"My father has to take what he gives. There is no escaping 'orders.' Even
I know that!" said Moya. A slight shiver passed over her as she spoke,
laughing off as usual the touch of seriousness in her words.

"Why did you do that?" Paul touched her shoulder. "Is it the wind? There
is a wind creeping down these steps." He improved the formation slightly
in respect to the wind.

"Listen!" said Moya. "Isn't that your mother walking on the porch? Father,
I know, is writing. She will be lonely."

"She is never lonely, more or less. It is always the same loneliness--of a
woman widowed for years."

"How very much she must have cared for him!" Moya sighed incredulously.
What a pity, she thought, that among the humbler vocations Paul's father
should have been just a plain "hired man." Cowboy, miner, man-o'-war's
man, even enlisted man, though that were bad enough--any of these he might
have been in an accidental way, that at least would have been picturesque;
but it is only the possession of land, by whatsoever means or title, that
can dignify an habitual personal contact with it in the form of soil. That
is one of the accepted prejudices which one does not meddle with at
nineteen. "Youth is conservative because it is afraid." Moya, for all her
fighting blood, was traditionally and in social ways much more in bonds
than Paul, who had inherited his father's dreamy speculative habit of
thought, with something of the farm-hand's distrust of society and its
forms and shibboleth.

Paul's voice took a narrative tone, and Moya gave herself up to
listening--to him rather more, perhaps, than to his story.