The Man Who Slept Till Noon

Dave Duncan broke his egg over his potatoes, mixed the two constituents in his dish into a kind of paste with the blade of a tableknife, and took a generous mouthful—off the knife-blade. Dave never used a fork unless the meal was a hurried one, necessitating what he termed “feedin’ from both sides”.

He was a healthy, stolid, settled man of forty-odd, who lived steadily and soberly from day to day, and did not care much how he looked or whether he was considered good company by the rest of his family, so long as his meals were ready on time, his socks kept mended, and a clean shirt handed to him on Sunday morning. His face told, if it told very much of anything, of a nature that resisted and had always resisted, asbestoslike, the taper-touch of any of those things that burn through cold practicality to the blood of the heart. His forehead sloped inward from the temples to a flat-topped head on which the thick hair, washed but not combed, bristled in a soapy tuft. His eyes were granite-coloured, short-lashed, and placidly expressionless; his lower face heavily fleshed, with a coarse brown stubble covering throat and chin and hedging the phlegmatically munching aperture of mouth. Nothing anywhere to win a second glance. A homely face, run to excess of homeliness because its owner had no care otherwise.

Perhaps one may be surprised, after reading this description, to be told that Dave Duncan was not a bachelor, and that the “rest of his family”, to which allusion has been made, referred not to brother or sister, but to a family which he had started “on his own”.

The rest of Dave Duncan’s family consisted of one—the little wiry, competent working-machine of a “home” girl he had brought to his farm, by right of casual matrimony, a little more than a year previously. Lottie Duncan, who was less than half her husband’s age, had been before her marriage a hired girl on an adjoining farm, a handy little body, who could cook and mend and iron, and bake bread, and had never, since she was in short dresses, lacked opportunity of practice in these housewifely accomplishments.

Duncan had married her because that had seemed the cheapest way of getting a woman to keep house for him and milk his cows. Lottie, who, in spite of a few faint, premature lines resulting from the cares of her kinetic and assiduous days, had not been without a certain neat prettiness, had taken Dave because he

“had his place paid for”. Tommy Phillips had wanted her badly; but Tommy was a landless, happy-go-lucky boy who “worked out”, and Lottie’s practicality—one characteristic she shared with her husband—preferred a middle-aged freeman to a youthful vassal.

This is not to go on to say that now she was beginning to regret her choice. On the contrary, Lottie did not regret it. She was perfectly satisfied. If the thing had been to do over again, she would have done exactly the same. Everything was working out completely according to plan. Lottie was now keeping strict and businesslike tab on the farm accounts, checking the store bills, keeping the farm-house orderly as “a new pin”, raising the calves—running the woman’s end of farm operation without let or criticism. The house of Duncan had never known a domestic quarrel.

But Lottie, little Lottie, was changing, changing pathetically, but by a transition so gradual that she herself, busy and unintrospective little person that she was, did not notice it at all. At twenty, she was drying and solidifying into dour, drab middle-age. She was becoming like her husband. His monotony, like a slowly lowered extinguisher, was putting out the tapers, the sparkles and piquancies, that had made sweet and grateful to the eye the vestal altar of her maidenhood. Her eyes, for instance, that in the opening days of their married life, before his influence had begun to make itself felt, had looked brightly and “cutely” across their neat post-nuptial table, now returned his glance with something of his own log-like phlegm. Her voice had lost its sprightly inflection, its struggling coquetry, and had become almost as dreary, droning, and monotonous as his own. She had become his truly consistent partner in his stale enterprise of living.

Dave Duncan’s egg and potatoes exchanged their location on his thick, blue-bordered plate for a spacious and corporeally profitable housing-place between his front and rear suspender-buttons. He poured his tea into his saucer, rippled its surface in careful preamble with a cooling suspiration from his stubby lips, and drank it with intermittent raisings of his shock eyebrows. Then, piling and pushing aside his plate, saucer, and cup, he shoved his chair back a little, stuck between his teeth the pipe that during the dinner interval had lain beside his elbow on the oil-cloth table cover, squared his forearms in the space vacated by the dishes, and looked toward his wife with his granite eyes.

Lottie Duncan, her posture patterned in a comical, unconscious way after his own, except that one hand, small, blunt-fingered, and red, was knuckled beneath the little face with its intent tilt and busy presentness of expression, looked at the same moment in her husband’s direction. Their glances did not meet, but crossed each other, as it were, in two downward, diagonal eye-rays that intersected just above the empty egg-plate in the centre of the table.

“Yes,” said Lottie, “I guess we will be needin’ a man, this spring, Dave.”

It did not surprise Duncan that his wife had picked the thought out of his mind as easily as one lifts a spoon out of an offered tumbler. Thought—plain, workaday thought, nothing fancy—was becoming communal, in a way so gradual and natural as to be below wonder, in this dour domestic firm of Duncan & Duncan.

“Wurk’s a kend o’ heavy, y’ see,” the farmer monotoned, as if it was himself who had made the original remark, “sence wur puttin’ in th’ pre-emption this year. See an’ tell Lavery’s, when yur in town to-day, that we need a man.”

Lavery was the storekeeper at Seeburn (from which place, it may be remarked, one could see no burn nor brae nor anything more picturesque than an alkali flat, crossed by a trail along whose clinging saline ruts one gladly escaped from Seeburn, even though it cost a pull—to the horses—to leave the hamlet). If you wanted to rent a farm—tell Lavery’s. If you wanted to buy a good “quarter” or “half” or “section o’ land “—tell Lavery’s. If you wanted to trade a fine-looking, though balky, horse for one who was a plug to look at but of assured locomotive tendencies—tell Lavery’s. If you wanted to hire a good man at boy’s wages—tell Lavery’s. The firm-which consisted of Bill (Bldie) Lavery, the Missis, and (after school was out) Buzzie of the blond braids—charged no commission for its services. All it asked was that you send no business to the mail-order houses. If you were one who sent trade out of town, you could, of course, still “tell Lavery’s” and still be received with a silken courtesy by any of the three partners and have your needs duly noted down—because in every deal there must be some one to get the short end, and you, in this case, would be that necessary party.

Thrifty Lottie Duncan ordered everything, except immediate necessaries, by mail. From the Seeburn postmaster, who had often made Lavery glow (or glower) through the mail wicket by displaying with a wink and grin one of the mighty catalogues seasonally addressed to the house of Duncan, Lavery’s knew of these transactions. Sometimes, in a mysterious way, Lavery’s knew even the amount and variety of the order that “went through” each spring and fall.

Therefore, after Lottie Duncan, taking with her the spool of thread, the box of matches, and the plug of tobacco that had been her excuse to call at Lavery’s about “help”, had left the store that Saturday afternoon, Baldie Lavery called to him the Missis and Buzzie, and said:

“Loak o’ thot.”

He spread out on the counter the scrap of paper on which he had noted down the Duncans’ need of a hired man.

“Pratty staat o’ things,” Mr. Lavery observed, rubbing the butt of his lead-pencil hissingly against his whiskered chin-end; “they people theer sattin’ a pattern to haalf t’ coontryside to send traade away—then coomin’ a-here an’ askin’ we to get they a mon. But us’ll get they a mon nottastannin’. Us’ll get they a prize mon. Eah, Buzz?” and the senior partner of Lavery’s, pronouncing the “u” in his daughter’s name as the “oo” in “wool”, playfully tweaked Miss Lavery’s pretty ear.

“We will, father,” Miss Buzzie, her dialect slightly modified by her Western schooling, answered promptly, slipping an arm around each of her parents. “We’ll send them Bert.”

“Bert?” Mr. Lavery glanced over his glasses interrogatively. “Oh, aay—t’ yoong lod o’ the staable? Him as cooms here, mother, to coort our Buzz. Ey, us’ll send they Bert. Hoa! hoa! hoa!” Mr. Lavery leaned back against the coffee-mill and laughed till that utensil rattled on its loose counter-bolts.

Bert, an easy-mannered, athletic, nomadic fledgeling of twenty-three, to whom life was just one picnic after another, took, however, some persuading before he could be induced to exchange intermittent work at Jim Hanna’s for the prospect of steady work on a farm.

“Nah,” he said in his don’t-care, hobbledehoy drawl, when the matter was first laid before him next day at the store, “I’d be n’ good on a farm.”

“Tha’rt noa good anywheer,” said Mr. Lavery, frankly, “except ta throa doost in t’ eyes o’ t’ lasses”; and the head of Lavery’s winked cordially at Miss Buzzie, who stood, her school-books under her arm, on the same side of the counter as young Bert.

“Buzzie La very,” said the Missis, who did not think this rallying wise in view of circumstances, ” ’tis time tha wur awaay to t’ school. Loak at t’ clock theer! ”

Bert, to whom Miss Buzzie Lavery loomed at that time in her most vivid stage as one of his procession of passing fancies, and with whose elusive self he might even have fallen in love (as the eagerness bred in youth kept guessing is sometimes miscalled) if the opaque conceit of his time of life had let him see how far he was from being really regarded seriously by the shrewd daughter of the house of Lavery, looked after her regretfully as she moved toward the door. His hope that she would turn for a parting glance was realized. Pausing with her hand on the door-knob, Miss Lavery, presenting her blue eyes to him fetchingly between down-tilted hatbrim and shoulder, said in a voice reduced to just the proper cadence of coaxing:

“Go on, Bertie. Do as feyther says. A staable’s no place for a fine lad like you to serve out his daays in.”

So it came about that, shortly after dinner-time on the day following her trip to town, Lottie Duncan, stopping her garden-rake a moment at the end of a seedbed, found presented to her casual scrutiny a figure approaching from the road-allowance gate. The shoulders of the figure swung nonchalantly; the legs resembled, in a slightly modified way, the handle of her implement of cultivation; the head, at intervals, exuded smoke as does a stove when the check-damper is turned suddenly against a strong draught.

“Good day, lady,” said Bert, the cigarette in his mouth jibbing spasmodically with his utterance; “I want a job.”

There! the distasteful thing was said and over with in as few words as possible.

Lottie turned back the brim of the old masculine felt hat she wore, and looked up at him. Bert, with a faint quickening of interest, noted that the “lady of the house” at this place where he had sentenced himself to imprisonment with hard labour was young, not old and dingy, as he had anticipated. Noting this, he removed his cloth peak-cap ostentatiously and, taking his cigarette out of his mouth, held it politely to leeward.

Lottie’s mind, as she watched these acts of deference and surveyed the doer of them, involuntarily reverted to the years before she had a husband who kept his hat on all the time except when in bed, and smoked at her as though she were a wall or a fence-post; whose hair bristled unkemptly instead of tumbling in comely disorder about his temples and ears; whose self-contained granite eyes held no pin-end of light, like a softly blown spark, in each iris. It was perhaps Lottie Duncan’s first backward glance since her materially satisfying marriage.

“Have you et?” she said.

Bert set his hat decorously back over his wavy tonsure.

“Oh, a bite, at the hotel,” he said; adding quickly, to remove any possible vestige of misunderstanding, “just a bite.”

“Come in,” said Lottie Duncan.

A few moments later Duncan’s wife, turning from setting the tea-canister back into the cupboard, looked toward the healthy young nomad plying zestful knife and fork at the farm-house table. In its original intention, Lottie’s look had been merely a casual and housewifely glance at his plate to see if it needed replenishing. But somehow she found it hard to take her eyes away again from that young, fresh-coloured face, those long legs carelessly a-sprawl beneath the table, those virilely squared shoulders that leaned above his plate.

Lottie Duncan had entered thoroughly into her husband’s viewpoint of the future. More land—bigger crops—more money. They did not think of this money as a medium to buy luxuries, or to purchase the ultimate right to rest when their bodies should be drying and yellowing toward the reaping-time. The farmer, born and bred to that estate, is the one type among the world’s workers into whose contemplation rest does not enter. He goes contentedly down the years in harness, just as his horses go. The inevitable odd incident of death finds him, as it were, between plow-handles. The only idea Dave and Lottie Duncan had as to a possible future use for their money had been expressed in a suggestion of Dave’s, one reflective evening, that “maybe we’ll take a jolt East an’ see the old place, some day, if we get the time.”

So Lottie, born and pre-fashioned a farmer’s wife and helpmate, had put away without great effort her right to receive youth’s gallantries at the age when these offerings are sweetest. But she had not, and of course could not, put away capacity to appreciate them. It was, therefore, somewhat good to have this young man remind her, as he had by his attitude out in the garden and as he continued to do from his place at the table, that she could still command attention from pernickety twenty-three.

Something exhaled from him that was meaty and potent-flavoured to her young-woman palate, something that defied insensibility, something that made her turn away a little guiltily from the reckless matter-of-course homage in Bert’s bold brown eyes.

“You better go out an’ see—him,” she said, her back turned, “when you’re done eatin’.”

After the boy, hat on the side of his head, lips pursed in a whistle, had gone off to the thirty-acre field up and down which Dave Duncan was moving steadily and stolidly behind his soft-rattling seed-drill, Lottie Duncan gathered up the dishes from the table, put them in the dish-pan, and poured over them hot water out of the kitchen kettle.

Somehow, that hot water felt good to her hands, as she sank them into it. The half-filled caloric pan, with its white litter of submerged porcelain, became a core of comfort in that scrubbed, sterile, bleakly tidy farmhouse kitchen. Lottie Duncan’s eyes were scaled of their emotionless glaze. The soft, contemplative hazel-gray came out, lighting her little face as the dawn the sky.

It was a new-washed and piquant countenance, touched with the pink of expectation, that looked out over the lea that evening, as Duncan’s wife hung out from the upper window the red blanket that was the supper-signal to the men on the far black square of fallow. Lottie had left off for the time her long, shapeless blue-and-white check apron, and had clad herself in the neat white waist and skirt of Sunday afternoon. She had pinned up the hair about her bird-like small head with a knack long unexercised. The lace collar she had put on was drawn down into a low “V” at the throat and secured there with a silver brooch.

Lottie could not herself have explained why she had, on this unsingular workday evening, marshalled all these embellishments in their joint naive appeal. It was just a “notion” she took, she would probably have said.

Somewhat expectantly, she awaited the arrival of the men. When, however, they had hungrily arrived, had washed themselves at the basin in the porch, and had taken chairs at the table, Lottie dallied in the neighbourhood of the stove, protracting her dishing-up of the meat and potatoes. She had so seldom, in these prosaic latter days, tricked herself out for any occasion except her routine churchgoing on Sundays, that she was shy of being looked at.

“Come on, Lot,” Dave Duncan’s monotone had a barely perceptible note of impatience; “whur’s them supper-things?”

Eyes lowered, and cheeks a little warm, the junior partner of Duncan & Duncan brought over the plate of fried meat and the vegetable-dish of boiled potatoes. As she set these down her husband “took notice” with mild ox-like surprise, that the meat-plate was garnished with green sprigs of water-cress. He noted also, as presently she fetched the tea, that this had been brewed in the long unused china pot belonging to the set of dishes that had been her wedding-present from her former mistress. Duncan made no comment, however, for appetite became his possessing interest as the savoury odour of the” supper-things” filled his nostrils. Helping himself liberally first, he pushed the meat-dish toward young Bert.

Bert was hungry, too, hungrier than he had ever been that he could remember, but he nearly spilled the gravy in trying to help himself and at the same time take surreptitious survey of the “lady of the house”.

Lottie Duncan, although the drab and practical concerns of her business of marriage had made her temporarily dull and hueless, held yet within her well-nourished little person the pleasing potentialities of womanhood in the early twenties. It had only needed a little pique and incentive, a little of the sunshine and dew of recognition, to cause her to bloom again in coloured cheek and brightening eye. Bert continued to steal glances at her between mouthfuls; and already, in his free-necked mind of boy-time that knew no law but liking, a new “passing fancy” was pushing Buzzie Lavery from the seat of honour.

The main post-supper chore on the Duncan farm was the milking of Daise, Bess, and Lill—staid lacteal containers all, as sober as the man that owned them and the shaggy old collie, seven-summers-wise that herded them leniently each evening to the milking-pen.

But the most tractable cow regards in an armed way a new milk-master— especially an unconventional and undignified one who diverts himself by rattlingly playing catch with his tin strainer-pail as he approaches the scene of his endeavour. So Daise, the mother of the Duncan herd, although suffering Bert to “strip” her for an arduous half-hour, did not “let down” into her udder any more fluid from her milk-veins, though filled to bursting-point, than she could without undue discomfort retain.

“Well, now—is that all she’d give you?” exclaimed Lottie, who, having long ago finished milking Bess and Lill, had been waiting patiently in the milk-house, with the cream-separator all set up and ready, till Daise’s contribution arrived. “That’s not the half, nor yet the quarter, of what Daise gives. Why, she’s only just freshed a month or so ago.”

“Ya, that’s every last straw she has in the loft, seemin’ly—honest, it is,” responded Bert, carelessly. He set down the pail, with its blue-white minim of milk in the bottom, and caressingly laid a cigarette to his lips. “How you comin’ up, anyway, Missis? Say, you got a spot o’ milk on your chin. Let’s rub it off.”

But Lottie, out of the deep experience of young men gained in her “free” former days, stepped quickly away as Bert, handkerchief-corner ostentatiously ready, approached her.

“Did you ever run a separator?” she said, setting her hand on the bowl of the machine. “Hundreds of ’em,” rejoined the youth, gripping the crank as he spoke, and hauling it around with reckless vigour.

“Well, then, “—Lottie stepped forward hastily to the succour of her well-kept dairy machine-” you ought to know that’s no way to start it. Turn easy until you get up speed; then don’t go any faster than sixty turns a minute. There—that’s better.”

“I’m a hog for work,” commented Bert as his shapely torso rose and fell gracefully to the revolution of the handle, “ain’t I?”

“You run through what milk’s there,” said Lottie, picking up the pail he had set down, “while I go down to the corral and finish Daise. I’ll be back before you’re done.”

Big, crooked-horned Daise sighed with contentment as her mistress’s practised fingers gripped her teats, and yielded her milk in grateful plenitude. As the alternate jets of white flashed frothing into the strainer-pail Lottie Duncan, lapsing into the thought-glow that attends upon busy mechanical movement, found in her mind the vague whisper of an ancient regret she had imagined silenced forever.

It was hardly seven hours since this “crazy lad”—as Lottie half affectionately termed him in a musing ejaculation—had stepped into her ken; yet in that short interval he had come nearer to her than the staid, self-absorbed, granite-eyed man with whom she had lived—lived, too, in the utter intimacy of wifehood—for more than a year. She must check-rein this boy, must (for little Lottie was, above all, an honest wife and an honest woman) hold him within the proprieties; but, within due bounds, there was no special reason why she should not, in her youth’s hunger, let him be companion and playmate.

Ah! how good the sparkle of him was—the glint, the bounce, the bonny and gay agility of mind and impulse—how forgivable even his boldness! For this last was not the evil, selfish, deliberate boldness of the old or the experienced. It was merely a boy’s spontaneity, a boy’s careless and playful challenge to circumstances.

Too early, she saw clearly, had she cut short her playtime, too soon settled into the staid and serious noon of living. But here was fun, innocent fun, to be had for the free-and-easy taking. She would take it-she would! She would have another run in the sun-hair down, hat-strings flying, skirts ankle-high, as it were. She was only a girl yet—and the years were coming on apace when she could never be a girl again, when ahead there would be only life’s lessening afternoon, with its ultimate sunset and—night.

Lottie Duncan’s eyes flashed approvingly as she returned with her brimming pail to the milk-house and noted that some instinct of fidelity to a playfellow had kept lazy Bert faithfully at work. The separator-bowl was spinning with a rich and cheery hum, the milk reservoir nearly empty.

“Welcome to our city,” was the operator’s rather breathless greeting. “Say, I thought you was never comin’. This job’s worse’n loadin’ gumbo.”

“You must be weak, for the size of you,” Lottie flung at him as she emptied Daise’s milk into the reservoir and took hold of the crank, which young Bert relinquished with considerable alacrity; “why, I have to do this every night, with no one to spell me off – See here, now; you stop that! Stop, I tell you!”

This last very briskly, sharply, and decisively, as Bert’s freed hand attempted to rest for a moment about her waist.

“All right—go ahead turning, and show us how it’s done.” Bert’s tone conveyed a slight swagger, but the offending hand was promptly removed. He composed himself on the bench beside the empty milk-pail, and lighted a fresh cigarette.

Lottie had just commenced to turn the separator-handle when there was a step outside and Dave Duncan’s sphinx-like face thrust in through the low door. Remembering her reflections while milking, Lottie could not help flushing a little as she looked around. But it was not suspicion that had brought dull Dave to the dairy.

“Come, young feller,” he said in his flat voice; “come on and give us a hand fillin’ some o’ them bags with seed-wheat, ready for the mornin’.”

To repeat, it was not jealousy nor anything unutilitarian that had brought Duncan to the little prairie-stone structure where the two young people, among the milk-things, were drawing together by the lodge-signs of their freemasonry of youth. But a sudden inkling, an odd needle-point of new concern, a sensation unlike anything he had ever felt before, pricked the husband as he faced that flushed and sparkling glance which showed him for a moment a familiar little face grown queerly unfamiliar.

“I guess maybe you better hit the hay now,” he said, half an hour later, as the last of the grain-bags was filled and set aside in a convenient corner for the morning seed-drill. “Yon’s your bed.” He pointed with one thick, blunt finger to a gray-blanketed cot in the corner of the granary—made up there because there was no accommodation in the partitionless farm-house up on the knoll-top. He surveyed the young man steadily a moment; then, making no further remark, stepped lumberingly down from the granary door-jamb and made his way, forehead wrinkled and eyes on the ground, to the house.

Lottie had let down her hair and taken off her shoes, and was swaying softly in the wooden rocking-chair. Halting unperceived in the dusk outside the open door, Dave Duncan, stirred oddly, studied her as she sat in bright, half-smiling pensiveness, the lamplight on her comely, fresh-coloured young face and a little glint, as of soft summer starshine, in each of her eyes. Something had upset the torpid concernless balance of his healthy, middle-aged mental ease.

He felt a real pang as, stepping into view after his momentary pause outside, he saw all the light pass out of her face, leaving it dreary and casual.

“B’en a kend o’ tough day on you, Lot, eh?” he ventured, awkwardly.

“Ye-es.” She yawned indifferently in his face as she dropped into the monotone of Duncan & Duncan. “Finished seedin’ yon forty-acre field yet, Dave?”

“Oh, I dun’no”—his usually dull face had taken on a queer glow—” I dun’no, Lot.”

The something unusual in his deportment and in his clumsily ingratiating, half-diffident lingering on her name made Lottie Duncan glance up, faintly curious. After surveying him a moment, she arose, with a wholly unconscious and involuntary little shrug, and moved off toward the bed in the corner.

“I’m a kend o’ tired, an’ I want to get a good sleep,” she said, over her shoulder. “Maybe you could split me an armful or two o’ wood now, before you get your shoes took off. See an’ not wake me when you’re comin’ to bed, for I’m that drowsy-like. I’m goin’ to need all the sleep I can get before sun-up.”

“Aw, no, Lot. I— Gr-r-h’m “—he cleared raspingly the throat that had become husky with his attempt to lower his voice to coaxing-pitch—” I want t’ talk a little to-night. You got plenty wood in the wood-box, there.” “A-all right, then, ” said Lottie, resignedly. She moved on another step or two, then turned slowly around and looked, not toward him as usual, but straight at him, at his reddening, commonplace face, at his granite eyes. “My, you’re a queer man, Dave Duncan,” she said, ponderingly; “too slow”—her voice quickened and took on a sudden tart flavour—” too slow to—to catch a cold.”

Her husband stood a moment, his hat in his hand, atter this last utterance. Then he said in his throat, low and humbly:

“I’ll go an’ split the full o’ your wood-box, then, Lot, ef you—ef yur set on me doin’ it.”

He thrust his hat, fumblingly and awry, back on his head, and went out to the wood-pile.

If, through some perversity, Dave Duncan had decided to fasten irrevocably on himself the name for “slowness” it appeared he had acquired, he could not have taken longer than he did at the accepted task. Lottie, whom even the tangent excitation of this evening of her youth’s reawakening could not draw away long from the regular orbit of her healthy mechanical day, heard from her pillow, as she yawned herself in pleasant weariness toward slumber, the strong-swung ax dawdle intermittently in its chopping. There would come a dull, moody bump of steel on wood, a morose patter of falling chips, a rending of wood-fibres —then a long pause. Vaguely speculating as to the reason for this dalliance where she had expected haste, Lottie Duncan presently fell into her dreamless and restorative nightly sleep.

It might have been an hour later when she was awakened by the bang of a wood block striking a kettle on the edge of the stove as Dave Duncan emptied his burden into the fire-wood box between stove and wall. She was about to murmur impatiently at him, when something in his expression made her change her mind and pretend slumber while she watched him from under lids held so low that her eyes, back in that dusky corner, seemed closed.

He was travailing with an inward excitement. Even as she looked his way, this feeling, like a banked fire burning slowly to the surface, began to show in a kind of phosphorescence that made warm and translucent the opaque gray granite globules of his eyes. He was looking straight at her, with an unembarrassed intentness that showed her sleep-sham had deceived him.

There was nothing suggesting transiency nor shallowness in this regard he was giving her. It showed her a man—a man in the strong and potent prime of his matured middle years, thoroughly awakened, not one single healthy fibre quiescent, glowing with a late but new-found flame of love.

With woman’s ready discernment of that thing which is what woman lives for, she could read that what possessed this man was, in spite of his years, a virgin sensation. He had been dull merely because he had been undeveloped. It had only needed the spur of a rival near to bring him, her husband, to her in full fruition.

Her thought passed a moment to the boy Bert—his petted boy-blasé pose, his capers, his instant transparent susceptibility, his unrespecting boldness—all the things about him that represented the attitude of his type and age. When she had been an unattached maiden, with bright eyes and many callers, she had won notice without effort from a hundred of his like. She had seen boys and girls marry, and separate again, in mutual dislike and disgust, within a period of months.

But this—this capitulation of a man in the flesh-fortress of his settled, middle-aged maturity! It took practical, canny, experienced little Lottie Duncan only a moment to realize that her greatest triumph in love-winning had taken place in her own legitimate home.

She opened her eyes and, with a thrill, put out a hand.

“Dave!” she said.

He started; then came over to her, reduced at once to the red, fumbling humility of first love.

“Has it b’en a hard day on you, kend of?” were the plain words her lips framed—but her eyes looked the rest.

“It has, kend of, Lot,” he mumbled. “I b’en thinkin’, outside there, that maybe, after seedin’s over, we ought to—ought to take a kend of a holiday— holiday, like, an’—an’ freshen up.”