“Rose has be'n foolish an' flirty an' wrong-headed,” allowed her grandfather; “but it won't do no good to treat her like a hardened criminile, same's you did afore she went away. She ain't hardly got her wisdom teeth cut, in love affairs! She ain't broke the laws of the State o' Maine, nor any o' the ten commandments; she ain't disgraced the family, an' there's a chance for her to reform, seein' as how she ain't twenty year old yet. I was turrible wild an' hot-headed myself afore you ketched me an' tamed me down.”
“You ain't so tame now as I wish you was,” Mrs. Wiley replied testily.
“If you could smoke a clay pipe 't would calm your nerves, mother, an' help you to git some philosophy inter you; you need a little philosophy turrible bad.”
“I need patience consid'able more,” was Mrs. Wiley's withering retort.
“That's the way with folks,” said Old Kennebec reflectively, as he went on peacefully puffing. “If you try to indoose 'em to take an int'rest in a bran'-new virtue, they won't look at it; but they 'll run down a side street an' buy half a yard more o' some turrible old shop-worn trait o' character that they've kep' in stock all their lives, an' that everybody's sick to death of. There was a man in Gard'ner—”
But alas! the experiences of the Gardiner man, though told in the same delightful fashion that had won Mrs. Wiley's heart many years before, now fell upon the empty air. In these years of Old Kennebec's “anecdotage,” his pipe was his best listener and his truest confidant.
Mr. Wiley's constant intercessions with his wife made Rose's home-coming somewhat easier, and the sight of her own room and belongings soothed her troubled spirit, but the days went on, and nothing happened to change the situation. She had lost a lover, that was all, and there were plenty more to choose from, or there always had been; but the only one she wanted was the one who made no sign. She used to think that she could twist Stephen around her little finger; that she had only to beckon to him and he would follow her to the ends of the earth. Now fear had entered her heart. She no longer felt sure, because she no longer felt worthy, of him, and feeling both uncertainty and unworthiness, her lips were sealed and she was rendered incapable of making any bid for forgiveness.
So the little world of Pleasant River went on, to all outward seeming, as it had ever gone. On one side of the stream a girl's heart was longing, and pining, and sickening, with hope deferred, and growing, too, with such astonishing rapidity that the very angels marveled! And on the other, a man's whole vision of life and duty was widening and deepening under the fructifying influence of his sorrow.
The corn waved high and green in front of the vacant riverside cottage, but Stephen sent no word or message to Rose. He had seen her once, but only from a distance. She seemed paler and thinner, he thought,—the result, probably, of her metropolitan gayeties. He heard no rumor of any engagement and he wondered if it were possible that her love for Claude Merrill had not, after all, been returned in kind. This seemed a wild impossibility. His mind refused to entertain the supposition that any man on earth could resist falling in love with Rose, or, having fallen in, that he could ever contrive to climb out. So he worked on at his farm harder than ever, and grew soberer and more careworn daily. Rufus had never seemed so near and dear to him as in these weeks when he had lived under the shadow of threatened blindness. The burning of the barn and the strain upon their slender property brought the brothers together shoulder to shoulder.
“If you lose your girl, Steve,” said the boy, “and I lose my eyesight, and we both lose the barn, why, it'll be us two against the world, for a spell!”