Mrs. Holt was not at home, but the house was standing open.  Kate found her room cleaned, shining, and filled with flowers.  She paid the drayman, opened her trunk, and put away her dresses, laying out all the things which needed washing; then she bathed, put on heavy shoes, and old skirt and waist, and crossing the road sat in a secluded place in the ravine and looked stupidly at the water.  She noticed that everything was as she had left it in the spring, with many fresher improvements, made, no doubt, to please her.  She closed her eyes, leaned against a big tree, and slow, cold and hot shudders alternated in shaking her frame.

She did not open her eyes when she heard a step and her name called.  She knew without taking the trouble to look that George had come home, found her luggage in her room, and was hunting for her.  She heard him come closer and knew when he seated himself that he was watching her, but she did not care enough even to move.  Finally she shifted her position to rest herself, opened her eyes, and looked at him without a word.  He returned her gaze steadily, smiling gravely.  She had never seen him looking so well.  He had put in the summer grooming himself, he had kept up the house and garden, and spent all his spare time on the ravine, and farming on the shares with his mother’s sister who lived three miles east of them.  At last she roused herself and again looked at him.

“I had your letter this morning,” she said.

“I was wondering about that,” he replied.

“Yes, I got it just before I started,” said Kate.  “Are you surprised to see me?”

“No,” he answered.  “After last year, we figured you might come the last of this week or the first of next, so we got your room ready Monday.”

“Thank you,” said Kate.  “It’s very clean and nice.”

“I hope soon to be able to offer you such a room and home as you should have,” he said.  “I haven’t opened my office yet.  It was late and hot when I got home in June and Mother was fussing about this winter —­ that she had no garden and didn’t do her share at Aunt Ollie’s, so I have farmed most of the summer, and lived on hope; but I’ll start in and make things fly this fall, and by spring I’ll be sailing around with a horse and carriage like the best of them.  You bet I am going to make things hum, so I can offer you anything you want.”

“You haven’t opened an office yet?” she asked for the sake of saying something, and because a practical thing would naturally suggest itself to her.

“I haven’t had a breath of time,” he said in candid disclaimer.

“Why don’t you ask me what’s the matter?”

“Didn’t figure that it was any of my business in the first place,” he said, “and I have a pretty fair idea, in the second.”

“But how could you have?” she asked in surprise.