He looked as if he believed her.  Indeed, he looked unutterable things, contemplating her, there in that mellow old room,—­wrinkling her nose a little and declaring that she could still smell apples.  But all he said was that he supposed the roof leaked, but it couldn’t be very bad because everything seemed quite decently dry and not at all musty.  He added that he must be getting back to work, but that an odd-job man, capable more or less of anything, was at her disposal for as long as she wanted him.

She went with him to the door when he made his rather precipitate departure and stood, after she had waved him a temporary farewell, gazing up at the soft sun-bathed slope with its aisles of gnarled trees.  She smiled at the sight of a decrepit long-handled wooden pump.  She took a long breath of the smell of the month of May.  Then she turned, with Aunt Lucile, to such practical matters as bedding, brooms and tea-kettles.

There was more to do than a first look had led them to suppose, and their schemes grew ambitious, besides, as they advanced with them, so that, for all the Briarean prodigies of Bill, the odd-job man, they went to bed dog tired at nine o’clock that night with their labors not more than half complete.  They slept—­Mary did, anyhow, the deepest sleep she had known in years.

She waked at an unearthly—­a heavenly hour.  The thin ether-cool air was quivering with the dissonance of bird calls; the low sun had laid great slow-moving oblongs of reddish gilt upon the brown walls of the big room.  (She had left her aunt in undivided possession of the extemporized bed-chamber.) She rose and opened the door and looked out into the orchard.  But what her eye came to rest upon was the old wooden pump.

It was a triumph of faith over skepticism, that pump.  Graham had contemned it utterly, hardly allowing, even, that it was picturesque, but Bill, the odd-job man had, with her encouragement, spent a patient hour over it and in the teeth of scientific probability, lo, it had given forth streams of water as clear as any that had ever miraculously been smitten out of a rock.  The partners had forbidden her to drink any of it except boiled, until it had been analyzed.

She looked about.  She had the world to herself.  So she carried her rubber tub, her sponge and a bath-towel out to the warped wooden platform and bathed en plein air, water and sun together.  She came in, deliciously shuddering, lighted a fire, already laid, of shavings and sticks, put the kettle on to boil and dressed.  She felt—­new born that morning.

This sensation made the undercurrent of a long fully filled day.  She almost never had time to look at it but she knew it was there.  It enabled her to take with equanimity the unlooked-for arrival (so far as she and her aunt were concerned) of Graham’s young torn-boy sister, Sylvia.  It made it possible for her to say, “Why, yes, of course!  I’d love to,” when Graham, along in the afternoon asked her if she wouldn’t go for a walk over the farm with him.  They spent more than an hour at it, sitting, a part of the time, side by side atop the gate into the upper pasture, yet not even then had the comfortable sense of pleasant companionship with him taken fright.  It was a security that resided, she knew, wholly in herself.