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Her wistful eyes softened with delicate sympathy as she glanced at his clean profile, and she thought of a sculptor’s marble. But whenever he turned toward her, it was the trusting simplicity of a youth talking with his mother. Mother! It was forced upon her, so that her breast warmed with medleys of sensation.

“Oh, what’s wrong with your hand?” she asked.

“Nothing much—I jabbed it on a nail yesterday.”

“Aren’t you doing anything for it?”

“Annie’s the doctor—that’s our hired girl.”

“Mauney Bard, you go straight to the doctor’s,” she said. “You might lose your arm, or even your life, if it becomes inflamed.”

He looked at her quizzically, and then nodded with a smile. “All right,” he agreed.

The horse broke into a walk at the foot of the big hill, leading up to the main street of Beulah. At the top the thoroughfare with its bare archway of maples came into view. The houses were characteristic of the residential section, set back beyond lawns and well separated, although here and there small grocery stores were to be seen with well-filled windows and idle, white-aproned proprietors. As they passed the double-windowed front of the Beulah weekly, the blatant explosions of a gasoline engine indicated that the journal was on press. A little further along a lamp-post bearing a large coal-oil lamp stood by the board side-walk, with a signboard nailed at right angles to the street, displaying in large black letters the name “Doctor Horne,” while the physician’s residence, a neat stone house with black pencilled mortar, looked out from a grove of basswood trees.