Amos stared out the door into the darkness.  Little by little Lydia saw creeping into his face new lines of determination, a new sort of pride that the thought of the selling of the lands had not put there.  He cleared his throat.

“Hang it, Lydia, I’m not as hard as you think I am.  I want you to be happy.  And I’m not so damned old as you think I am.  I’m good for homesteading, if you and Liz are.  A farmer with three hundred and twenty acres!  God!”

Lydia nodded.  Amos began to walk the floor.  “I’m still a young man.  If I had the backing that land gives a man, I could clean out a lot of rottenness in the State.  Even if I only did it by showing what a man with a clean record could make of himself.”

“That’s just the point,” cried Lydia eagerly, “and your record wouldn’t have been clean, if you’d gotten it through Marshall.”

“What young men need nowadays,” Amos went on, “is to get back to the old idea of land ownership.  Three hundred and twenty acres!  Lydia, why can’t I enter on it to-morrow?”

“Why not?” asked Lydia.

“If I take Brown’s offer for the cottage, it would leave us enough to get a team and I bet I could hire a tractor to get to the cleared portion of it, this Fall.  A hundred acres are clear, you know.  I might as well quit the factory now, eh, Lydia?”

With a laugh that had a sob in it, Lydia kissed her father and whirled out the door.  Billy was coming in at the gate.  She flew down to seize his hand and turn him toward the road.

“Let’s walk!  I’ve such quantities to tell you!”

Billy turned obediently, but paused in the shadow of the pine.  “Lydia, I can’t tell you what it means to me.  No matter what bigger things may seem to happen to me, nothing can equal the things I’ve felt and dreamed to-day.”

Then he put his arms about Lydia and kissed her, and she put her arms about his neck and laid her head against his shoulder.  They stood thus motionless while the pine whispered above them.  And in the intensity of that embrace all the griefs of Lydia’s life were hallowed and made purposeful.

“Lydia,” said Billy, “I want to tell Mother and Dad.  Will you come over home with me, now?”

“Yes,” replied Lydia, “and then we must tell my father and Lizzie.  Oh, Billy, I forgot,” as they started down the road, “I’ve decided to homestead that land.”

“But—­why, Lydia dear, you’re going to be a lawyer’s wife.  For heaven’s sake, let that beastly land go.”

“No, I’m going to be a pioneer’s wife!”

There was a little pause, then Billy laughed uncertainly.  “Well, I’m not going to talk about it to-night.  I’m in a frame of mind to-night where I’d promise you to be an Indian chief if you ask it.  Mother and Dad are in the kitchen.”

They opened the kitchen door and stepped in.  Pa Norton was sitting in his stocking feet, reading the evening paper.  Ma was putting away the day’s baking.  She paused with a loaf of bread in her hand as the two came in and Pa looked over his glasses.