"I have startled you, dear Ephraim; I hope I have done you no harm."
He made as yet no answer but to take her hand, grasping it with rough heartiness as if this was the first moment of their meeting.
Susannah laughed as women sometimes laugh over their cherished ones for very joy, not amusement. "Speak to me," she coaxed. "I have come back to you. Do you think we are in a dream?" She let herself kneel on the old floor of the old aisle, and, clasping both his hands, laid them against her cheek.
With his returning self, something of his habitual formality of manner would have returned had she remained in any common attitude, but to this coaxing, kneeling queen Ephraim (although his whole life had passed without caresses) could not behave with reticence.
One thing he did not do. He did not hint that it was unseemly that she should kneel at his feet. Chivalry was the very substance of the soul of this son of New England, and no outward seeming could disturb his serene reverence for the woman he loved. He stooped over her, now stroking her hair, how holding her hands close against his heart, now whispering words that in their audible passion were new and strange to his unaccustomed lips.
"I am all alone, Ephraim. I have no money, no clothes. I have walked most of the way from Rochester to-day."
"Are you very tired?"—as if the fact that she had been walking that day was all that needed his immediate attention.
"I was forced to come suddenly. I only escaped with my life. But I have long been wearying to come to you, for since my husband and the child died I have been quite alone."
"We heard that they were dead, but that was long ago." There was no tone of reproach in his voice, only curiosity. "You never wrote, and I—I supposed that if you were alive you—you preferred to remain, Susy."
She did not enter into explanation then. After a while, when he had raised her to her feet and embraced her again, she whispered, "Why are you in the meeting-house, Ephraim?"