[Pg 149]

The corn waved high and green in front of the vacant riverside cottage, but Stephen sent no word or message to Rose. He had seen her once, but only from a distance. She seemed paler and thinner, he thought,—the result; probably, of her metropolitan gayeties. He heard no rumor of any engagement, and he wondered if it were possible that her love for Claude Merrill had not, after all, been returned in kind. This seemed a wild impossibility. His mind refused to entertain the supposition that any man on earth could resist falling in love with Rose, or, having fallen in, that he could ever contrive to climb out. So he worked on at his farm harder than ever, and grew soberer and more careworn daily. Rufus had never seemed so near and dear to him as in these weeks when he had lived under the shadow of threatened blindness. The burning of the barn and the[Pg 150] strain upon their slender property brought the brothers together shoulder to shoulder.

[Pg 150]

“If you lose your girl, Steve,” said the boy, “and I lose my eyesight, and we both lose the barn, why, it’ll be us two against the world, for a spell!”

The “To Let” sign on the little house was an arrant piece of hypocrisy. Nothing but the direst extremity could have caused him to allow an alien step on that sacred threshold. The plowing up of the flower-beds and planting of the corn had served a double purpose. It showed the too curious public the finality of his break with Rose and her absolute freedom; it also prevented them from suspecting that he still entered the place. His visits were not many, but he could not bear to let the dust settle on the furniture that he and Rose had chosen together; and whenever he locked the door and went back to the River Farm, he thought of a verse in the Bible: “Therefore the Lord God sent him[Pg 151] forth from the Garden of Eden, to till the ground from whence he was taken.”

[Pg 151]

It was now Friday of the last week in August. The river was full of logs, thousands upon thousands of them covering the surface of the water from the bridge almost up to the Brier Neighborhood.

The Edgewood drive was late, owing to a long drought and low water; but it was to begin on the following Monday, and Lije Dennett and his under boss were looking over the situation and planning the campaign. As they leaned over the bridge-rail they saw Mr. Wiley driving down the river road. When he caught sight of them he hitched the old white horse at the corner and walked toward them, filling his 

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