"I should be very much obliged to you," she said humbly.
She did not see, for she did not look to see, a tiny show of a smile which spread itself over her companion's face. They drove on fast, till the bottom of the bay was left and they descended from the tableland, by Sam Doolittle's, to the road which skirted the south side of Shahweetah. Winthrop looked keenly as he passed at the old fields and hillsides. They were uncultivated now; fallow lands and unmown grass pastures held the place of the waving harvests of grain and new-reaped stubblefields that used to be there in the old time. The pastures grew rank, for there were even no cattle to feed them; and the fallows were grown with thistles and weeds. But over what might have been desolate lay the soft warmth of the summer morning; and rank pasture and uncared fallow ground took varied rich and bright hues under the early sun's rays. Those rays had now waked the hilltops and sky and river, and were just tipping the woods and slopes of the lower ground. By the bend meadow Winthrop drew in his horse again and looked fixedly.
"Does it seem pleasant to you?" he asked.
"How should it, Mr. Winthrop?" Elizabeth said coldly.
"Do you change your mind about wishing to be here?"
"No, not at all. I might as well be here as anywhere. I would rather — I have nowhere else to go."
He made no comment, but drove on fast again, till he drew up once more at the old back door of the old house. It seemed a part of the solitude, for nothing was stirring. Elizabeth sat and watched Winthrop tie the horse; then he came and helped her out of the wagon.
"Lean on me," said he. "You are trembling all over."
He put her arm within his, and led her up to the door and knocked.
"Karen is up — unless she has forgotten her old ways," said
Winthrop. He knocked again.