Laurie shook himself into his coat. "Well," he said, on his way to the door, "I'll be round Saturday, whether or no. And Milly," he added significantly, his hand on the latch, "you've got to like me then!"
Amelia laughed. "I guess there won't be no trouble!" she called after him daringly.
She stood there in the biting wind, while he uncovered the horse and drove away. Then she went shaking back to her fire; but it was not altogether from cold. The sense of the consistency of love and youth, the fine justice with which nature was paying an old debt, had raised her to a stature above her own. She stood there under the mantel, and held by it while she trembled. For the first time, her husband had gone utterly out of her life. It was as though he had not been.
"Saturday!" she said to herself. "Saturday! Three days till then!"
Next morning, the spring asserted itself,—there came a whiff of wind from the south and a feeling of thaw. The sled-runners began to cut through to the frozen ground, and about the tree-trunks, where thin crusts of ice were sparkling, came a faint musical sound of trickling drops. The sun was regnant, and little brown birds flew cheerily over the snow and talked of nests.
Amelia finished her housework by nine o'clock, and then sat down in her low rocker by the south window, sewing in thrifty haste. The sun fell hotly through the panes, and when she looked up, the glare met her eyes. She seemed to be sitting in a golden shower, and she liked it. No sunlight ever made her blink, or screw her face into wrinkles. She throve in it like a rose-tree. At ten o'clock, one of the slow-moving sleds, out that day in premonition of a "spell o' weather," swung laboriously into her yard and ground its way up to the side-door. The sled was empty, save for a rocking-chair where sat an enormous woman enveloped in shawls, her broad face surrounded by a pumpkin hood. Her dark brown front came low over her forehead, and she wore spectacles with wide bows, which gave her an added expression of benevolence. She waved a mittened hand to Amelia when their eyes met, and her heavy face broke up into smiles.
"Here I be!" she called in a thick, gurgling voice, as Amelia hastened out, her apron thrown over her head. "Didn't expect me, did ye? Nobody looks for an old rheumatic creatur'. She's more out o' the runnin' 'n a last year's bird's-nest."
"Why, aunt Ann!" cried Amelia, in unmistakable joy. "I'm tickled to death to see you. Here, Amos, I'll help get her out."
The driver, a short, thick-set man of neutral, ashy tints and a sprinkling of hair and beard, trudged round the oxen and drew the rocking-chair forward without a word. He never once looked in Amelia's direction, and she seemed not to expect it; but he had scarcely laid hold of the chair when aunt Ann broke forth:—
"Now, Amos, ain't you goin' to take no notice of 'Melia, no more'n if she wa'n't here? She ain't a bump on a log, nor you a born fool."