So there were empty hours for her that day; and always the emptiest are the heaviest—those unfilled baskets of time which strangely become lightest only after we have heaped them with the best we have to give. Gabriella filled the hour-baskets this day with thoughts of David, whose field work she knew would be interrupted by the storm, and whose movements about the house she vainly tried to follow in imagination.
Two months of close association with him in that dull country neighborhood had wrought great changes in the simple feeling with which she had sought him at first. He had then been to her only a Prodigal who had squandered his substance, tried to feed his soul on the swinish husks of Doubt, and returning to his father's house unrepentant, had been admitted yet remained rejected: a Prodigal not of the flesh and the world but of the spirit and the Lord. But what has ever interested the heart of woman as a prodigal of some kind?
At other times he was figured by her sympathies as a young Samaritan gone travelling into a Divine country but fallen among spiritual thieves, who had stripped him of his seamless robe of Faith and left him bruised by Life's wayside: a maltreated Christ-neighbor whom it was her duty to succor if she could. But a woman's nursing of a man's wound—how often it becomes the nursing of the wounded! Moreover, Gabriella had now long been aware of what she had become to her prodigal, her Samaritan; she saw the truth and watched it growing from day to day; for he was incapable of disguises. But often what effect has such watching upon the watcher, a watcher who is alone in the world? So that while she fathomed with many feminine soundings all that she was to David, Gabriella did not dream what David had become to her.
Shortly after nightfall, when she heard his heavy tread on the porch below, the tedium of the day instantly vanished. Happiness rose in her like a clear fountain set suddenly playing—rose to her eyes—bathed her in refreshing vital emotions.
"I am so glad you came," she said as she entered the parlor, gave him her hand, and stood looking up into his softened rugged face, at his majestical head, which overawed her a little always. Large as was the mould in which nature had cast his body, this seemed to her dwarfed by the inner largeness of the man, whose development she could note as now going forward almost visibly from day to day: he had risen so far already and was still so young.
He did not reply to her greeting except with a look. In matters which involved his feeling for her, he was habitually hampered and ill at ease; only on general subjects did she ever see him master of his resources. Gabriella had fallen into the habit of looking into his eyes for the best answers: there he always spoke not only with ideas but emotions: a double speech much cared for by woman.
They seated themselves on opposite sides of the wide deep fire-place: a grate for soft coal had not yet destroyed that.
"Your schoolhouse is safe," he announced briefly.
"Oh, I've been wanting to know all day but had no one to send! How do YOU know?" she inquired quickly.
"It's safe. The yard will have to be cleared of brush: that's all."