honey, the faint buzzing of the
bees, all this enveloped Billy like boundless, delicious indolence. "To
rest here," thought she.

"May I sit here?" she asked, pointing to a wheelbarrow which lay
upturned on the gravel path. The old man merely nodded, as he
cautiously stripped the bees from his hands, and Billy sat down,
stretched out her feet, let her arms hang heavily, and sighed deeply:
this was all she needed. Oh, it wasn't so hard to live, after all.

"You're the young lady at Kadullen?" the old man finally said again, "I
often go there with honey. S'pose you're wet, hey?"

"Yes."

"S'pose you've been out in the rain during the night, and now I s'pose
you want to go home?"

Yes, Billy wanted to go home. The old man took off his straw hat and
thoughtfully rubbed his hand over his bald, shiny pate. "We could hitch
up," he said. Then he turned toward the other side and cried, "Lina!"
Over there before the little stable a red cow was standing, and in
front of her squatted a girl in a blue linen dress, milking her. The
girl got up slowly and a little laboriously, stood there a moment,
screwed up her face at the sunlight, looked crossly over at Billy, and
wiped her big red hands on her white apron.

"Come on," said the old man.

So Lina came slowly along the vegetable beds; on the big, stout body
perched a small head, with a puffy-cheeked, very heated childish face
under a heavy mass of oily brown hair. She still kept her hands on her
apron, as if wishing to conceal the fact that she was pregnant. She
stopped short before Billy and asked ill-humoredly, "What is it,
father?"

"Take the young lady in with you," said the father, "put some dry
clothes on her, and give her something to eat; afterward, young lady,
we'll drive on."

Lina turned and strode toward the house.

Billy got up to follow her, when the old man looked slyly at the two
with a sidelong glance, pointed at his daughter with his thumb and
said, "She's lost her good name too." Lina looked back at Billy, passed
the back of her hand across her eyes, and smiled faintly.

The living room into which Billy was conducted must have been freshly
calcimined, for it seemed so surprisingly, glaringly white. The
sunshine was so strangely heavy and honey-yellow as it rested on the
red and white chintz covers of the furniture and the pine boards of the
floor. Then, too, there was an eager, loud medley of bird-voices trying
to outsing each other, for all over t