be something."

"Admitting that it would be something for her, what would it be for your
father and you?"

She relaxed the energy of her hands. He had time to notice them. It hurt
him to see anything so shapely coarsened with hard work. "Wouldn't it be
that much?" she asked, as if reaching a conclusion. "If she were out of
it, it would be a gain all round."

Never having heard a human being speak like this, he was shocked. "But
everything can't be so black. There must be something somewhere."

She glanced up at him obliquely. Months afterward he recalled the look.
Her tone, when she spoke, seemed to be throwing him a challenge as well
as making an admission. "Well, there is--one thing."

He spoke triumphantly. "Ah, there _is_ one thing, then?"

"Yes, but it may not happen."

"Oh, lots of things may not happen. We just have to hope they will.
That's all we've got to live by."

There was a lovely solemnity about her. "And even if it did happen, so
many people would be opposed to it that I'm not sure it would do any
good, after all."

"Oh, but we won't think of the people who'd be opposed to it--"

"We should have to, because"--the sweet fixity of her gaze gave him an
odd thrill--"because you'd be one."

He laughed as he held out his hand to say good-by. "Don't be too sure.
And in any case it won't matter about me."

She declined to take his hand on the ground that her own was soiled with
loam, but she mystified him slightly when she said: "It will matter
about you; and if the thing ever happens I want you to remember that I
told you so. I can't play fair; but I'll play as fair as I can."

CHAPTER III

Thor was deaf to these enigmatic words in the excitement of perceiving
that the girl had beauty. The discovery gave him a new sort of pleasure
as he turned his runabout toward the town. Beauty had not hitherto been
a condition to which he attached great value. If anything, he had held
it in some scorn. Now, for the first time in his emotional life, he was
stirred by a girl's mere prettiness--a quite unusual prettiness, it had
to be admitted; a slightly haggard prettiness, perhaps; a prettiness a
little worn by work, a little coarsened by wind and weather; a
prettiness too desperate for youth and too tragic for coquetry, but for
those very reasons doubtless all the more haunting. He was obliged to
remind himself that it was nothing to him, since he had never swerved
from the intention to marry Lois W