can't talk to 'em. I guess they don't care about what I'm interested in. But you, Nan, I get along fine with you."

"But I care about most things, Harvey," Nan responded and laughed. "Dancing and having a good time as well as work and harvests."

"Yes, sure." Harvey echoed her laughter. "I know, but you see how tongue-tied I am! Seems like you're the only girl I know that takes an interest in the things I've got all wrapped up in."

"Maybe it's because I've had to," Nan mused, thinking of her father. "I do love to see hay put into stacks, corn into cribs, and wheat-" she broke off suddenly to ask "How much longer will you run your threshing machine ?"

"Six or seven weeks, I sh'd think. Did you write to your Dad?"

"Yes." For some minutes Nan rode silent through the cool, pale moonlighted night, listening to the incessant chirring of the crickets in the rank dead grass beside the road, then: "Harvey, if you're right about Dad an' he can take charge of your baling outfit, it will be the best thing in the world for him. Keep him busy, get him interested."

"Yes. I been thinkin', Nan," Harvey was considering his words with care, "maybe some day your Dad an' me might be partners. 'Course," he hedged, "you can't tell now, but you got to look ahead.”

"Partners!" Nan cried, and rode her Dolly mare

close to Harvey's big gray in order to smile eagerly into his face. "Oh, Harvey, how splendid for Dad!"

"Nan, I've thought furder'n that, too." He leaned toward her from his superior height as he stumbled on: "I mean your Dad—well, he might be the partner for me can't be certain. But now, you! Nan, I know you could be.”

"I!" She knew what he meant, but added defensively, half frightened, "your partner?"

"Nan, don't you see what I mean?" Harvey's voice was hoarse with the strain of his anxiety, and, yielding to an uncalculated impulse of courage, he leaned to place an arm about her shoulders.

His touch, the leaning bulk of him, the underflow of passion that had charged his words, something of the eloquence of the inarticulate in him combined to thrill Nan. She lifted a hand to clasp the great pawlike one trembling on her shoulder, and he broke out:

"Ah, Nan, I love you so! I can't tell you. It just seems like I'm boilin' all inside; an' thinkin' about you -thinkin' about you." He became lost in the fog of his sensations.

"Why, Harvey, I didn't know you cared for me like that."

"It's so, Nan; I think about you all the time." His powerful, blunt fingers clutched Nan's smaller hand. "It's got so I hate to see you talkin' to anybody else. . . It nearly makes me sick to think of somebody

else bein'-lovin' you. Don't you see, Nan?" His fingers hurt her hand as he pressed her close against his leaning shoulder.

Nan was confused, moved, deeply stirred. The sincerity of the man's passion had its effect, so, less clearly to her conscious mind, did the thought that here was help for her father and a sure anchorage for herself. It seemed to her that she must love Harvey because she admired and trusted him, and yet something deep inside held her back.

"I do like you, Harvey, but-why, I'm not seventeen yet."

It seemed an inadequate rendering of what she felt, but Harvey appeared to understand and his voice was gentle as he said:

"I know, Nan." They rode on without speaking for some time. "I can wait. . . . An' I want to say, what I said a little while ago just seemed to come over me like a hot wind, an' seemed like I had to tell you. Nights like this in the fall, when it seems like God-oh, I don't know, somethin' seems to be goin' on like the carryin' out of promises. . . . An' I love you so much, Nan, it just seems like I've got to tell you. . . . I don't know" He sighed at the hopelessness of attempting to pour out his heart to her.

"You keep fillin' my mind, Nan, an' I just had to say what I did. Maybe you could make the promise now, Nan, an' I could wait—”

Around and around he pursued the thought, blindly,

but yet effectively, like a negro field singer absorbed in the rehearsal of the Lord's promise of salvation.

The crude insistence of Harvey's plea, its passionate sincerity, overwhelmed Nan. She was too young to understand her own lack of passion. And the sore spot left by Tom's cruelty needed a medicine, though this, too, she did not comprehend. Love for Harvey would never overwhelm her like a sweet flood, render her incoherent as he had become. But he was strong, masterful in his dumb fashion-and he meant so much now to her father: the opportunity to make good, to accomplish what would surely be, this time, a regeneration! And she could not doubt the single-heartedness of his love for her. Yes, there must be rich gold in this great lump called Harvey!

As the two arrived at the Dines gate, she put out her hand and took Harvey's, pressed it to her cheek and said in a shy, small voice-yet with an odd sinking of the heart:

"I think I'll promise what you want."

She slipped off her horse as Billy Dines came to the door, with a hurried "good night, Harvey," avoiding his downstretched arms.

Susan Dines had a wonderful Saturday, excited all the morning over Nan's confession of her engagement to Harvey and bursting into jubilant song when Billy brought back from Big Grove in the afternoon a telegram from Kearns:

"Tell Nancy her dad is free and sends love. He can't come home just now, but is writing. Heartiest congratulations.”

Nan danced around her aunt with shining eyes.

"But he'll come soon, won't he, Aunty?" she cried. "When he hears about Harvey and me, and what Harvey means to do for him?" The two savored their happiness for a time, and then a shadow of doubt crept into the old woman's eyes.

"I guess," she observed at length, "that Mrs. Ellery's seen a good deal of your pa."

"Yes," Nan answered innocently. "I was so glad she liked him."

"Huh!" Susan Dines dropped the subject.

Sam Davis, who returned from Texas with Kearns, brought Chester Forest's letter to Nan and Susan Dines. In it he explained that he planned to join the Southern Gleaners, work for the order for a few months in Texas and qualify as an organizer before coming back to the long grass country. He would establish the order at Big Grove, and from there help to spread it. Nan's first disappointment was emphasized by Sam Davis's pessimistic prophecy:

"Your dad'll never come back to the farm. You mark my words!"

"You just wait till he hears from me," Nan challenged. She recovered her faith and went happily about her work with Billy Dines.

In the long letter she sent to her father, Nan wrote: