“What’s that man doing?” asked Annie alertly.

“Ploughin’.  Say, didn’t you ever see a man ploughin’ before?” “Only in the movies,” said Annie, unabashed.  “Do you ever plough?”

He laughed outright.

“Say, you’re going to be some little farmer’s wife.  I can see that.  Yes’m, I plough a little now and then.  It’s like fancywork—­awful fascinating—­and once you get started you don’t want to stop till you get a whole field done.”

“Quit kidding.”

“Say, Annie, do you know a chicken when you see it walking round?  Or a turkey?  Or a guinea keet?  We got ’em all.  Aunt Dolcey, she takes care of ’em.”

“I’d like to take care of ’em.  I’ll feed ’em, if she’ll show me how.”

“Aunt Dolcey’ll show you.  She’ll be tickled to death to have somebody feed ’em when she’s got the mis’ry.”

At Frederick they left the big motor bus and got into Wes’s own rackety flivver, the possession of which delighted Annie’s heart.

“My land, I never thought I’d get married to a man that owned an automobile,” she confessed with flattering frankness in her voice.

“This ain’t an automobile,” said Wes.  “It’s a coffeepot, and an awful mean one.  Sometimes she won’t boil, no matter what I do.”

The coffeepot on this particular day chose to boil.  They rattled merrily out of Frederick and off into the higher hills beyond.  It was a little after noon when they reached the farm.

They had had to turn off the pike and take a winding wood road, rough and muddy from the spring rains.  All through the budding green of the trees dogwood had hung out white bridal garlands for them, and there were violets in all the little mossy hollows.  At last they came through to the clearing, where lay the farm, right on the ridge, its fields smiling in the sun, a truce of Nature with man’s energy and persistence.  Yet not a final truce.  For all around, the woods crept up to the open and thrust in tentative fingers—­tiny pine trees, sprouts and seedlings of hardwood, scraps of underbrush—­all trying to gain a foothold and even when cut and overturned by the sharp plough still clinging tenaciously to their feeble rooting.

“It looks somehow,” said Annie, vaguely understanding this, “as if the trees and things were just waiting to climb over the walls.”

“And that’s what they are,” said Wesley Dean.  “The time I put in grubbing!  Well—­let’s go in and see Aunt Dolcey.”

He had told her, coming out, that he was afraid she would find the house sort of plain, but just the space of it delighted her.  The rooms were bare and square, whitewashed exquisitely, the furniture dark old cherry and walnut of a style three generations past.

There were no blinds or curtains, and in the streaming sunlight Annie could see that everything was clean and polished to the last flicker of high light.  Here and there were bits of colour—­crimson and blue in the rag carpet, golden brass candlesticks on the mantel, a red-beaded mat on the table under the lamp, the lamp itself clear glass and filled with red kerosene that happily repeated the tint of the mat.  It all pleased Annie, touching some hitherto untwanged chord of beauty in her nature.  And there was about it the unmistakable atmosphere of home.