“I’ve got two apples and a double handful of black walnut kernels.  The drinks from the spring are on you,” he answered as he led me down through a thicket of slim trees that were sending out a queer fragrance to a huge old stone spring-house from which gushed a stream of water.  “Just these two spring days are bringing out the locust buds almost before time.  Smell ’em!” he said as he looked up into the tops of the slim trees, which were showing a pink-green tinge of color in the red sunset rays.

“Oh,” I said softly as I clasped my hands to my breast and breathed in deep, “I’m glad, glad I didn’t have to let them sell it.  I love it.  I love it!”

“Sell it?” asked Adam as he brushed a rug of dry leaves from under the bushes upon one of the huge slabs of rock before the door of the spring-house for me to sit on, and took two apples from his pocket.

“Yes, and I’ll work both my fingers and toes to the bone before I’ll give it up,” I answered as I crouched down beside him on the leaves and began to munch at the apple, which he had polished on the sleeve of his soft, gray, flannel shirt before he handed it to me.

While we dined on the two red apples, the tangy nuts, and a few hard crackers that, I think, were dog-biscuits, I told him all about it, up to my defiance and assumption of the management of Elmnest in the library after dinner.

“I can keep us from starving until I learn chickens, can’t I?” I asked after the recital, and I crouched a little closer to him on the rock, for black shadows were coming in between the trees and into my consciousness, and all the pink moonlight had faded as a rosy dream, leaving the world about us silver gray.

“I wonder just how much genuine land passion there is in the hearts of women?” said Adam, softly answering my question with another.  “The duration of race life depends upon it really.”

“I don’t know what you are talking about, but I understand you,” I answered him hotly.  “Also I know that I love that old sheep more than you do, and I’m going to get in line with my egg-basket when the United States begins mustering in forces to fight, no matter what it is to be.  I wish I could say it like I feel it to that Mr. Secretary Evan Baldwin, who forgets that women are the natural—­the nutritive sex.”

“I wish you could,” said kind Adam, with one of Pan’s railing laughs.

“Don’t laugh at me—­I’m getting born all over, and it is hard,” I said with a sob in my throat.

“Forgive me!  I’m not really laughing—­it’s just a form—­form of the Peckerwood’s nature-worship,” he answered as he took my hand in his warm one for a second.  “Let’s go finish up with old sheep mother,” he added as he began to pad swiftly away up the path, drawing me after him.

“Yes, I am growing inside,” I assured myself as I for the second night fell asleep on the soft bosom of my family tradition of four posts.