Then I closed the book forever with such decision that the Leghorn lady and Mrs. Ewe, who was helping her explore me, both jumped, and I rose to my feet.

“I got eight hundred and fifty dollars out of the deal, and Evan Adam Baldwin only got a few mediocre and amateur kisses, which he shared with me, for all his hard labor in plowing and tilling and restoring Elmnest and me to the point of being of value in the scheme of things.  I got the best of that deal and why should I sulk?” I said to myself in a firm and even tone of voice.  I didn’t.

If I had worked like a couple of women when speeded up by a weird chant on my heartstrings, which I now recognized was just a part of the system used in my reorganization, I worked like five when my heart became perfectly dead and silent.  I got out of my bed the very minute that the first gleam of consciousness came into my mind, before I could have a second to think about anything unprofitable, plunged into the old brass-bound cedar tub of cold water, which I had carried up from the spring in a bucket that matched it the night before, got into my corduroys and smock, and was out in the barn and at work before it would seem possible for a woman to more than open her eyes of understanding upon the world.  All day long I weeded and hoed and harvested and fed and cleaned and marketed that farm until I fell dead between the posts of the old bed at night.

I didn’t pray.  I knew God would understand.

And through it all there was Matthew!  The first week or two he remonstrated with me; then when he saw that I was possessed by the demon of work he just rolled up his sleeves, collected Polly and Bud, and helped.  He promoted his best clerk in the office to a junior partnership, refused several important cases, bought the hundred-acre forest which joins Elmnest, which Aunt Mary had had in her family for generations, and which had been considered as waste land after the cedars had been cut off, and began to restore it.  He never bothered me once in a sentimental way, and when he brought the plans of his house over on the knoll opposite Elmnest, Polly helped me enthuse and criticize them, and he went away seemingly content.  His and Polly’s Rhode Island Reds were rivaling my Leghorns in productiveness, and all of Riverfield seemed to have gone chicken mad.  Mr. Spain traded a prize hog for a cock, and twelve black Minorca hens, and Mr. Buford brought the bride two settings of gray “Rocks” to start a college education for the bundle.

“Do you know what the whole kit and biling is so busy about?” said Aunt Mary as she surveyed with pride a new hen-house that Bud had just finished, in which I saw the trap nests over which she had disputed with the commissioner of agriculture.  “They were just woke up by that speech of Adam’s, and they are getting ready to show him what Riverfield can do when he gets back.  When did you say you expect him, honeybunch?”

“I don’t,” I answered quietly.