He set the soothed animal down on the lawn, where, after one scornful look at the tugging and helpless dog, Simon Cameron proceeded to rub his arched back against the man’s legs, thus transferring a goodly number of fluffy gray hairs to Brice’s shabby trousers.  Tiring of this, he minced off, affectedly, toward the distant house that stood at the landward end of the sloping lawn.

As he set the cat down, Brice had stepped out of the shadows of the grove, into the open.  And now, not only his face, but his whole body was clearly visible in the dying daylight.  The girl’s eyes ran appraisingly over the worn clothes and the cracking and dusty shoes.  Brice felt, rather than saw, her appraisal.  And he knew she was contrasting his costume with his voice and his clean-shaven face.  She broke the moment of embarrassed silence by saying “You must be tired after your long tramp, from Miami.  Were you walking for fun and exercise, or are you bound for any especial place?” He knew she was fencing, that his clothes made her wonder if she ought not to offer him some cash payment for finding her dog,—­a reward she would never have dreamed of offering on the strength of his manner and voice.  Also, it seemed, she was seeking some way of closing the interview without dismissing him or walking away.  And he answered with per fect simplicity: 

“No, I wasn’t walking for exercise or fun.  There are better and easier ways of acquiring fun than by plodding for hours in the hot sunshine.  And of getting exercise, too.  I was on my way to Homestead or to some farming place along the line, where I might pick up a job.”

“Oh!”

“Yes.  I could probably have gotten a place as dishwasher or even as a ‘bus’ or porter, in one of the big Miami hotels,” he pursued, “or a billet with one of the dredging gangs in the harbor.  But somehow I’d rather do farm work of some sort.  It seems less of a slump, when a chap is down on his luck, than to go in for scrubbing or for section-gang hustling.  There are farms and citrus groves, all along here, just back of the bay.  And I’m looking for one of them where I can get a decent day’s work to do and a decent day’s wages for doing it.”

He spoke with an almost overdone earnestness.  The girl was watching him, attentively, a furrow between her straight brows.  Somehow, her level look made him uncomfortable.  He continued, with a shade less assurance: 

“I was brought up on a farm, though I haven’t been on one since I was eighteen.  I might have been better off if I’d stayed there.  Anyhow, when a man’s prospects of starving are growing brighter every day, a farm-job is about the pleasantest sort of work he can find.”

“Starving!” she repeated, in something like contempt.  “If you had been in this region a little longer—­say, long enough to pronounce the name, ‘Miami’ as it’s pronounced down here, instead of calling it ‘Me-ah-mee,’ as you did—­if you’d been here longer, you’d know that nobody need starve in Florida.  Nobody who is willing to work.  There’s the fishing, and the construction gangs, and the groves, and the farms, and a million other ways of making a living.  The weather lets you sleep outdoors, if you have to.  The...”