“You’d better wait till you try it,” he warned her.

“Oh, I don’t mind, I don’t want much.”  And she was impelled to add:  “It’s such a beautiful day.”

“It’s absurd to get hungry on such a day—­absurd,” he agreed.

“Yes, it is,” she laughed.  “I’m not really hungry, but I haven’t time to get back to Hampton for dinner.”  Suddenly she grew hot at the thought that he might suspect her of hinting.  “You see, I live in Hampton,” she went on hurriedly, “I’m a stenographer there, in the Chippering Mill, and I was just out for a walk, and—­I came farther than I intended.”  She had made it worse.

But he said, “Oh, you came from Hampton!” with an intonation of surprise, of incredulity even, that soothed and even amused while it did not deceive her.  Not that the superior intelligence of which she had begun to suspect him had been put to any real test by the discovery of her home, and she was quite sure her modest suit of blue serge and her $2.99 pongee blouse proclaimed her as a working girl of the mill city.  “I’ve been to Hampton,” he declared, just as though it were four thousand miles away instead of four.

“But I’ve never been here before, to Silliston,” she responded in the same spirit:  and she added wistfully, “it must be nice to live in such a beautiful place as this!”

“Yes, it is nice,” he agreed.  “We have our troubles, too,—­but it’s nice.”

She ventured a second, appraising glance.  His head, which he carried a little flung back, his voice, his easy and confident bearing—­all these contradicted the saw and the hammer, the flannel shirt, open at the neck, the khaki trousers still bearing the price tag.  And curiosity beginning to get the better of her, she was emboldened to pay a compliment to the fence.  If one had to work, it must be a pleasure to work on things pleasing to the eye—­such was her inference.

“Why, I’m glad you like it,” he said heartily.  “I was just hoping some one would come along here and admire it.  Now—­what colour would you paint it?”

“Are you a painter, too?”

“After a fashion.  I’m a sort of man of all work—­I thought of painting it white, with the pillars green.”

“I think that would be pretty,” she answered, judicially, after a moment’s thought.  “What else can you do?”

He appeared to be pondering his accomplishments.

“Well, I can doctor trees,” he said, pointing an efficient finger at the magnificent maple sheltering, like a guardian deity, the old farmhouse.  “I put in those patches.”

“They’re cement,” she exclaimed.  “I never heard of putting cement in trees.”

“They don’t seem to mind.”

“Are the holes very deep?”

“Pretty deep.”

“But I should think the tree would be dead.”

“Well, you see the life of a tree is right under the bark.  If you can keep the outer covering intact, the tree will live.”