"This grove has been neglected for years; it is so full of disease as to be a menace to other groves. To cure it entirely would cost a small fortune. It is starved as well as diseased; to feed it properly will cost many hundred dollars a year. Worse, its impoverished and famished condition makes it particularly liable to injury by frost and winds. Every winter this grove sheds half its crop before selling time. In fact no one hereabouts would buy it. More, no one would accept it as a gift."

"Oh!" she cried, as if shot. She put the back of her hand across her eyes, needing to shut out even the dim evening light, for she felt sick and faint. "How he lied to me!"

"That man Hopkins is in no wise to blame. He is rather a decent sort. He is honest with his clients. You were not his client. The owner of the grove was his client. Hopkins' business was to sell the grove for the owner, and he sold. You must not blame him.” "Whom then?" asked the girl wanly. Roycroft's intonation had suggested that someone, somewhere, was to blame.

"Yourself," said the young man, speaking rather roughly.

A sensitive young man is apt to speak in this way when he sees some fragile, pretty thing suffering and knows that he has done it.

"Why myself?" she asked, drawing her breath in sobbing fashion.

"Were you not-well, mad-to imagine that for four thousand dollars you could buy a place good for ten thousand a year indefinitely?"

"They told me the owner sacrificed it because he needed money."

"Did you not stop to think that he could have borrowed twice four thousand upon it had he had ten thousand boxes of fruit in sight?"

She drooped her head miserably. The sanguine fool that she had been!

"How much is in sight?" she presently asked, relegating the former owner's problem to oblivion. It was her own problem that was on deck.

Turning upon his soap-box throne, the young man ran his eye down several rows of trees, computing.

The girl, watching his concentration as exemplified in his keen eyes and firm set chin, was forced to admire it, though her admiration was against her will. It does not come natural to admire the skill of a surgeon who is amputating one's member, and ruthless amputation was evidently going on in the calculations of the young grove expert.

His profile was the best part of him, she decided. The clear outline of it, the lay of his thick hair, were both comfortingly classic, and very becoming to his general style of forcefulness, to his suggestion of productive youth, was the steel blue streak on his cheek where the recent razor had been. Yes; he was abominably handsome.

Noting that he was pivoting round again on the soap box she erased the artistic analysis from her expression as an art student might hastily rub out an idle charcoal sketch before the master reached the spot.

"The average is perhaps a box to a tree," he decided. "A grove box. The number of packed boxes would be less. Moreover, you must expect half of the fruit to fall. The grove is exhausted; it is as sick as a child with diphtheria. Even you should be able to see that."

The "even" sounded like "poor idiot that you are,” but the girl was too frightened to resent it. She studied the grove.

"It looks strong and big," she faltered. "The trees are nice and clumpy and bushy, and almost everyone seems to have half a dozen sprouting up at its roots, and the leaves are such a lovely yellow."

"Are you making game of the situation or of me?" he asked, a tremendous flash coming into his eyes.

"Of neither-not now. I'm just telling you what I see."

"You have seen enough to condemn any grove. Yours has to be pruned, and pruning at this time is about as dangerous as no pruning at all. All the trees have die-back and withertip. A few of them have foot rot. That shriveled one has blight. All you can do to that is to burn it, and the sooner the safer. If instead of being a young lady, and not a conspicuously strong one, you were two or three men, you might, by working night and day, by spraying, by fertilizing, by cutting off the water-runners, by plowing lightly, by harrowing, by scrubbing the bark of each and every tree with a solution of whale-oil soap, you might realize two hundred dollars on this year's crop."

"Oh!" cried Laurie again. She rose unsteadily, sending the flowers spilling unheeded to her feet. The future went black.

Roycroft rose too.

"It was my positive duty to tell you this," he stated, once more speaking with roughness. "It gives you an opportunity to go back to your home and friends before discouragement drives you."

"Go back 'home' ?" she asked, lashing herself as well

as him. "Didn't I take pains to pull it all down over our heads before I came away? Didn't I give up my stenographer's position and see that they got a splendid worker in my place? Didn't I use every cent of my money in buying this? And to what 'friends' could say, "Take in grandpa and myself and support us indefinitely'?"

I

"As I remarked before, you are in an appalling predicament," he observed, above the futility of offering consolation. "I for one do not see how you are going to get out of it."

"I'm going to get out of it by staying in!" she declared, clenching her hands. "You said three men could. All right, I'll be three men-I'll have to! I'll do the work-I've got to!"

"You'll plow?" he asked. He was not amused; he was angry, as angry as any serious worker is when absurd statements are made to him.

"I'll plow," she said, "if I have to get down on my hands and knees and do it with my haircomb! I've been performing a man's work with my head ever since I was fourteen years old; now I'll try it with my fingers for a change."

She ripped his hat from the hibiscus bush and handed it to him with eloquent significance.

But he took so long about going that the tears she had hoped to hide came first. She put her slim white hands in front of her face and wept quietly but uncontrollably.

He folded his arms, to give them something safe to do, and looked down at her intently, able to see little else but brow and neck.

"I shall be over here quite frequently," he observed. "Will you?" she asked, a satirical sob in her tone

suggesting that people usually waited till they were invited.

"Quite frequently," he repeated. "Your grandfather has favored me by requesting me to play chess with him. I shall give you all the advice and help that I can, whether you ask for it or not. I have many books on citrus culture that you must read. I shall bring them. Perhaps you need tools that I may possess in duplicate, such as pruning knives and shears -clippers. Please think a moment and tell me what I may bring you, for there is something, is there not?"

He asked this with pardonable certainty, seeing that she had lowered her hands and was regarding him with a dawning of hope.

"Yes," she answered timidly, "I've thought of one thing."

"Mention it."

"I'd like a kitten-if you could find one," she half whispered.

"Kitten?" he echoed. His brilliant brown eyes flared again. He evidently never felt quite safe against the American joke. "Pardon-perhaps I misunderstood you or you me. I half fancied you said 'kitten.""

"What you 'hawf fawncied' was wholly right," she said, sobbing again. "I want a kitten. I awfully want a kitten. I need to have something around that's soft and cuddley. And now-good-by, please.”

A few minutes later he was down at the centipede dock by himself, unfastening his canoe with the air of correct leisure that accompanied all his actions. His mind was extremely busy, and in a tone that hinted at being an unusually rich baritone he was humming "Annie Laurie."