“I think it’s just awful for you to come on me, scrubbing floors!  You should have knocked at the front door, till I heard,” she said, crossly.

The Harvard man looked at her seriously.  “I really never saw a girl playing golf look as pretty as you do, scrubbing floors.  May I come in?”

He did not wait for an invitation but stepped over the pail and brush to the chair beside the table.  An open book lay on the chair.  He picked it up. “‘Ancient Rome,’” he read.

“I’m trying to keep up.”  Lydia was drying her red hands on the roller towel.  Her shoulders drooped despondently.  “What’s the use of trying to be a lady,” she said, suddenly, “when you have to fight poverty like this!  You oughtn’t to have come on me this way!”

The Harvard man looked from the immaculate kitchen to the slender girl, with her fine head, and then at the book in his hand.

“Of course, I’ve never known a girl like you.  But I should imagine that eventually you’ll achieve something finer out of your poverty than the other girls at the University will out of their golf and tennis.  I don’t fancy that our New England mothers were ashamed of scrubbing floors.”

He looked at her with a smile on his pale face.  Suddenly Lydia smiled in return.  “Sit down while I make us some tea,” she said.  “I’ll never try to play lady with you again.”

Willis stayed with her an hour, sitting in the kitchen where the open door showed the turquoise lake through a gray-green net of swelling tree buds.  He did not leave till Lizzie wakened.  He cleared up the tangle in Lydia’s trigonometry for her and went over the lost lessons in Shakespeare, all the while with a vague lump in his throat over the wistful eagerness in the blue eyes opposite his, over the thin, red, watersoaked hands that turned the leaves of the books.

When Billy called that evening he found Lydia more cheerful than she had been in weeks.  When she told him of her caller he looked at her thoughtfully and growled, “I hope he chokes,” and not another word did he say while he finished Amos’ chores.

Professor Willis came out regularly after this and when Lydia returned to class work in May, she was able to work creditably through the reviews then taking place and in June to pass the examinations.

During all this time she said nothing to Billy about his muckraking campaign.  In spite of her high resolves she half hoped he had given it up.  But she did not know Billy as well as she thought she did.  He finished his law course in June and entered ex-Senator Alvord’s office as he had planned.  There was another election in the fall and John Levine was returned to Congress, this time almost without a struggle.  So many of the voters of the community were profiting by the alienating of the mixed-blood pines that it would have been blatant hypocrisy on the part of Republicans as well as Democrats to have opposed him.  In fact, thanks to Levine, the town had entered on a period of unprecedented prosperity.  The college itself had purchased for a song a section of land to be used as an agricultural experiment station.