patent on the hay loading device.

Hugh did not get to the Butterworth farmhouse until two o'clock in the
morning, but when he got there his wife was awake and waiting for him. She
heard his heavy, dragging footsteps in the road as he turned in at the farm
gate, and getting quickly out of bed, threw a cloak over her shoulders and
came out to the porch facing the barns. A late moon had come up and the
barnyard was washed with moonlight. From the barns came the low, sweet
sound of contented animals nibbling at the hay in the mangers before them,
from a row of sheds back of one of the barns came the soft bleating of
sheep and in a far away field a calf bellowed loudly and was answered by
its mother.

When Hugh stepped into the moonlight around the corner of the house, Clara
ran down the steps to meet him, and taking his arm, led him past the barns
and over the bridge where as a child she had seen the figures of her fancy
advancing towards her. Sensing his troubled state her mother spirit was
aroused. He was unfilled by the life he led. She understood that. It was so
with her. By a lane they went to a fence where nothing but open fields lay
between the farm and the town far below. Although she sensed his troubled
state, Clara was not thinking of Hugh's trip to Pittsburgh nor of the
problems connected with the completion of the hay-loading machine. It may
be that like her father she had dismissed from her mind all thoughts of him
as one who would continue to help solve the mechanical problems of his age.
Thoughts of his continued success had never meant much to her, but during
the evening something had happened to Clara and she wanted to tell him
about it, to take him into the joy of it. Their first child had been a girl
and she was sure the next would be a man child. "I felt him to-night," she
said, when they had got to the place by the fence and saw below the lights
of the town. "I felt him to-night," she said again, "and oh, he was strong!