, and hung up their aprons, they went up to
the Vorses' to play "five hundred."

"Seems's if I never could get enough light, myself," the matron
continued agreeably, descending the porch steps. "Before I come here I
never had nothing in my kitchen but an oil lamp and a reflector. Jest
as sure as I'd be dishing up dinner, hot nights, that lamp would begin
to flicker and suck--well, shucks! I'd look up at it and I'd say,
'Well, why don't you go out? Go ahead!'" Mrs. Tolley laughed joyously.
"Well, one night--George--" she was continuing with relish, when Min
pulled at her sleeve and, with a sort of affectionate impatience, said,
"Oh, f've'vens' sakes ma!"

"Yes, I'm coming," said Mrs. Tolley, recalled. "Wish't you played 'five
hundred,' Mr. Fo'ster," she added politely.

"I don't play either that or old maid," said Paul, distinctly. This
remark was taken in good part by the Tolleys.

"Old maid's a real comical game," Min conceded mildly.

"Well, you won't be s'lunsum next week when the Chisholms get back,"
said Mrs. Tolley, unaffectedly, gathering up the skirt of her starched
gown to avoid contact with the sudden heavy dews. "He's an awful nice
feller, and she--she's twenty-six, but she's as jolly as a girl. I
declare, I just love Patricia Chisholm."

"Twenty-six, is she?" said Paul, disgustedly, to himself, when the
Tolleys had gone. "Only one woman--of any class, that is--in this
forsaken hole, and she twenty-six!" And he had been thinking of this
Patricia with a good deal of interest, he admitted resentfully. Paul
was twenty-four, and liked slender little girls well under twenty.

"Lord, what a place!" he said, for the hundredth time.

He sat brooding in the darkness, discouraged and homesick. So he had
sat for all his nights at Kirkwood.

The men at the cook-house were playing cards, silently, intently. The
cook, serene and cool, was smoking in the doorway of his cabin. Above
the dull roar of the river Paul could hear Min Tolley's cackle of
l