Amos looked down at her, growing first pale, then crimson. She had become, he believed, merely a part of the fearful and unrighteous past; she had vanished entirely, together with impulses to worldliness and evil. But here she was, looking up with her dark eyes as she had looked when she was a little girl. Her eyes seemed unhappy, and his heart bounded. Then it sank like a stone and uneasiness succeeded his rapture.
"I'm working for the Lord, Ellen," he explained, glancing at the group of singers who had turned to look for him. "I'm married."
"Don't you live with Grandfather?"
"No."
"Is he alone?"
"He doesn't want anybody," explained Amos quickly. "He knows he has only to ask and I'll come." The sharp whirr of a tambourine summoned him imperatively; it spoke, not with a religious, but with a domestic sternness. His wife had been expecting him to bring the stranger promptly into the circle of inquirers; she did not approve of this lengthy conversation.
"I must go," said Amos uneasily. "She is there."
Back in the noisy group Amos neither spoke nor sang. When one of his companions began to pray, he removed his cap and bent his beautiful head. But he was not praying, he was thinking of the Kloster and the past. Now that he was in the world he was not of it. He was like a monk who had left his monastery too late. The glare of the sun was too bright, the noise of the world too loud. In his hard day's work he forgot himself, but his evening tasks, his public orisons, his soliciting of strangers, were odious. There were times when he bitterly regretted his marriage; there was no time, indeed, when he did not wish it undone. But he believed that in seeking to win souls he was obeying God, and in this conviction he found consolation.
In the dingy railroad station Ellen waited for her train. The station had seemed hitherto an opening gateway; she had thought it vast and wonderful when she had arrived with her father. Her second entrance, when she came to make her living, had been more sober. Waiting for her train for Ithaca, scarcely hearing Fetzer's good-byes because she was thinking of Lanfair's, she had found it again a dazzling portal. Now, at last, it was an entrance to prison. She believed that all happiness lay behind her. She stepped into the train, and when she reached Ephrata went her way on foot.
The moon shone brightly on the Kloster and on Grandfather's cottage and on the white tombstones in the churchyard. Ellen choked back a sob; her absence from this spot reproached her.