And while he was turning that last sentence over uncomfortably in his mind a hail sounded across the meadow.  Sophie stood up and waved the tin bucket she had in her hand.  Tommy Ashe came striding toward them.  He, too, carried a tin bucket.

“We’re going to a blackberry patch down the creek,” Sophie answered Thompson’s involuntary look of inquiry.  “Get a pail and come along.”

“I must work,” Thompson shook his head.

“Berry-picking’s work, if work is what you want,” she retorted.  “You’d think so by the time you’d picked a hundred quarts or more and preserved them for winter use.  But then I suppose your winter supply will emanate from some mysterious, beneficent source, without any effort on your part.  How fortunate that will be.”

She tempered this sally with a laugh, and being presently joined by Tommy Ashe, set off toward the bank of Lone Moose, leaving Mr. Thompson sitting on his log, indulging in some very mixed reflections.

The task he was engaged upon seemed suddenly to have lost its savor.  Whether this arose from a depressing sense of inability to deny the truth of much that Sophie Carr had just said, or from the fact that as he sat there looking after them he found himself envying Tommy Ashe’s pleasant intimacy with the girl, he could not say.  Indeed, he did not inquire too closely of himself.  Some of the conclusions he was latterly arriving at were so radically different from what he was accustomed to accepting that he was a little bit afraid of them.

It took him a considerable time to get back into a proper working frame of mind.  The progress of his wooden edifice suffered by that much.  When he went trudging home at last, sweaty and tired, with his axe over one shoulder, he was wondering frankly if, after all, it was either wise or necessary to establish a mission at Lone Moose.  What good could he or any other man possibly do there?  The logical and proper answer to that did not spring as readily to his lips as it would have done at the time of his appointment by the Board of Home Missions.

Along with that he was troubled by a constant recurrence of his thoughts to Sophie Carr.  Nor was it a matter of wonder at her bookish knowledge, her astonishing vocabulary, her ability to think and to express her thoughts concisely.  He conceded that she was a remarkable young woman in that respect.  It was not her intellectual capacity which concerned him greatly, but the sunny aureole of her hair, the smiling curve of her lips, the willowy pliancy of her well-developed body.  Just to think of her meant a colorful picture, a vision that filled him with uneasy restlessness, with vague dissatisfaction, with certain indefinable longings.

He was quite unable to define to himself the purport of these remarkable symptoms.

CHAPTER VII

A SLIP OF THE AXE