“I've never known a woman– or a man, for that matter– with such ability as yours. Not your knack, remarkable as it is; I don't measure a person by such things. But I fear that you are wasting yourself on this boy in Hatrack River. How could any man deserve all that you've sacrificed for him?”

"Deserving it– that's his labor. Mine is to have the knowledge

when he's ready to learn it."

Mistress Modesty was crying in earnest now. She still smiledfor she had taught herself that love must always smile, even in grief– but the tears flowed down her cheeks. “Oh, Peggy, how could you have learned so well, and yet make such a mistake?”

A mistake? Didn't Mistress Modesty trust her judgment, even now? “'A woman's wisdom is her gift to women,'” Peggy quoted. “'Her beauty is her gift to men. Her love is her gift to God.'”

Mistress Modesty shook her head as she listened to her own maxim from Peggy's lips. “So why do you intend to inflict your wisdom on this poor unfortunate man you say you love?”

“Because some men are great enough that they can love a whole woman, and not just a part of her.”

“Is he such a man?”

How could Peggy answer? “He will be, or he won't have me.”

Mistress Modesty paused for a moment, as if trying to find a beautiful way to tell a painful truth. “I always taught you that if you become completely and perfectly yourself, then good men will be drawn to you and love you. Peggy, let us say this man has great needs– but if you must become something that is not you in order to supply him, then you will not be perfectly yourself, and he will not love you. Isn't that why you left Hatrack River in the first place, so he would love you for yourself, and not for what you did for him?”

“Mistress Modesty, I want him to love me, yes. But I love the work he must accomplish even more than that. What I am today would be enough for the man. What I will go and do tomorrow is not for the man, it is for his work.”

“But–” began Mistress Modesty.

Peggy raised an eyebrow and smiled slightly. Mistress Modesty nodded and did not interrupt.

“If I love his work more than I love the man, then to be perfectly myself, I must do what his work requires of me. Won't I, then, be even more beautiful?”

“To me, perhaps,” said Mistress Modesty. “Few men have vision clear enough for that subtle beauty.”

“He loves his work more than he loves his life. Won't he, then, love the woman who shares in it more than a woman who is merely beautiful?”

“You may be right,” said Mistress Modesty, “for I have never loved work more than I have loved the person doing it, and I have never known a man who truly loved his work more than his own life. All that I have taught you is true in the world I know. If you pass from my world into another one, I can no longer reach you anything.”

“Maybe I can't be a perfect woman and also live my life as it must be lived.”

“Or perhaps, Mistress Margaret, even the best of the world is not fit to recognize a perfect woman, and so will accept me as a fair counterfeit, while you pass by unknown.”

That was more than Peggy could bear. She cast aside decorum and threw her arms around Mistress Modesty and kissed her and cried, assuring her that there was nothing counterfeit about her. But when all the weeping was done, nothing had changed. Peggy was finished in Dekane, and by next morning her trunk was packed.

Everything she had in the world was a gift from Mistress Modesty, except for the box Oldpappy gave her long ago. Yet what was in that box was a heavier burden by far than any other thing that Peggy carried.

She sat in the northbound train, watching the mountains drift by outside her east-facing window. It wasn't all that long ago that Whitley Physicker had brought her to Dekane in his carriage. Dekane had seemed the grandest place at first; at the time, it seemed to her that she was discovering the world by coming here. Now she knew that the world was far too large for one person to discover it. She was leaving a very small place and going to another very small place, and perhaps from there to other small places. The same size heartfires blazed in every city, no brighter for having so much company.

I left Hatrack River to be free of you, Prentice Alvin. Instead I found a larger, far more entangling net outside. Your work is larger than yourself, larger than me, and because I know of it I'm bound to help. If I didn't, I'd be a vile person in my own eyes.

So if you end up loving me or not, that doesn't matter all that much. Oh, yes, to me it matters, but the course of the world won't change one way or the other. What matters is that we both prepare you to do your work. Then if love comes, then if you can play Goodman to my Goodwife, we'll take that as an unlooked-for blessing and be glad of it as long as we can.

It was a week before Hank Dowser found his way back to Hatrack River. A miserable week with no profit in it, because try as he would he couldn't find decent dry ground for them folks west of town to dig their cellar. “It's all wet ground,” he said. “I can't I help it if it's all watery.”

But they held him responsible just the same. Folks are like that. They act like they thought the dowser put the water where it sets, instead of just pointing to it. Same way with torches– blamed them half the time for causing what they saw, when all they did was see it. There was no gratitude or even simple understanding in most folks.

So it was a relief to be back with somebody, half-decent like Makepeace Smith. Even if Hank wasn't too proud of the way Makepeace was dealing with his prentice boy. How could Hank criticize him? He himself hadn't done much better– oh, he was pure embarrassed now to think how he railed on that boy and got him a cuffing, and for nothing, really, just a little affront to Hank Dowser's pride. Jesus stood and took whippings and a crown of thorns in silence, but I lash out when a prentice mumbles a few silly words. Oh, thoughts like that put Hank Dowser in a dark mood, and he was aching for a chance to apologize to the boy.

But the boy wasn't there, which was too bad, though Hank didn't have long to brood about it. Gertie Smith took Hank Dowser up to the house and near jammed the food down his throat with a ramrod, just to get in an extra half-loaf of bread, it felt like. “I can't hardly walk,” said Hank, which was true; but it was also true that Gertie Smith cooked just as good as her husband forged and that prentice boy shod and Hank dowsed, which is to say, with a true knack. Everybody has his talent, everybody has his gift from God, and we go about sharing gifts with each other, that's the way of the world, the best way.

So it was with pleasure and pride that Hank drank the swallows of water from the first clear bucket drawn from the well. Oh, it was fine water, sweet water, and he loved the way they thanked him from their hearts. It wasn't till he was out getting mounted on his Picklewing again that he realized he hadn't seen the well. Surely be, should've seen the well–

He rounded the smithy on horseback and looked where he thought he had dowsed the spot, but the ground didn't appear like it had been troubled in a hundred years. Not even the trench the prentice, dug while he was standing there. It took him a minute to find where the well actually was, sort of halfway between smithy and house, a fine little roof over the windlass, the whole thing finished with smooth-worked stone. But surely it hadn't been so near the house when the wand dipped–

“Oh, Hank!” called Makepeace Smith. “Hank, I'm glad you ain't gone yet!”

Where was the man? Oh, there, back in the meadow just up from the smithy, near where Hank had first looked for the well. Waving a stick in his hand– a forked stick–