“It must seem dreadfully ungrateful and hard-hearted in me to say to you, after all you have done for me, that you must go on in the rain.  Anybody would think that I ought to ask you to come into our house and wait until the storm is over.  But, really, I do not see how I can do it.”

I urged her not for a moment to think of me.  I was hardy, and did not mind rain, and when I was mounted upon my wheel the exercise would keep me warm enough until I reached a place of shelter.

“I do not like it,” she said.  “It is cruel and inhuman, and nothing you can say will make it any better.  But the fact is that I find myself in a very—­Well, I do not know what to say about it.  You are the school-teacher at Walford, are you not?”

This question surprised me, and I assented quickly, wondering what would come next.

“I thought so,” she said.  “I have seen you on the road on your wheel, and some one told me who you were.  And now, since you have been so kind to me, I am going to tell you exactly why I cannot ask you to stop at our house.  Everything is all wrong there to-day, and if I don’t explain what has happened, you might think that things are worse than they really are, and I wouldn’t want anybody to think that.”

[Illustration:  “The rain was coming down hard”]

I listened with great attention, for I saw that she was anxious to free herself of the imputation of being inhospitable, and although the heavy rain and my rapid pace made it sometimes difficult to catch her words, I lost very little of her story.

“You see,” said she, “my father is very fond of gardening, and he takes great pride in his vegetables, especially the early ones.  He has peas this year ahead of everybody else in the neighborhood, and it was only day before yesterday that he took me out to look at them.  He has been watching them ever since they first came up out of the ground, and when he showed me the nice big pods and told me they would be ready to pick in a day or two, he looked so proud and happy that you might have thought his peas were little living people.  I truly believe that even at prayer-time he could not help thinking how good those peas would taste.

“But this morning when he came in from the garden and told mother that he was going to pick our first peas, so as to have them perfectly fresh for dinner, she said that he would better not pick them to-day, because the vegetable man had been along just after breakfast, and he had had such nice green peas that she had bought some, and therefore he had better keep his peas for some other day.

“Now, I don’t want you to think that mother isn’t just as good as gold, for she is.  But she doesn’t take such interest in garden things as father does, and to her all peas are peas, provided they are good ones.  But when father heard what she had done I know that he felt exactly as if he had been stabbed in one of his tenderest places.  He did not say one word, and he walked right out of the house, and since that they haven’t spoken to each other.  It was dreadful to sit at dinner, neither of them saying a word to the other, and only speaking to me.  It was all so different from the way things generally are that I can scarcely bear it.