A widow woman and her son, who worked in one of the great retail
stores, lived down-stairs in the building. The young man, rather
consequential but interested, strolled out in the backyard and
surveyed the corn. The widow, who was consumptive, thrust her head
and shoulders, muffled in a white shawl, out of her kitchen window
into the soft spring air.

"So the corn has come up," said the son, throwing himself back on his
heels with a lordly air. The mother smiled dimly at the green spears
from between the woolly swaths of her shawl. She coughed, and pulled
the white fleece closely over her mouth and nose. Then only her eyes
were visible, which looked young as they gazed at the green spears of
corn. The book-keeper nodded his elderly, distinctly commonplace, and
unimportant head with the motion of a conqueror who marshals armies.

After all, it is something for a man to be able to call into life,
even if under the force which includes him also, the new life of the
spring. It is a power like that of a child in leading-strings, but
still power. After the mother and son had gone away and he and his
sister were still out in the cool, and the great evening star had
come out and it was too dark to work any longer, for the first time
he said something about the queer accounts in his books in Captain
Carroll's office.

"I suppose it is all right," he said, leaning a second on his hoe and
staring up at the star, "but sometimes my books and the accounts I
keep look rather--strange to me."

"He pays you regularly, doesn't he?" inquired the sister. The