“But how does it happen you’re keepin’ it up, Emma, all this time?  Why, you must be anyway—­it ain’t that you look it—­but—­” He floundered, stopped.

She laughed.  “That’s all right, Ben.  I couldn’t fool you on that.  And I’m working because it keeps me happy.  I want to work till I die.  My children keep telling me to stop, but I know better than that.  I’m not going to rust out.  I want to wear out.”  Then, at an unspoken question in his eyes:  “He’s dead.  These twenty years.  It was hard at first when the children were small.  But I knew garden stuff if I didn’t know anything else.  It came natural to me.  That’s all.”

So then she got his story from him bit by bit.  He spoke of the farm and of Dike, and there was a great pride in his voice.  He spoke of Bella, and the son who had been killed, and of Minnie.  And the words came falteringly.  He was trying to hide something, and he was not made for deception.  When he had finished: 

“Now, listen, Ben.  You go back to your farm.”

“I can’t.  She—­I can’t.”

She leaned forward, earnestly.  “You go back to the farm.”

He turned up his palms with a little gesture of defeat.  “I can’t.”

“You can’t stay here.  It’s killing you.  It’s poisoning you.  Did you ever hear of toxins?  That means poisons, and you’re poisoning yourself.  You’ll die of it.  You’ve got another twenty years of work in you.  What’s ailing you?  You go back to your wheat and your apples and your hogs.  There isn’t a bigger job in the world than that.”

For a moment his face took on a glow from the warmth of her own inspiring personality.  But it died again.  When they rose to go his shoulders drooped again, his muscles sagged.  At the doorway he paused a moment, awkward in farewell.  He blushed a little, stammered.

“Emma—­I always wanted to tell you.  God knows it was luck for you the way it turned out—­but I always wanted to—­”

She took his hand again in her firm grip at that, and her kindly, bright brown eyes were on him.  “I never held it against you, Ben.  I had to live a long time to understand it.  But I never held a grudge.  It just wasn’t to be, I suppose.  But listen to me, Ben.  You do as I tell you.  You go back to your wheat and your apples and your hogs.  There isn’t a bigger man-size job in the world.  It’s where you belong.”

Unconsciously his shoulders straightened again.  Again they sagged.  And so they parted, the two.

* * * * *

He must have walked almost all the long way home, through miles and miles of city streets.  He must have lost his way, too, for when he looked up at a corner street sign it was an unfamiliar one.

So he floundered about, asked his way, was misdirected.  He took the right street car at last and got off at his own corner at seven o’clock, or later.  He was in for a scolding, he knew.

But when he came to his own doorway he knew that even his tardiness could not justify the bedlam of sound that came from within.  High-pitched voices.  Bella’s above all the rest, of course, but there was Minnie’s, too, and Gus’s growl, and Pearlie’s treble, and the boy Ed’s, and—­