“And do you—­remember the Boltons?” she persisted.  “I was so interested in what Mrs. Daggett told me about the family yesterday.  It seems strange to think no one has lived here since.  And now that I—­it is to be my home, I can’t help thinking about them.”

“You should have built a new house,” said Jim Dodge.  “A new house would have been better and cheaper, in the end.”

He thrust his spade deep, a sign that he considered the conversation at an end.

“Tell one of the other men to dig this,” she objected.  “I want to make a list of the plants we need and get the order out.”

“I can do that tonight, Miss Orr,” he returned, going on with his digging.  “The men are busy in the orchards this morning.”

“You want me to go away,” she inferred swiftly.

He flung down his spade.

“It is certainly up to me to obey orders,” he said.  “Pardon me, if I seem to have forgotten the fact.  Shall we make the list now?”

Inwardly he was cursing himself for his stupidity.  Perhaps he had been mistaken the night before.  His fancy had taken a swift leap in the dark and landed—­where?  There was a sort of scornful honesty in Jim Dodge’s nature which despised all manner of shams and petty deceits.  His code also included a strict minding of his own business.  He told himself rather sharply that he was a fool for suspecting that Lydia Orr was other than she had represented herself to be.  She had been crying the night before.  What of that?  Other girls cried over night and smiled the next morning—­his sister Fanny, for example.  It was an inexplicable habit of women.  His mother had once told him, rather vaguely, that it did her good to have a regular crying-spell.  It relieved her nerves, she said, and sort of braced her up....

“Of course I didn’t mean that,” Lydia was at some pains to explain, as the two walked toward the veranda where there were chairs and a table.

She was looking fair and dainty in a gown of some thin white stuff, through which her neck and arms showed slenderly.

“It’s too warm to dig in the ground this morning,” she decided.  “And anyway, planning the work is far more important.”

“Than doing it?” he asked quizzically.  “If we’d done nothing but plan all this; why you see—­”

He made a large gesture which included the carpenters at work on the roof, painters perilously poised on tall ladders and a half dozen men busy spraying the renovated orchards.

“I see,” she returned with a smile, “—­now that you’ve so kindly pointed it out to me.”

He leveled a keen glance at her.  It was impossible not to see her this morning in the light of what he thought he had discovered the night before.

“I’ve done nothing but make plans all my life,” she went on gravely.  “Ever since I can remember I’ve been thinking—­thinking and planning what I should do when I grew up.  It seemed such a long, long time—­being just a little girl, I mean, and not able to do what I wished.  But I kept on thinking and planning, and all the while I was growing up; and then at last—­it all happened as I wished.”