"Is he very ill?"
The girl shrugged her shoulders. "Who knows? There is no doctor near,
and his mother is poor. We are fighting it out together."
There was something heroic in her cool acceptance of her hard life. He
was silent for a moment, and then he said: "Would you have time to read
my book to-night?"
"Oh, if I might," she said eagerly, "but you haven't it with you."
"I will bring it," he told her, "after supper."
"But," she protested.
"There are no 'buts,'" he said, smiling; "if you will read it, I will
get it to you."
The sky had darkened, and, as he went toward home, he faced clouds in
the southeast.
"It is going to rain," Otto Brand prophesied as they sat down to supper.
The other three men hoped that it would not. Already the ground was
soaked, making the cutting of corn impossible, and another rain with a
frost on top of it would spoil all chance of filling the silo.
Van Alen could not enter into their technical objections. He hoped it
would not rain, because he wanted to take a book to Mazie Wetherell, and
he had not brought a rain-coat.
But it did rain, and he went without a rain-coat!
The house, as he neared it, showed no light, and under the thick canopy
of the trees there was no sound but the drip, drip of the rain. By
feeling and instinct he found the front door, and knocked.
There was a movement inside, and then Mazie Wetherell asked softly:
"Who's there?"
"I have brought the book."
The bolt was withdrawn, and in the hall, scarcely lighted by the shaded
lamp in the room beyond, stood the girl, in a loose gray gown, with
braided shining hair--a shadowy being, half-merged into the shadows.
"I thought you would not come," in a hushed tone, "in such a storm."
"I said I should come. The book may help you through the long night."