“You mean,” said Kate with an effort, “that if Robert asked a woman to marry him, it would mean that he loved her.”

“Indubitably!” cried Agatha.

Kate laughed until she felt a little better, but she went home in a mood far different from that in which she started.  Then she had been very happy, and she had intended to tell Agatha about her happiness, the very first of all.  Now she was far from happy.  Possibly —­ a thousand things, the most possible, that Robert had responded to Agatha’s suggestion, and stopped and asked her that abrupt question, from an impulse as sudden and inexplicable as had possessed her when she married George Holt.  Kate fervently wished she had gone to the cornfield as usual that afternoon.

“That’s the way it goes,” she said angrily, as she threw off her better dress and put on her every-day gingham to prepare supper.  “That’s the way it goes!  Stay in your element, and go on with your work, and you’re all right.  Leave your job and go trapesing over the country, wasting your time, and you get a heartache to pay you.  I might as well give up the idea that I’m ever to be happy, like anybody else.  Every time I think happiness is coming my way, along comes something that knocks it higher than Gilderoy’s kite.  Hang the luck!”

She saw Robert pass while she was washing the dishes, and knew he was going to Agatha’s, and would stop when he came back.  She finished her work, put Little Poll to bed, and made herself as attractive as she knew how in her prettiest blue dress.  All the time she debated whether she would say anything to him about what Agatha had said or not.  She decided she would wait awhile, and watch how he acted.  She thought she could soon tell.  So when Robert came, she was as nearly herself as possible, but when he began to talk about being married soon, the most she would say was that she would begin to think about it at Christmas, and tell him by spring.  Robert was bitterly disappointed.  He was very lonely; he needed better housekeeping than his aged mother was capable of, to keep him up to a high mark in his work.  Neither of them was young any longer; he could see no reason why they should not be married at once.  Of the reason in Kate’s mind, he had not a glimmering.  But Kate had her way.  She would not even talk of a time, or express an opinion as to whether she would remain on the farm, or live in Nancy Ellen’s house, or sell it and build whatever she wanted for herself.  Robert went away baffled, and disappointed over some intangible thing he could not understand.

For six weeks Kate tortured herself, and kept Robert from being happy.  Then one morning Agatha stopped to visit with her, while Adam drove on to town.  After they had exhausted farming, Little Poll’s charms, and the neighbours, Agatha looked at Kate and said:  “Katherine, what is this I hear about Robert coming here every day, now?  It appeals to me that he must have followed my advice.”