“There’s the Home Farm,” said Sharon.  “High mighty!  Some change since my grandad came in here and fit the Injins and catamounts off it.  I wonder what he’d say if he could hear what I’m paying for farm help right now—­and hard to get at that.  I don’t know how I’ve managed.  See that mower going down there in the south forty?  Well, the best man I’ve had for two years is cutting that patch of timothy.  Who do you guess?  It’s my girl, Juliana.  She not only took charge for me, but she jumped in herself and did two men’s work.

“Funny girl, that one.  So quiet all these years, never saying much, never letting out.  But she let out when the men went.  I guess lots have been like her.  You can see a woman doing anything nowadays.  Why, they got a woman burglar over to the county seat the other night!  And I just read the speech of a silly-softy of a congressman telling why they shouldn’t have the vote.  Hell!  Excuse me for cursing so.”

Unconsciously Wilbur had been following with his eyes the course of the willow-bordered creek.  He half expected to hear the crisp little tacking of machine guns from its shelter, and he uneasily scanned the wood at his left.  It was the valley of the Surmelin, and yonder was the Marne.

“I keep thinking I’ll be shot at,” he explained.

“You won’t be.  Safe as a church here—­just like being in God’s pocket.  Say, don’t that house look good to you?” He cocked a thumb toward the dwelling of the Home Farm in a flat space beyond the creek.  It was the house of dull red brick, broad, low, square fronted, with many windows, the house in a green setting to which they had gone so many years before.  Heat waves made it shimmer.

“Yes, it looks good,” conceded Wilbur.

“Then listen, young man!  You’re to live there.  It’ll be your headquarters.  You’re going to manage the four other farms from there, and give me a chance to be seventy-three years old next Tuesday without a thing on my mind.  You ain’t a farmer, but you’re educated; you can learn anything after you’ve seen it done; and farming is mostly commonsense and machinery nowadays.  So that’s where you’ll be, understand?  No more dubbing round doing this and that, printing office one day, garage the next, and nothing much the next.  You’re going to settle down and take up your future, see?”

“Well, if you think I can.”

“I do!  You’re an enlightened young man.  What I can’t tell you Juliana can.  I got a dozen tractors out of commission right now.  Couldn’t get any one to put ’em in shape.  None of them dissipated noblemen round the Mansion garage would look at a common tractor.  You’ll start on them.  You’re fixed—­don’t tell me no!”

“Yes, sir,” said Wilbur.

“You done your bit in a fighting war; now you’ll serve in a peaceful one.  I don’t know what the good Lord intends to come out of all this rumpus, but I do know the world’s going to need food.  We’ll raise it.”