"Well," flashed Mariana, "I'd like to see anybody keep me when I've got ready to go." She was on the doorstep now, and the spring wind was bringing her faint, elusive odors. She felt like putting her head up in the air like a lost four-footed creature and snuffing for her home.
"Oh, I guess you'll be glad enough to stay," said Lizzie Ann, with a shrewdness Mariana hated. "The cap'n's takin' to clippin' his beard. He's a nice-lookin' man, younger by ten years than he was when she's alive, and neat 's a pin."
Mariana chose her way back along the muddy road, choking a temptation to turn the corner to her own little house, build a fire there, and let single men fight the domestic battle for themselves. But that night when the spring wind was still moving and she stood on Cap'n Hanscom's doorstone and looked at the dark lilac buds at her hand, the tears came, and the cap'n, bearing in his last armful of wood for the night, saw them and was undone. He went in speechlessly and piled the wood with absent care. He stood a moment in thought, and then he called her.
"Mariana, you come here."
She went obediently.
"You ain't homesick, be you?" the cap'n inquired.
She nodded, like a child.
"I guess so," she responded. "Leastways, if 'tain't that I don't know what 'tis."
The cap'n was looking at her pleadingly, all warm benevolence and anxious care.
"I know how 'tis," he burst forth. "You've give up your home to come here, an' you feel as if you hadn't anything of your own left. Ain't that so, Mariana?"