"I ain't a rich man," said Jethro, with some quiet pride; "but I've got enough. Yes, I like my business; and city life suits me. You'll fall in with it, too."
Then silence settled between them; but that never troubled Dilly. She was used to long musings on her walks to and from her patients, and in her watching beside their beds. Conversation seemed to her a very spurious thing when there is nothing to say.
"What you thinking about?" he asked suddenly.
Dilly looked up at him with her bright, truth-telling glance. "I was thinkin'," she answered, with a clarity never ruthless, because it was so sweet,—"I was thinkin' you make me homesick, somehow or another."
Jethro looked at her doubtfully, and then, as she smiled at him, he smiled also.
"I don't believe it's me," he said, confidently. "It's because you're going over things here. It's the old house."
"Maybe," said Dilly, nodding and tying her last bundle of papers. "But I don't know. I never had quite such feelin's before. It's the nearest to bein' afraid of anything I've come acrost. I guess I shall have to run out into the lot an' take my bearin's."
Jethro got up, put his hands in his pockets, and walked about the room. He was very gentle, but he did at heart cherish the masculine theory that the unusual in woman is never to be judged by rules.
"But it is a queer kind of a day," owned Dilly, pushing in the last drawer. "Why, Jethro!" She faced him, and her voice broke in excitement. "You don't know, I ain't begun to tell you, how queer it seems to me. Why, I've dreaded this day for weeks! but when it come nigh, it begun to seem to me like a joyful thing. I felt as if they all knew of it: them that was gone. It seemed as if they stood 'round me, ready to uphold me in what I was doin'. I shouldn't be surprised if they were all here now. I don't feel a mite alone."
Her voice shook with excitement; her eyes were big and black. Jethro came up to her, and laid a kindly hand on her shoulder. It was a fine hand, long and shapely, and Dilly, looking down at it, remembered, with a strange regretfulness, how she had once loved its lines.