TIVERTON TALES

BY

ALICE BROWN

BOSTON AND NEW YORK
HOUGHTON, MIFFLIN AND COMPANY

The Riverside Press, Cambridge

1899

COPYRIGHT, 1899, BY ALICE BROWN
ALL RIGHTS RESERVED

TO M. H. R.
A MASTER MAGICIAN

CONTENTS

TIVERTON TALES

DOORYARDS

Tiverton has breezy, upland roads, and damp, sweet valleys; but should you tarry there a summer long, you might find it wasteful to take many excursions abroad. For, having once received the freedom of family living, you will own yourself disinclined to get beyond dooryards, those outer courts of domesticity. Homely joys spill over into them, and, when children are afoot, surge and riot there. In them do the common occupations of life find niche and channel. While bright weather holds, we wash out of doors on a Monday morning, the wash-bench in the solid block of shadow thrown by the house. We churn there, also, at the hour when Sweet-Breath, the cow, goes afield, modestly unconscious of her own sovereignty over the time. There are all the varying fortunes of butter-making recorded. Sometimes it comes merrily to the tune of

chanted in time with the dasher; again it doth willfully refuse, and then, lest it be too cool, we contribute a dash of hot water, or too hot, and we lend it a dash of cold. Or we toss in a magical handful of salt, to encourage it. Possibly, if we be not the thriftiest of householders, we feed the hens here in the yard, and then "shoo" them away, when they would fain take profligate dust-baths under the syringa, leaving unsightly hollows. But however, and with what complexion, our dooryards may face the later year, they begin it with purification. Here are they an unfailing index of the severer virtues; for, in Tiverton, there is no housewife who, in her spring cleaning, omits to set in order this outer pale of the temple. Long before the merry months are well under way, or the cows go kicking up their heels to pasture, or plants are taken from the south window and clapped into chilly ground, orderly passions begin to riot within us, and we "clear up" our yards. We gather stray chips, and pieces of bone brought in by the scavenger dog, who sits now with his tail tucked under him, oblivious of such vagrom ways. We rake the grass, and then, gilding refined gold, we sweep it. There is a tradition that Miss Lois May once went to the length of trimming her grass about the doorstone and clothes-pole with embroidery scissors; but that was a too-hasty encomium bestowed by a widower whom she rejected next week, and who qualified his statement by saying they were pruning-shears.

After this preliminary skirmishing arises much anxious inspection of ancient shrubs and the faithful among old-fashioned plants, to see whether they have "stood the winter." The fresh, brown "piny" heads are brooded over with a motherly care; wormwood roots are loosened, and the horse-radish plant is given a thrifty touch. There is more than the delight of occupation in thus stirring the wheels of the year. We are Nature's poor handmaidens, and our labor gives us joy.

But sweet as these homespun spots can make themselves, in their mixture of thrift and prodigality, they are dearer than ever at the points where they register family traits, and so touch the humanity of us all. Here is imprinted the story of the man who owns the farm, that of the father who inherited it, and the grandfather who reclaimed it from waste; here have they and their womenkind set the foot of daily living and traced indelible paths. They have left here the marks of tragedy, of pathos, or of joy. One yard has a level bit of grassless ground between barn and pump, and you may call it a battlefield, if you will, since famine and desire have striven there together. Or, if you choose to read fine meanings into threadbare things, you may see in it a field of the cloth of gold, where simple love of life and childlike pleasure met and sparkled for no eye to see. It was a croquet ground, laid out in the days when croquet first inundated the land, and laid out by a woman. This was Della Smith, the mother of two grave children, and the wife of a farmer who never learned to smile. Eben was duller than the ox which ploughs all day long for his handful of hay at night and his heavy slumber; but Della, though she carried her end of the yoke with a gallant spirit, had dreams and desires forever bursting from brown shells, only to live a moment in the air, and then, like bubbles, die. She had a perpetual appetite for joy. When the circus came to town, she walked miles to see the procession; and, in a dream of satisfied delight, dropped potatoes all the afternoon, to make up. Once, a hand-organ and monkey strayed that way, and it was she alone who followed them; for the children were little, and all the saner house-mothers contented themselves with leaning over the gates till the wandering train had passed. But Della drained her draught of joy to the dregs, and then tilted her cup anew. With croquet came her supremest joy,—one that leavened her days till God took her, somewhere, we hope, where there is playtime. Della had no money to buy a croquet set, but she had something far better, an alert and undiscouraged mind. On one dizzy afternoon, at a Fourth of July picnic, when wickets had been set up near the wood, she had played with the minister, and beaten him. The game opened before her an endless vista of delight. She saw herself perpetually knocking red-striped balls through an eternity of wickets; and she knew that here was the one pastime of which no soul could tire. Afterwards, driving home with her husband and two children, still in a daze of satisfied delight, she murmured absently:—

"Wonder how much they cost?"

"What?" asked Eben, and Della turned, flushed scarlet, and replied:—

"Oh, nothin'!"

That night, she lay awake for one rapt hour, and then she slept the sleep of conquerors. In the morning, after Eben had gone safely off to work, and the children were still asleep, she began singing, in a monotonous, high voice, and took her way out of doors. She always sang at moments when she purposed leaping the bounds of domestic custom. Even Eben had learned that, dull as he was. If he heard that guilty crooning from the buttery, he knew she might be breaking extra eggs, or using more sugar than was conformable.

"What you doin' of?" he was accustomed to call. But Della never answered, and he did not interfere. The question was a necessary concession to marital authority; he had no wish to curb her ways.

Della scudded about the yard like a willful wind. She gathered withes from a waiting pile, and set them in that one level space for wickets. Then she took a handsaw, and, pale about the lips, returned to the house and to her bedroom. She had made her choice. She was sacrificing old associations to her present need; and, one after another, she sawed the ornamenting balls from her mother's high-post bedstead. Perhaps the one element of tragedy lay in the fact that Della was no mechanician, and she had not foreseen that, having one flat side, her balls might decline to roll. But that dismay was brief. A weaker soul would have flinched; to Della it was a futile check, a pebble under the wave. She laid her balls calmly aside. Some day she would whittle them into shape; for there were always coming to Della days full of roomy leisure and large content. Meanwhile apples would serve her turn,—good alike to draw a weary mind out of its channel or teach the shape of spheres. And so, with two russets for balls and the clothes-slice for a mallet (the heavy sledge-hammer having failed), Delia serenely, yet in triumph, played her first game against herself.

"Don't you drive over them wickets!" she called imperiously, when Eben came up from the lot in his dingle cart.

"Them what?" returned he, and Della had to go out to explain. He looked at them gravely; hers had been a ragged piece of work.

"What under the sun 'd you do that for?" he inquired. "The young ones wouldn't turn their hand over for 't. They ain't big enough."

"Well, I be," said Della briefly. "Don't you drive over 'em."

Eben looked at her and then at his path to the barn, and he turned his horse aside.

Thereafter, until we got used to it, we found a vivid source of interest in seeing Della playing croquet, and always playing alone. That was a very busy summer, because the famous drought came then, and water had to be carried for weary rods from spring and river. Sometimes Della did not get her playtime till three in the afternoon, sometimes not till after dark; but she was faithful to her joy. The croquet ground suffered varying fortunes. It might happen that the balls were potatoes, when apples failed to be in season; often her wickets broke, and stood up in two ragged horns. Sometimes one fell away altogether, and Delia, like the planets, kept an unseen track. Once or twice, the mistaken benevolence of others gave her real distress. The minister's daughter, noting her solitary game, mistook it for forlornness, and, in the warmth of her maiden heart, came to ask if she might share. It was a timid though official benevolence; but Della's bright eyes grew dark. She clung to her kitchen chair.

"I guess I won't," she said, and, in some dim way, everybody began to understand that this was but an intimate and solitary joy. She had grown so used to spreading her banquets for one alone that she was frightened at the sight of other cups upon the board; for although loneliness begins in pain, by and by, perhaps, it creates its own species of sad and shy content.

Della did not have a long life; and that was some relief to us who were not altogether satisfied with her outlook here. The place she left need not be always desolate. There was a good maiden sister to keep the house, and Eben and the children would be but briefly sorry. They could recover their poise; he with the health of a simple mind, and they as children will. Yet he was truly stunned by the blow; and I hoped, on the day of the funeral, that he did not see what I did. When we went out to get our horse and wagon, I caught my foot in something which at once gave way. I looked down—at a broken wicket and a withered apple by the stake.

Quite at the other end of the town is a dooryard which, in my own mind, at least, I call the traveling garden. Miss Nancy, its presiding mistress, is the victim of a love of change; and since she may not wander herself, she transplants shrubs and herbs from nook to nook. No sooner does a green thing get safely rooted than Miss Nancy snatches it up and sets it elsewhere. Her yard is a varying pageant of plants in all stages of misfortune. Here is a shrub, with faded leaves, torn from the lap of prosperity in a well-sunned corner to languish under different conditions. There stands a hardy bush, shrinking, one might guess, under all its bravery of new spring green, from the premonition that Miss Nancy may move it to-morrow. Even the ladies'-delights have their months of garish prosperity, wherein they sicken like country maids; for no sooner do they get their little feet settled in a dark, still corner than they are summoned out of it, to sunlight bright and strong. Miss Nancy lives with a bedridden father, who has grown peevish through long patience; can it be that slow, senile decay which has roused in her a fierce impatience against the sluggishness of life, and that she hurries her plants into motion because she herself must halt? Her father does not theorize about it. He says, "Nancy never has no luck with plants." And that, indeed, is true.

There is another dooryard with its infallible index finger pointing to tell a tale. You can scarcely thread your way through it for vehicles of all sorts congregated there to undergo slow decomposition at the hands of wind and weather. This farmer is a tradesman by nature, and though, for thrift's sake, his fields must be tilled, he is yet inwardly constrained to keep on buying and selling, albeit to no purpose. He is everlastingly swapping and bargaining, giving play to a faculty which might, in its legitimate place, have worked out the definite and tangible, but which now goes automatically clicking on under vain conditions. The house, too, is overrun with useless articles, presently to be exchanged for others as unavailing, and in the farmer's pocket ticks a watch which to-morrow will replace with another more problematic still. But in the yard are the undisputable evidences of his wild unthrift. Old rusty mowing-machines, buggies with torn and flapping canvas, sleighs ready to yawn at every crack, all are here: poor relations in a broken-down family. But children love this yard. They come, hand in hand, with a timid confidence in their right, and ask at the back door for the privilege of playing in it. They take long, entrancing journeys in the mouldy old chaise; they endure Siberian nights of sleighing, and throw out their helpless dolls to the pursuing wolves; or the more mercantile-minded among the boys mount a three-wheeled express wagon, and drive noisily away to traffic upon the road. This, in its dramatic possibilities, is not a yard to be despised.

Not far away are two neighboring houses once held in affectionate communion by a straight path through the clover and a gap in the wall. This was the road to much friendly gossip, and there were few bright days which did not find two matrons met at the wall, their heads together over some amiable yarn. But now one house is closed, its windows boarded up, like eyes shut down forever, and the grass has grown over the little path: a line erased, perhaps never to be renewed. It is easier to wipe out a story from nature than to wipe it from the heart; and these mutilated pages of the outer life perpetually renew in us the pangs of loss and grief.

But not all our dooryard reminiscences are instinct with pain. Do I not remember one swept and garnished plot, never defiled by weed or disordered with ornamental plants, where stood old Deacon Pitts, upon an historic day, and woke the echoes with a herald's joy? Deacon Pitts had the ghoulish delight of the ennuied country mind in funerals and the mortality of man; and this morning the butcher had brought him news of death in a neighboring town. The butcher had gone by, and I was going; but Deacon Pitts stood there, dramatically intent upon his mournful morsel. I judged that he was pondering on the possibility of attending the funeral without the waste of too much precious time now due the crops. Suddenly, as he turned back toward the house, bearing a pan of liver, his pondering eye caught sight of his aged wife toiling across the fields, laden with pennyroyal. He set the pan down hastily—yea, even before the advancing cat!—and made a trumpet of his hands.

"Sarah!" he called piercingly. "Sarah! Mr. Amasa Blake's passed away! Died yesterday!"

I do not know whether he was present at that funeral, but it would be strange if he were not; for time and tide both served him, and he was always on the spot. Indeed, one day he reached a house of mourning in such season that he found the rooms quite empty, and was forced to wait until the bereaved family should assemble. There they sat, he and his wife, a portentous couple in their dead black and anticipatory gloom, until even their patience had well-nigh fled. And then an arriving mourner overheard the deacon, as he bent forward and challenged his wife in a suspicious and discouraged whisper:—

"Say, Sarah, ye don't s'pose it's all goin' to fush out, do ye?"

They had their funeral.

To the childish memory, so many of the yards are redolent now of wonder and a strange, sweet fragrance of the fancy not to be described! One, where lived a notable cook, had, in a quiet corner, a little grove of caraway. It seemed mysteriously connected with the oak-leaf cookies, which only she could make; and the child, brushing through the delicate bushes grown above his head, used to feel vaguely that, on some fortunate day, cookies would be found there, "a-blowin' and a-growin'." That he had seen them stirred and mixed and taken from the oven was an empty matter; the cookies belonged to the caraway grove, and there they hang ungathered still. In the very same yard was a hogshead filled with rainwater, where insects came daily to their death and floated pathetically in a film of gauzy wings. The child feared this innocent black pool, feared it too much to let it alone; and day by day he would hang upon the rim with trembling fingers, and search the black, smooth depths, with all Ophelia's pangs. And to this moment, no rushing river is half so ministrant to dread as is a still, dull hogshead, where insects float and fly.

These are our dooryards. I wish we lived in them more; that there were vines to sing under, and shade enough for the table, with its wheaten loaf and good farm butter, and its smoking tea. But all that may come when we give up our frantic haste, and sit down to look, and breathe, and listen.

A MARCH WIND

When the clouds hung low, or chimneys refused to draw, or the bread soured over night, a pessimistic public, turning for relief to the local drama, said that Amelia Titcomb had married a tramp. But as soon as the heavens smiled again, it was conceded that she must have been getting lonely in her middle age, and that she had taken the way of wisdom so to furbish up mansions for the coming years. Whatever was set down on either side of the page, Amelia did not care. She was whole-heartedly content with her husband and their farm.

It had happened, one autumn day, that she was trying, all alone, to clean out the cistern. This was while she was still Amelia Titcomb, innocent that there lived a man in the world who could set his foot upon her maiden state, and flourish there. She was an impatient creature. She never could delay for a fostering time to put her plants into the ground, and her fall cleaning was done long before the flies were gone. So, to-day, while other house mistresses sat cosily by the fire, awaiting a milder season, she was toiling up and down the ladder set in the cistern, dipping pails of sediment from the bottom, and, hardy as she was, almost repenting her of a too-fierce desire. Her thick brown hair was roughened and blown about her face, her cheeks bloomed out in a frosty pink, and the plaid kerchief, tied in a hard knot under her chin, seemed foolishly ineffectual against the cold. Her hands ached, holding the pail, and she rebelled inwardly against the inclemency of the time. It never occurred to her that she could have put off this exacting job. She would sooner have expected Heaven to put off the weather. Just as she reached the top of the cistern, and lifted her pail of refuse over the edge, a man appeared from the other side of the house, and stood confronting her. He was tall and gaunt, and his deeply graven face was framed by grizzled hair. Amelia had a rapid thought that he was not so old as he looked; experience, rather than years, must have wrought its trace upon him. He was leading a little girl, dressed with a very patent regard for warmth, and none for beauty. Amelia, with a quick, feminine glance, noted that the child's bungled skirt and hideous waist had been made from an old army overcoat. The little maid's brown eyes were sweet and seeking; they seemed to petition for something. Amelia's heart did not respond at that time, she had no reason for thinking she was fond of children. Yet she felt a curious disturbance at sight of the pair. She afterwards explained it adequately to the man, by asserting that they looked as odd as Dick's hatband.

"Want any farmwork done?" asked he. "Enough to pay for a night's lodgin'?" His voice sounded strangely soft from one so large and rugged. It hinted at unused possibilities. But though Amelia felt impressed, she was conscious of little more than her own cold and stiffness, and she answered sharply,—

"No, I don't. I don't calculate to hire, except in hayin' time, an' then I don't take tramps."

The man dropped the child's hand, and pushed her gently to one side.

"Stan' there, Rosie," said he. Then he went forward, and drew the pail from Amelia's unwilling grasp. "Where do you empt' it?" he asked. "There? It ought to be carried further. You don't want to let it gully down into that beet bed. Here, I'll see to it."

Perhaps this was the very first time in Amelia's life that a man had offered her an unpaid service for chivalry alone. And somehow, though she might have scoffed, knowing what the tramp had to gain, she believed in him and in his kindliness. The little girl stood by, as if she were long used to doing as she had been told, with no expectation of difficult reasons; and the man, as soberly, went about his task. He emptied the cistern, and cleansed it, with plentiful washings. Then, as if guessing by instinct what he should find, he went into the kitchen, where were two tubs full of the water which Amelia had pumped up at the start. It had to be carried back again to the cistern; and when the job was quite finished, he opened the bulkhead, set the tubs in the cellar, and then, covering the cistern and cellar-case, rubbed his cold hands on his trousers, and turned to the child.

"Come, Rosie," said he, "we'll be goin'."

It was a very effective finale, but still Amelia suspected no trickery. The situation seemed to her, just as the two new actors did, entirely simple, like the course of nature. Only, the day was a little warmer because they had appeared. She had a new sensation of welcome company. So it was that, quite to her own surprise, she answered as quickly as he spoke, and her reply also seemed an inevitable part of the drama:—

"Walk right in. It's 'most dinner-time, an' I'll put on the pot." The two stepped in before her, and they did not go away.

Amelia herself never quite knew how it happened; but, like all the other natural things of life, this had no need to be explained. At first, there were excellent reasons for delay. The man, whose name proved to be Enoch Willis, was a marvelous hand at a blow, and she kept him a week, splitting some pine knots that defied her and the boy who ordinarily chopped her wood. At the end of the week, Amelia confessed that she was "terrible tired seein' Rosie round in that gormin' kind of a dress;" so she cut and fitted her a neat little gown from her own red cashmere. That was the second reason. Then the neighbors heard of the mysterious guest, and dropped in, to place and label him. At first, following the lead of undiscouraged fancy, they declared that he must be some of cousin Silas's connections from Omaha; but even before Amelia had time to deny that, his ignorance of local tradition denied it for him. He must have heard of this or that, by way of cousin Silas; but he owned to nothing defining place or time, save that he had been in the war—"all through it." He seemed to be a man quite weary of the past and indifferent to the future. After a half hour's talk with him, unseasonable callers were likely to withdraw, perhaps into the pantry, whither Amelia had retreated to escape catechism, and remark jovially, "Well, 'Melia, you ain't told us who your company is!"

"Mr. Willis," said Amelia. She was emulating his habit of reserve. It made a part of her new loyalty.

Even to her, Enoch had told no tales; and strangely enough, she was quite satisfied. She trusted him. He did say that Rosie's mother was dead; for the last five years, he said, she had been out of her mind. At that, Amelia's heart gave a fierce, amazing leap. It struck a note she never knew, and wakened her to life and longing. She was glad Rosie's mother had not made him too content. He went on a step or two into the story of his life. His wife's last illness had eaten up the little place, and after she went, he got no work. So, he tramped. He must go again. Amelia's voice sounded sharp and thin, even to her, as she answered,—

"Go! I dunno what you want to do that for. Rosie's terrible contented here."

His brown eyes turned upon her in a kindly glance.

"I've got to make a start somewhere," said he. "I've been thinkin' a machine shop's the best thing. I shall have to depend on somethin' better'n days' works."

Amelia flushed the painful red of emotion without beauty.

"I dunno what we're all comin' to," said she brokenly.

Then the tramp knew. He put his gnarled hand over one of hers. Rosie looked up curiously from the speckled beans she was counting into a bag, and then went on singing to herself an unformed, baby song. "Folks'll talk," said Enoch gently. "They do now. A man an' woman ain't never too old to be hauled up, an' made to answer for livin'. If I was younger, an' had suthin' to depend on, you'd see; but I'm no good now. The better part o' my life's gone."

Amelia flashed at him a pathetic look, half agony over her own lost pride, and all a longing of maternal love.

"I don't want you should be younger," said she. And next week they were married.

Comment ran races with itself, and brought up nowhere. The treasuries of local speech were all too poor to clothe so wild a venture. It was agreed that there's no fool like an old fool, and that folks who ride to market may come home afoot. Everybody forgot that Amelia had had no previous romance, and dismally pictured her as going through the woods, and getting a crooked stick at last. Even the milder among her judges were not content with prophesying the betrayal of her trust alone. They argued from the tramp nature to inevitable results, and declared it would be a mercy if she were not murdered in her bed. According to the popular mind, a tramp is a distinct species, with latent tendencies toward crime. It was recalled that a white woman had, in the old days, married a comely Indian, whose first drink of fire-water, after six months of blameless happiness, had sent him raging home, to kill her "in her tracks." Could a tramp, pledged to the traditions of an awful brotherhood, do less? No, even in honor, no! Amelia never knew how the tide of public apprehension surged about her, nor how her next-door neighbor looked anxiously out, the first thing on rising, to exclaim, with a sigh of relief, and possibly a dramatic pang, "There! her smoke's a-goin'."

Meantime, the tramp fell into all the usages of life indoors; and without, he worked revolution. He took his natural place at the head of affairs, and Amelia stood by, rejoicing. Her besetting error of doing things at the wrong moment had disarranged great combinations as well as small. Her impetuosity was constantly misleading her, bidding her try, this one time, whether harvest might not follow faster on the steps of spring. Enoch's mind was of another cast. For him, tradition reigned, and law was ever laying out the way. Some months after their marriage, Amelia had urged him to take away the winter banking about the house, for no reason save that the Mardens clung to theirs; but he only replied that he'd known of cold snaps way on into May, and he guessed there was no particular hurry. The very next day brought a bitter air, laden with sleet, and Amelia, shivering at the open door, exulted in her feminine soul at finding him triumphant on his own ground. Enoch seemed, as usual, unconscious of victory. His immobility had no personal flavor. He merely acted from an inevitable devotion to the laws of life; and however often they might prove him right, he never seemed to reason that Amelia was consequently wrong. Perhaps that was what made it so pleasant to live with him.

It was "easy sleddin'" now. Amelia grew very young. Her cheeks gained a bloom, her eyes brightened. She even, as the matrons noticed, took to crimping her hair. They looked on with a pitying awe. It seemed a fearsome thing, to do so much for a tramp who would only kill you in the end. Amelia stepped deftly about the house. She was a large woman, whose ways had been devoid of grace; but now the richness of her spiritual condition informed her with a charm. She crooned a little about her work. Singing voice she had none, but she grew into a way of putting words together, sometimes a line from the psalms, sometimes a name she loved, and chanting the sounds, in unrecorded melody. Meanwhile, little Rosie, always irreproachably dressed, with a jealous care lest she fall below the popular standard, roamed in and out of the house, and lightened its dull intervals. She, like the others, grew at once very happy, because, like them, she accepted her place without a qualm, as if it had been hers from the beginning. They were simple natures, and when their joy came, they knew how to meet it.

But if Enoch was content to follow the beaten ways of life, there was one window through which he looked into the upper heaven of all: thereby he saw what it is to create. He was a born mechanician. A revolving wheel would set him to dreaming, and still him to that lethargy of mind which is an involuntary sharing in the things that are. He could lose himself in the life of rhythmic motion; and when he discovered rusted springs, or cogs unprepared to fulfill their purpose, he fell upon them with the ardor of a worshiper, and tried to set them right. Amelia thought he should have invented something, and he confessed that he had invented many things, but somehow failed in getting them on the market. That process he mentioned with the indifference of a man to whom a practical outcome is vague, and who finds in the ideal a bright reality. Even Amelia could see that to be a maker was his joy; to reap rewards of making was another and a lower task.

One cold day in the early spring, he went "up garret" to hunt out an old saddle, gathering mildew there, and came upon a greater treasure, a disabled clock. He stepped heavily down, bearing it aloft in both hands.

"See here, 'Melia," asked he, "why don't this go?"

Amelia was scouring tins on the kitchen table. There was a teasing wind outside, with a flurry of snow, and she had acknowledged that the irritating weather made her as nervous as a witch. So she had taken to a job to quiet herself.

"That clock?" she replied. "That was gran'ther Eli's. It give up strikin', an' then the hands stuck, an' I lost all patience with it. So I bought this nickel one, an' carted t' other off into the attic. 'T ain't worth fixin'."

"Worth it!" repeated Enoch. "Well, I guess I'll give it a chance."

He drew a chair to the stove, and there hesitated. "Say, 'Melia," said he, "should you jest as soon I'd bring in that old shoemaker's bench out o' the shed? It's low, an' I could reach my tools off'n the floor."

Amelia lacked the discipline of contact with her kind, but she was nevertheless smooth as silk in her new wifehood.

"Law, yes, bring it along," said she. "It's a good day to clutter up. The' won't be nobody in."

So, while Enoch laid apart the clock with a delicacy of touch known only to square, mechanical fingers, and Rosie played with the button-box on the floor, assorting colors and matching white with white, Amelia scoured the tins. Her energy kept pace with the wind; it whirled in gusts and snatches, yet her precision never failed.

"Made up your mind which cow to sell?" she asked, opening a discussion still unsettled, after days of animated talk.

"Ain't much to choose," said Enoch. He had frankly set Amelia right on the subject of livestock; and she smilingly acquiesced in his larger knowledge. "Elbridge True's got a mighty nice Alderney, an' if he's goin' to sell milk another year, he'll be glad to get two good milkers like these. What he wants is ten quarts apiece, no matter if it's bluer'n a whetstone. I guess I can swap off with him; but I don't want to run arter him. I put the case last Thursday. Mebbe he'll drop round."

"Well," concluded Amelia, "I guess you're pretty sure to do what's right."

The forenoon galloped fast, and it was half past eleven before she thought of dinner.

"Why," said she, "ain't it butcher day? I've been lottin' on a piece o' liver."

"Butcher day is Thursday," said Enoch. "You've lost count."

"My land!" responded Amelia. "Well, I guess we can put up with some fried pork an' apples." There came a long, insistent knock at the outer door. "Good heavens! Who's there! Rosie, you run to the side-light, an' peek. It can't be a neighbor. They'd come right in. I hope my soul it ain't company, a day like this."

Rosie got on her fat legs with difficulty. She held her pinafore full of buttons, but disaster lies in doing too many things at once; there came a slip, a despairing clutch, and the buttons fell over the floor. There were a great many round ones, and they rolled very fast. Amelia washed the sand from her parboiled fingers, and drew a nervous breath. She had a presentiment of coming ill, painfully heightened by her consciousness that the kitchen was "riding out," and that she and her family rode with it. Rosie came running back from her peephole, husky with importance. The errant buttons did not trouble her. She had an eternity of time wherein to pick them up; and, indeed, the chances were that some tall, benevolent being would do it for her.

"It's a man," she said. "He's got on a light coat with bright buttons, and a fuzzy hat. He's got a big nose."

Now, indeed, despair entered into Amelia, and sat enthroned. She sank down on a straight-backed chair, and put her hands on her knees, while the knock came again, a little querulously.

"Enoch," said she, "do you know what's happened? That's cousin Josiah Pease out there." Her voice bore the tragedy of a thousand past encounters; but that Enoch could not know.

"Is it?" asked he, with but a mild appearance of interest. "Want me to go to the door?"

"Go to the door!" echoed Amelia, so stridently that he looked up at her again. "No; I don't want anybody should go to the door till this room's cleared up. If 't w'an't so everlastin' cold, I'd take him right into the clock-room, an' blaze a fire; but he'd see right through that. You gether up them tools an' things, an' I'll help carry out the bench."

If Enoch had not just then been absorbed in a delicate combination of brass, he might have spoken more sympathetically. As it was, he seemed kindly, but remote.

"Look out!" said he, "you'll joggle. No, I guess I won't move. If he's any kind of a man, he'll know what 't is to clean a clock."

Amelia was not a crying woman, but the hot tears stood in her eyes. She was experiencing, for the first time, that helpless pang born from the wounding of pride in what we love.

"Don't you see, Enoch?" she insisted. "This room looks like the Old Boy—an' so do you—an' he'll go home an' tell all the folks at the Ridge. Why, he's heard we're married, an' come over here to spy out the land. He hates the cold. He never stirs till 'way on into June; an' now he's come to find out."

"Find out what?" inquired Enoch absorbedly. "Well, if you're anyways put to 't, you send him to me." That manly utterance enunciated from a "best-room" sofa, by an Enoch clad in his Sunday suit, would have filled Amelia with rapture; she could have leaned on it as on the Tables of the Law. But, alas! the scene-setting was meagre, and though Enoch was very clean, he had no good clothes. He had pointedly refused to buy them with his wife's money until he should have worked on the farm to a corresponding amount. She had loved him for it; but every day his outer poverty hurt her pride. "I guess you better ask him in," concluded Enoch. "Don't you let him bother you."

Amelia turned about with the grand air of a woman repulsed.

"He don't bother me," said she, "an' I will let him in." She walked to the door, stepping on buttons as she went, and conscious, when she broke them, of a bitter pleasure. It added to her martyrdom.

She flung open the door, and called herself a fool in the doing; for the little old man outside was in the act of turning away. In another instant, she might have escaped. But he was only too eager to come back again, and it seemed to Amelia as if he would run over her, in his desire to get in.

"There! there! 'Melia," said he, pushing past her, "can't stop to talk till I git near the fire. Guess you were settin' in the kitchen, wa'n't ye? Don't make no stranger o' me. That your man?"

She had shut the door, and entered, exasperated anew by the rising wind. "That's my husband," said she coldly. "Enoch, here's cousin Josiah Pease."

Enoch looked up benevolently over his spectacles, and put out a horny left hand, the while the other guarded his heap of treasures. "Pleased to meet you, sir," said he. "You see I'm tinkerin' a clock."

To Enoch, the explanation was enough. All the simple conventions of his life might well wait upon a reason potent as this. Josiah Pease went to the stove, and stood holding his tremulous hands over a cover. He was a little man, eclipsed in a butternut coat of many capes, and his parchment face shaded gradually up from it, as if into a harder medium. His eyes were light, and they had an exceedingly uncomfortable way of darting from one thing to another, like some insect born to spear and sting. His head was entirely bald, all save a thin fringe of hair not worth mentioning, since it disappeared so effectually beneath his collar; and his general antiquity was grotesquely emphasized by two sets of aggressive teeth, displaying their falsity from every crown.

Amelia took out the broom, and began sweeping up buttons. She had an acrid consciousness that by sacrificing them she was somehow completing the tragedy of her day. Rosie gave a little cry; but Amelia pointed to the corner where stood the child's chair, exhumed from the attic, after forty years of rest. "You set there," she said, in an undertone, "an' keep still."

Rosie obeyed without a word. Such an atmosphere had not enveloped her since she entered this wonderful house. Remembering vaguely the days when her own mother had "spells," and she and her father effaced themselves until times should change, she folded her little hands, and lapsed back into a condition of mental servitude.

Meanwhile, Amelia followed nervously in the track of Enoch's talk with cousin Josiah, though her mind kept its undercurrent of foolish musing. Like all of us, snatched up by the wheels of great emergencies, she caught at trifles while they whirled her round. Here were "soldier-buttons." All the other girls had collected them, though she, having no lover in the war, had traded for her few. Here were the gold-stones that held her changeable silk, there the little clouded pearls from her sister's raglan. Annie had died in youth; its glamour still enwrapped her. Poor Annie! But Rosie had seemed to bring her back. Amelia swept litter, buttons and all, into the dustpan, and marched to the stove to throw her booty in. Nobody marked her save Rosie, whose playthings were endangered; but Enoch's very obtuseness to the situation was what stayed her hand. She carried the dustpan away into a closet, and came back, to gather up her tins. A cold rage of nervousness beset her, so overpowering that she herself was amazed at it.

Meantime, Josiah Pease had divested himself of his coat, and drawn the grandfather chair into a space behind the stove.

"You a clock-mender by trade?" he asked of Enoch.

"No," said Enoch absently, "I ain't got any reg'lar trade."

"Jest goin' round the country?" amended cousin Josiah, with the preliminary insinuation Amelia knew so well. He was, it had been said, in the habit of inventing lies, and challenging other folks to stick to 'em. But Enoch made no reply. He went soberly on with his work.

"Law, 'Melia, to think o' your bein' married," continued Josiah, turning to her. "I never should ha' thought that o' you."

"I never thought it of myself," said Amelia tartly. "You don't know what you'll do till you're tried."

"No! no!" said Josiah Pease. "Never in the world. You remember Sally Flint, how plain-spoken she is? Well, Betsy Marden's darter Ann rode down to the poor-house t' other day with some sweet trade, an' took a young sprig with her. He turned his back a minute, to look out o' winder, an' Sally spoke right up, as ye might say, afore him. 'That your beau?' says she. Well, o' course Ann couldn't own it, an' him right there, so to speak. So she shook her head. 'Well, I'm glad on 't,' says Sally. 'If I couldn't have anything to eat, I'd have suthin' to look at!' He was the most unsignifyin'est creatur' you ever put your eyes on. But they say Ann's started in on her clo'es."

Amelia's face had grown scarlet. "I dunno's any such speech is called for here," said she, in a furious self-betrayal. Josiah Pease had always been able to storm her reserves.

"Law, no," answered he comfortably. "It come into my mind,—that's all."

She looked at Enoch with a passionate sympathy, knowing too well how the hidden sting was intended to work. But Enoch had not heard. He was absorbed in a finer problem of brass and iron; and though Amelia had wished to save him from hurt, in that instant she scorned him for his blindness. "I guess I shall have to ask you to move," she said to her husband coldly. "I've got to git to that stove, if we're goin' to have any dinner to-day."

It seemed to her that even Enoch might take the hint, and clear away his rubbish. Her feelings might have been assuaged by a clean hearth and some acquiescence in her own mood. But he only moved back a little, and went on fitting and musing. He was not thinking of her in the least, nor even of Josiah Pease. His mind had entered its brighter, more alluring world. She began to fry her pork and apples, with a perfunctory attempt at conversation. "You don't often git round so early in the spring," said she.

"No," returned cousin Josiah. "I kind o' got started out, this time, I don't rightly know why. I guess I've had you in mind more of late, for some Tiverton folks come over our way, tradin', an' they brought all the news. It sort o' stirred me up to come."

Amelia turned her apples vigorously, well aware that the slices were breaking. That made a part of her bitter day.

"Folks needn't take the trouble to carry news about me," she said. There was an angry gleam in her eyes. "If anybody wants to know anything, let 'em come right here, an' I'll settle 'em." The ring of her voice penetrated even to Enoch's perception, and he looked up in mild surprise. She seemed to have thrown open, for an instant, a little window into a part of her nature he had never seen.

"How good them apples smell!" said Josiah innocently. "Last time I had 'em was down to cousin Amasa True's, he that married his third wife, an' she run through all he had. I went down to see 'em arter the vandoo,—you know they got red o' most everything,—an' they had fried pork an' apples for dinner. Old Bashaby dropped in. 'Law!' says she. 'Fried pork an' apples! Well, I call that livin' pretty nigh the wind!'" Josiah chuckled. He was very warm now, and the savory smell of the dish he decried was mounting to what served him for fancy. "'Melia, you ain't never had your teeth out, have ye?" he asked, as one who spoke from richer memories.

"I guess my teeth'll last me as long as I want 'em," said Amelia curtly.

"Well, I didn't know. They looked real white an' firm last time I see 'em, but you never can tell how they be underneath. I knew the folks would ask me when I got home. I thought I'd speak."

"Dinner's ready," said Amelia. She turned an alien look upon her husband. "You want to wash your hands?"

Enoch rose cheerfully. He had got to a hopeful place with the clock.

"Set ri' down," said he. "Don't wait a minute. I'll be along."

So Amelia and the guest began their meal, while little Rosie climbed, rather soberly, into her higher chair, and held out her plate.

"You wait," said Amelia harshly. "Can't you let other folks eat a mouthful before you have to have yours?" Yet as she said it, she remembered, with a remorseful pang, that she had always helped the child first; it had been so sweet to see her pleased and satisfied.

Josiah was never talkative during meals. Not being absolute master of his teeth, his mind dwelt with them. Amelia remembered that, with a malicious satisfaction. But he could not be altogether dumb. That, people said, would never happen to Josiah Pease while he was above ground.

"That his girl?" he asked, indicating Rosie with his knife, in a gustatory pause.

"Whose?" inquired Amelia willfully.

"His." He pointed again, this time to the back room, where Enoch was still washing his hands.

"Yes."

"Mother dead?"

Amelia sprang from her chair, while Rosie looked at her with the frightened glance of a child to whom some half-forgotten grief has suddenly returned.

"Josiah Pease!" said Amelia. "I never thought a poor, insignificant creatur' like you could rile me so,—when I know what you're doin' it for, too. But you've brought it about. Her mother dead? Ain't I been an' married her father?"

"Law, Amelia, do se' down!" said Josiah indulgently. There was a mince-pie warming on the back of the stove. He saw it there. "I didn't mean nuthin'. I'll be bound you thought she's dead, or you wouldn't ha' took such a step. I only meant, did ye see her death in the paper, for example, or anything like that?"

"'Melia," called Enoch, from the doorway, "I won't come in to dinner jest now. Elbridge True's drove into the yard. I guess he's got it in mind to talk it over about them cows. I don't want to lose the chance."

"All right," answered Amelia. She took her seat again, while Enoch's footsteps went briskly out through the shed. With the clanging of the door, she felt secure. If she had to deal with Josiah Pease, she could do it better alone, clutching at the certainty that was with her from of old, that, if you could only keep your temper with cousin Josiah, you had one chance of victory. Flame out at him, and you were lost. "Some more potatoes?" asked she, with a deceptive calm.

"Don't care if I do," returned Josiah, selecting greedily, his fork hovering in air. "Little mite watery, ain't they? Dig 'em yourself?"

"We dug 'em," said Amelia coldly.

Rosie stepped down from her chair, unnoticed. To Amelia, she was then no bigger than some little winged thing flitting about the room in time of tragedy. Our greatest emotions sometimes stay unnamed. At that moment, Amelia was swayed by as tumultuous a love as ever animated damsel of verse or story; but it merely seemed to her that she was an ill-used woman, married to a man for whom she was called on to be ashamed. Rosie tiptoed into the entry, put on her little shawl and hood, and stole out to play in the corn-house. When domestic squalls were gathering, she knew where to go. The great outdoors was safer. Her past had taught her that.

"Don't like to eat with folks, does he? Well, it's all in what you're brought up to."

Amelia was ready with her counter-charge. "Have some tea?"

She poured it as if it were poison, and Josiah became conscious of her tragic self-control.

"You ain't eat a thing," said he, with an ostentatious kindliness. He bent forward a little, with the air of inviting a confidence. "Got suthin' on your mind, ain't you, 'Melia?" he whispered. "Kind o' worried? Find he's a drinkin' man?"

Amelia was not to be beguiled, even by that anger which veils itself as justice. She looked at him steadily, with scorching eyes.

"You ain't took any sugar," said she. "There 't is, settin' by you. Help yourself."

Josiah addressed himself to his tea, and then Amelia poured him another cup. She had some fierce satisfaction in making it good and strong. It seemed to her that she was heartening her adversary for the fray, and she took pleasure in doing it effectually. So great was the spirit within her that she knew he could not be too valiant, for her keener joy in laying him low. Then they rose from the table, and Josiah took his old place by the stove, while Amelia began carrying the dishes to the sink. Her mind was a little hazy now; her next move must depend on his, and cousin Josiah, somewhat drowsy from his good dinner, was not at once inclined to talk. Suddenly he raised his head snakily from those sunken shoulders, and pointed a lean finger to the window.

"'Melia!" cried he sharply. "I'll be buttered if he ain't been and traded off both your cows. My Lord! be you goin' to stan' there an' let them two cows go?"

Amelia gave one swift glance from the window, following the path marked out by that insinuating index. It was true. Elbridge was driving her two cows out of the yard, and her husband stood by, watching him. She walked quietly into the entry, and Josiah laid his old hands together in the rapturous certainty that she was going to open the door, and send her anger forth. But Amelia only took down his butternut coat from the nail, and returned with it, holding it ready for him to insert his arms.

"Here's your coat," said she, with that strange, deceptive calmness. "Stan' up, an' I'll help you put it on."

Josiah looked at her with helplessly open mouth, and eyes so vacuous that Amelia felt, even at that moment, the grim humor of his plight.

"I was in hopes he'd harness up"—he began, but she ruthlessly cut him short.

"Stan' up! Here, put t' other arm in fust. This han'kercher yours? Goes round your neck? There 't is. Here's your hat. Got any mittens? There they be, in your pocket. This way. This is the door you come in, an' this is the door you'll go out of." She preceded him, her head thrown up, her shoulders back. Amelia had no idea of dramatic values, but she was playing an effective part. She reached the door and flung it open, but Josiah, a poor figure in its huddled capes, still stood abjectly in the middle of the kitchen. "Come!" she called peremptorily. "Come, Josiah Pease! Out you go." And Josiah went, though, contrary to his usual habit, he did not talk. He quavered uncertainly down the steps, and Amelia called a halt. "Josiah Pease!"

He turned, and looked up at her. His mouth had dropped, and he was nothing but a very helpless old child. Vicious as he was, Amelia realized the mental poverty of her adversary, and despised herself for despising him. "Josiah Pease!" she repeated. "This is the end. Don't you darken my doors ag'in. I've done with you,—egg an' bird!" She closed the door, shutting out Josiah and the keen spring wind, and went back to the window, to watch him down the drive. His back looked poor and mean. It emphasized the pettiness of her victory. Even at that moment, she realized that it was the poorer part of her which had resented attack on a citadel which should be impregnable as time itself. Just then Enoch stepped into the kitchen behind her, and his voice jarred upon her tingling nerves.

"Well," said he, more jovially than he was wont to speak, "I guess I've made a good trade for ye. Company gone? Come here an' se' down while I eat, an' I'll tell ye all about it."

Amelia turned about and walked slowly up to him, by no volition of her conscious self. Again love, that august creature, veiled itself in an unjust anger, because it was love and nothing else.

"You've made a good bargain, have you?" she repeated. "You've sold my cows, an' had 'em drove off the place without if or but. That's what you call a good bargain!" Her voice frightened her. It amazed the man who heard. These two middle-aged people were waking up to passions neither had felt in youth. Life was strong in them because love was there.

"Why, 'Melia!" said the man. "Why, 'Melia!"

Amelia was hurried on before the wind of her destiny. Her voice grew sharper. Little white stripes, like the lashes from a whip, showed themselves on her cheeks. She seemed to be speaking from a dream, which left her no will save that of speaking.

"It's been so ever sence you set foot in this house. Have I had my say once? Have I been mistress on my own farm? No! You took the head o' things, an' you've kep' it. What's mine is yours."

Her triumph over Josiah seemed to be strangely repeated; the scene was almost identical. The man before her stood with his hands hanging by his sides, the fingers limp, in an attitude of the profoundest patience. He was thinking things out. She knew that. Her hurrying mind anticipated all he might have said, and would not. And because he had too abiding a gentleness to say it, the insanity of her anger rose anew. "I'm the laughin'-stock o' the town," she went on bitterly. "There ain't a man or woman in it that don't say I've married a tramp."

Enoch winced, with a sharp, brief quiver of the lips; but before she could dwell upon the sight, to the resurrection of her tenderness, he turned away from her, and went over to the bench.

"I guess I'll move this back where't was," he said, in a very still voice, and Amelia stood watching him, conscious of a new and bitterer pang: a fierce contempt that he could go on with his poor, methodical way of living, when greater issues waited at the door. He moved the bench into its old place, gathered up the clock, with its dismantled machinery, and carried it into the attic. She heard his step on the stairs, regular and unhalting, and despised him again; but in all those moments, the meaning of his movements had not struck her. When he came back, he brought in the broom; and while he swept up the fragments of his work, Amelia stood and watched him. He carried the dustpan and broom away to their places, but he did not reenter the room. He spoke to her from the doorway, and she could not see his face.

"I guess you won't mind if I leave the clock as 't is. It needs some new cogs, an' if anybody should come along, he wouldn't find it any the worse for what I've done. I've jest thought it over about the cows, an' I guess I'll leave that, too, jest as it is. I made you a good bargain, an' when you come to think it over, I guess you'd ruther it'd stan' so than run the resk of havin' folks make a handle of it. Good-by, 'Melia. You've been good to me,—better'n anybody ever was in the world."

She heard his step, swift and steady, through the shed and out at the door. He was gone. Amelia turned to the window, to look after him, and then, finding he had not taken the driveway, she ran into the bedroom, to gaze across the fields. There he was, a lonely figure, striking vigorously out. He seemed glad to go; and seeing his haste, her heart hardened against him. She gave a little disdainful laugh.

"Well," said Amelia, "that's over. I'll wash my dishes now."

Coming back into the kitchen, with an assured step, she moved calmly about her work, as if the world were there to see. Her pride enveloped her like a garment. She handled the dishes as if she scorned them, yet her method and care were exquisite. Presently there came a little imperative pounding at the side door. It was Rosie. She had forgotten the cloudy atmosphere of the house, and being cold, had come, in all her old, imperious certainty of love and warmth, to be let in. Amelia stopped short in her work, and an ugly frown roughened her brow. Josiah Pease, with all his evil imaginings, seemed to be at her side, his lean forefinger pointing out the baseness of mankind. In that instant, she realized where Enoch had gone. He meant to take the three o'clock train where it halted, down at the Crossing, and he had left the child behind. Tearing off her apron, she threw it over her head. She ran to the door, and, opening it, almost knocked the child down, in her haste to be out and away. Rosie had lifted her frosty face in a smile of welcome, but Amelia did not see it. She gathered the child in her arms, and hurried down the steps, through the bars, and along the narrow path toward the pine woods. The sharp brown stubble of the field merged into the thin grasses of the greener lowland, and she heard the trickling of the little dark brook, where gentians lived in the fall, and where, still earlier, the cardinal flower and forget-me-not crowded in lavish color. She knew every inch of the way; her feet had an intelligence of their own. The farm was a part of her inherited life; but at that moment, she prized it as nothing beside that newly discovered wealth which she was rushing to cast away. Rosie had not striven in the least against her capture. She knew too much of life, in some patient fashion, to resist it, in any of its phases. She put her arms about Amelia's neck, to cling the closer, and Amelia, turning her face while she staggered on, set her lips passionately to the little sleeve.

"You cold?" asked she—"dear?" But she told herself it was a kiss of farewell.

She stepped deftly over the low stone wall into the Marden woods, and took the slippery downward path, over pine needles. Sometimes a rounded root lay above the surface, and she stumbled on it; but the child only tightened her grasp. Amelia walked and ran with the prescience of those without fear; for her eyes were unseeing, and her thoughts hurrying forward, she depicted to herself the little drama at its close. She would be at the Crossing and away again, before the train came in; nobody need guess her trouble. Enoch must be there, waiting. She would drop the child at his side,—the child he had deserted,—and before he could say a word, turn back to her desolate home. And at the thought, she kissed the little sleeve again, and thought how good it would be if she could only be there again, though alone, in the shielding walls of her house, and the parting were over and done. She felt her breath come chokingly.

"You'll have to walk a minute," she whispered, setting the child down at her side. "There's time enough. I can't hurry."

At that instant, she felt the slight warning of the ground beneath her feet, shaken by another step, and saw, through the pines, her husband running toward her. Rosie started to meet him, with a little cry, but Amelia thrust her aside, and hurried swiftly on in advance, her eyes feeding upon his face. It had miraculously changed. Sorrow, the great despair of life, had eaten into it, and aged it more than years of patient want. His eyes were like lamps burned low, and the wrinkles under them had guttered into misery. But to Amelia, his look had all the sweet familiarity of faces we shall see in Paradise. She did not stop to interpret his meeting glance, nor ask him to read hers. Coming upon him like a whirlwind, she put both her shaking hands on his shoulders, and laid her wet face to his.

"Enoch! Enoch!" she cried sharply, "in the name of God, come home with me!"

She felt him trembling under her hands, but he only put up his own, and very gently loosed the passionate grasp. "There! there!" he said, in a whisper. "Don't feel so bad. It's all right. I jest turned back for Rosie. Mebbe you won't believe it, but I forgot all about her."

He lowered his voice, for Rosie had gone close to him, and laid her hands clingingly upon his coat. She did not understand, but she could wait. A branch had almost barred the path, and Amelia, her dull gaze fallen, noted idly how bright the moss had kept, and how the scarlet cups enriched it. Her strength would not sustain her, void of his, and she sank down on the wood, her hands laid limply in her lap. "Enoch," she said, from her new sense of the awe of life, "don't lay up anything ag'inst me. You couldn't if you knew."

"Knew what?" asked Enoch gently. He did not forget that circumstance had laid a blow at the roots of his being; but he could not turn away while she still suffered.

Amelia began, stumblingly,—

"He talked about you. I couldn't stan' it."

"Did you believe it?" he queried sternly.

"There wa'n't anything to believe. That's neither here nor there. But—Enoch, if anybody should cut my right hand off—Enoch"—Her voice fell brokenly. She was a New England woman, accustomed neither to analyze nor talk. She could only suffer in the elemental way of dumb things who sometimes need a language of the heart. One thing she knew. The man was hers; and if she reft herself away from him, then she must die.

He had taken Rosie's hand, and Amelia was aware that he turned away.

"I don't want to bring up anything," he said hesitatingly, "but I couldn't stan' bein' any less'n other men would, jest because the woman had the money, an' I hadn't. I dunno's 't was exactly fair about the cows, but somehow you kind o' set me at the head o' things, in the beginnin', an' it never come into my mind"—

Amelia sat looking wanly past him. She began to see how slightly argument would serve. Suddenly the conventions of life fell away from her and left her young.

"Enoch," she said vigorously, "you've got to take me. Somehow, you've got to. Talkin' won't make you see that what I said never meant no more than the wind that blows. But you've got to keep me, or remember, all your life, how you murdered me by goin' away. The farm's come between us. Le's leave it! It's 'most time for the cars. You take me with you now. If you tramp, I'll tramp. If you work out, so 'll I. But where you go, I've got to go, too."

Some understanding of her began to creep upon him; he dropped the child's hand, and came a step nearer. Enoch, in these latter days of his life, had forgotten how to smile; but now a sudden, mirthful gleam struck upon his face, and lighted it with the candles of hope. He stood beside her, and Amelia did not look at him.

"Would you go with me, 'Melia?" he asked.

"I'm goin'," said she doggedly. Her case had been lost, but she could not abandon it. She seemed to be holding to it in the face of righteous judgment.

"S'pose I don't ask you?"

"I'll foller on behind."

"Don't ye want to go home, an' lock up, an' git a bunnit?"

She put one trembling hand to the calico apron about her head.

"No."

"Don't ye want to leave the key with some o' the neighbors?"

"I don't want anything in the world but you," owned Amelia shamelessly.

Enoch bent suddenly, and drew her to her feet. "'Melia," said he, "you look up here."

She raised her drawn face and looked at him, not because she wished, but because she must. In her abasement, there was no obedience which she would deny him. But she could only see that he was strangely happy, and so the more removed from her own despair. Enoch swiftly passed his arm about her, and turned her homeward. He laughed a little. Being a man, he must laugh when that bitter ache in the throat presaged more bitter tears.

"Come, 'Melia," said he, "come along home, an' I'll tell you all about the cows. I made a real good bargain. Come, Rosie."

Amelia could not answer. It seemed to her as if love had dealt with her as she had not deserved; and she went on, exalted, afraid of breaking the moment, and knowing only that he was hers again. But just before they left the shadow of the woods, he stopped, holding her still, and their hearts beat together.

"'Melia," said he brokenly, "I guess I never told you in so many words, but it's the truth: if God Almighty was to make me a woman, I'd have her you, not a hair altered. I never cared a straw for any other. I know that now. You're all there is in the world."

When they walked up over the brown field, the sun lay very warmly there with a promise of spring fulfilled. The wind had miraculously died, and soft clouds ran over the sky in flocks. Rosie danced on ahead, singing her queer little song, and Enoch struggled with himself to speak the word his wife might wish.

"'Melia," said he at last, "there ain't anything in my life I couldn't tell you. I jest ain't dwelt on it, that's all. If you want to have me go over it—"

"I don't want anything," said Amelia firmly. Her eyes were suffused, and yet lambent. The light in them seemed to be drinking up their tears. Her steps, she knew, were set within a shining way. At the door only she paused and fixed him with a glance. "Enoch," said she threateningly, "whose cows were them you sold to-day?"

He opened his lips, but she looked him down. One word he rejected, and then another. His cheeks wrinkled up into obstinate smiling, and he made the grimace of a child over its bitter draught.

"'Melia, it ain't fair," he complained. "No, it ain't. I'll take one of 'em, if you say so, or I'll own it don't make a mite o' difference whose they be. But as to lyin'—"

"Say it!" commanded Amelia. "Whose were they?"

"Mine!" said Enoch. They broke into laughter, like children, and held each other's hands.

"I ain't had a mite o' dinner," said Amelia happily, as they stepped together into the kitchen. "Nor you! An' Rosie didn't eat her pie. You blaze up the fire, an' I'll fry some eggs."

THE MORTUARY CHEST

"Now we've got red o' the men-folks," said Mrs. Robbins, "le's se' down an' talk it over." The last man of all the crowd accustomed to seek the country store at noontime was closing the church door behind him as she spoke. "Here, Ezry," she called after him, "you hurry up, or you won't git there afore cockcrow to-morrer, an' I wouldn't have that letter miss for a good deal."

Mrs. Robbins was slight, and hung on wires,—so said her neighbors. They also remarked that her nose was as picked as a pin, and that anybody with them freckles and that red hair was sure to be smart. You could always tell. Mrs. Robbins knew her reputation for extreme acuteness, and tried to live up to it.

"Law! don't you go to stirrin' on him up," said Mrs. Solomon Page comfortably, putting on the cover of her butter-box, which had contained the family lunch. "If the store's closed, he can slip the letter into the box, an' three cents with it, an' they'll put a stamp on in the mornin'."

By this time, there was a general dusting of crumbs from Sunday gowns, a settling of boxes and baskets, and the feminine portion of the East Tiverton congregation, according to ancient custom, passed into the pews nearest the stove, and arranged itself more compactly for the midday gossip. This was a pleasant interlude in the religious decorum of the day; no Sunday came when the men did not trail off to the store for their special council, and the women, with a restful sense of sympathy alloyed by no disturbing element, settled down for an exclusively feminine view of the universe. Mrs. Page took the head of the pew, and disposed her portly frame so as to survey the scene with ease. She was a large woman, with red cheeks and black, shining hair. One powerful arm lay along the back of the pew, and, as she talked, she meditatively beat the rail in time. Her sister, Mrs. Ellison, according to an intermittent custom, had come over from Saltash to attend church, and incidentally to indulge in a family chat. It was said that Tilly rode over about jes' so often to get the Tiverton news for her son Leonard, who furnished local items to the Sudleigh "Star;" and, indeed, she made no secret of sitting down in social conclave with a bit of paper and a worn pencil in hand, to jog her memory. She, too, had smooth black hair, but her dark eyes were illumined by no steadfast glow; they snapped and shone with alert intelligence, and her great forehead dominated the rest of her face, scarred with a thousand wrinkles by intensity of nature rather than by time. A pleasant warmth had diffused itself over the room, so cold during the morning service that foot-stoves had been in requisition. Bonnet strings were thrown back and shawls unpinned. The little world relaxed and lay at ease.

"What's the news over your way, sister?" asked Mrs. Ellison, as an informal preliminary.

"Tilly don't want to give; she'd ruther take," said Mrs. Baxter, before the other could answer. "She's like old Mis' Pepper. Seliny Hazlitt went over there, when she was fust married an' come to the neighborhood, an' asked her if she'd got a sieve to put squash through. Poor Seliny! she didn't know a sieve from a colander, in them days."

"I guess she found out soon enough," volunteered Mrs. Page. "He was one o' them kind o' men that can keep house as well as a woman. I'd ruther live with a born fool."

"Well, old Mis' Pepper she ris up an' smoothed down her apron (recollect them little dots she used to wear?—made her look as broad as a barn door!), an' she says, 'Yes, we've got a sieve for flour, an' a sieve for meal, an' a sieve for rye, an' a sieve for blue-monge, an' we could have a sieve for squash if we was a mind to, but I don't wish to lend.' That's the way with Tilly. She's terrible cropein' about news, but she won't lend."

"How's your cistern?" asked Mrs. John Cole, who, with an exclusively practical turn of mind, saw no reason why talk should be consecutive. "Got all the water you want?"

"Yes," said Mrs. Page; "that last rain filled it up higher'n it's been sence November."

But Mrs. Ellison was not to be thrown off the track.

"Ain't there been consid'able talk over here about Parson Bond?" she asked.

Miss Sally Ware, a plump and pleasing maiden lady, whose gold beads lay in a crease especially designed for them, stirred uneasily in her seat and gave her sisters an appealing glance. But she did not speak, beyond uttering a little dissentient noise in her throat. She was loyal to her minister. An embarrassed silence fell like a vapor over the assemblage. Everybody longed to talk; nobody wanted the responsibility of beginning. Mrs. Page was the first to gather her forces.

"Now, Tilly," said she, with decision, "you ain't comin' over here to tole us into haulin' our own pastor over the coals, unless you'll say right out you won't pass it on to Saltash folks. As for puttin' it in the paper, it ain't the kind you can."

Tilly's eyes burned.

"I guess I know when to speak an' when not to," she remarked. "Now don't beat about the bush; the men-folks'll be back to-rights. I never in my life give Len a mite o' news he couldn't ha' picked up for himself."

"Well, some master silly pieces have got into the paper, fust an' last," said Mrs. Robbins. "Recollect how your Len come 'way over here to git his shoes cobbled, the week arter Tom Brewer moved int' the Holler, an' folks hadn't got over swappin' the queer things he said? an' when Tom got the shoes done afore he promised, Len says to him, 'You're better'n your word.' 'Well,' says Tom, 'I flew at 'em with all the venom o' my specie.' An' it wa'n't a fortnight afore that speech come out in a New York paper, an' then the Sudleigh 'Star' got hold on 't, an' so 't went. If folks want that kind o' thing, they can git a plenty, I say." She set her lips defiantly, and looked round on the assembled group. This was something she had meant to mention; now she had done it.

The informal meeting was aghast. A flavor of robust humor was accustomed to enliven it, but not of a sort to induce dissension.

"There! there!" murmured Sally Ware. "It's the Sabbath day!"

"Well, nobody's breakin' of it, as I know of," said Mrs. Ellison. Her eyes were brighter than usual, but she composed herself into a careful disregard of annoyance. When desire of news assailed her, she could easily conceal her personal resentments, cannily sacrificing small issues to great. "I guess there's no danger o' Parson Bond's gittin' into the paper, so long's he behaves himself; but if anybody's got eyes, they can't help seein'. I hadn't been in the Bible class five minutes afore I guessed how he was carryin' on. Has he begun to go with Isabel North, an' his wife not cold in her grave?"

"Well, I think, for my part, he does want Isabel," said Mrs. Robbins sharply, "an' I say it's a sin an' a shame. Why, she ain't twenty, an' he's sixty if he's a day. My soul! Sally Ware, you better be settin' your cap for my William Henry. He's 'most nineteen."

Miss Ware flushed, and her plump hands tightened upon each other under her shawl. She was never entirely at ease in the atmosphere of these assured married women; it was always a little bracing.

"Well, how's she take it?" asked Tilly, turning from one to the other. "Tickled to death, I s'pose?"

"Well, I guess she ain't!" broke in a younger woman, whose wedding finery was not yet outworn. "She's most sick over it, and so she has been ever since her sister married and went away. I believe she'd hate the sight of him, if 't wasn't the minister; but 't is the minister, and when she's put face to face with him, she can't help saying yes and no."

"I dunno'," said Mrs. Page, with her unctuous laugh. "Remember the party over to Tiverton t' other night, an' them tarts? You see, Rosanna Maria Pike asked us all over; an' you know how flaky her pie-crust is. Well, the minister was stan'in' side of Isabel when the tarts was passed. He was sort o' shinin' up to her that night, an' I guess he felt a mite twittery; so when the tarts come to him, he reached out kind o' delicate, with his little finger straight out, an' tried to take one. An' a ring o' crust come off on his finger. Then he tried it ag'in, an' got another ring. Everybody'd ha' laughed, if it hadn't been the minister; but Isabel she tickled right out, an' says, 'You don't take jelly, do you, Mr. Bond?' An' he turned as red as fire, an' says, 'No, I thank you.'"

"She wouldn't ha' said it, if she hadn't ha' been so nervous," remarked Miss Sally, taking a little parcel of peppermints from her pocket, and proceeding to divide them.

"No, I don't s'pose she would," owned Mrs. Page reflectively. "But if what they say is true, she's been pretty sassy to him, fust an' last. Why, you know, no matter how the parson begins his prayer, he's sure to end up on one line: 'Lord, we thank Thee we have not been left to live by the dim light of natur'.' 'Lisha Cole, when he come home from Illinois, walked over here to meetin', to surprise some o' the folks. He waited in the entry to ketch 'em comin' out, an' the fust word he heard was, 'Lord, we thank Thee we have not been left to live by the dim light of natur'.' 'Lisha said he'd had time to be shipwrecked (you know he went to California fust an' made the v'yage), an' be married twice, an' lay by enough to keep him, and come home poor; but when he heard that, he felt as if the world hadn't moved sence he started."

Sally Ware dropped her mitten, to avoid listening and the necessity of reply; it was too evident that the conversational tone was becoming profane. But Mrs. Page's eyes were gleaming with pure dramatic joy, and she continued:—

"Well, a fortnight or so ago he went over to see Isabel, an' Sadie an' her husband happened to be there. They were all settin' purrin' in the dark, because they'd forgot to send for any kerosene. 'No light?' says he, hittin' his head ag'inst the chimbly-piece goin' in,—'no light?' 'No,' says Isabel, 'none but the dim light of natur'.'"

There was a chime of delighted laughter in many keys. The company felt the ease of unrestricted speech. They wished the nooning might be indefinitely prolonged.

"Sometimes I think she sets out to make him believe she's wuss 'n she is," remarked Mrs. Cole. "Remember how she carried on last Sabbath?"

"I guess so!" returned Mrs. Page. "You see, Tilly, he's kind o' pushin' her for'ard to make her seem more suitable,—he'd like to have her as old as the hills!—an' nothin' would do but she must go into the Bible class. Ain't a member that's under fifty, but there that little young thing sets, cheeks red as a beet, an' the elder asks her questions, when he gits to her, as if he was coverin' on her over with cotton wool. Well, last Sabbath old Deacon Pitts—le's see, there ain't any o' his folks present, be they?—well, he was late, an' he hadn't looked at his lesson besides. 'T was the fust chapter in Ruth, where it begins, 'In the days when the judges ruled.' You recollect Naomi told the two darters they'd got to set sail, an' then the Bible says, 'they lifted up their voice an' wept.' 'Who wept?' says the parson to Deacon Pitts, afore he'd got fairly se' down. The deacon he opened his Bible, an' whirled over the leaves. 'Who wept, Brother Pitts?' says the parson over ag'in. Somebody found the deacon the place, an' p'inted. He was growin' redder an' redder, an' his spe'tacles kep' slippin' down, but he did manage to see the chapter begun suthin' about the judges. Well, by that time parson spoke out sort o' sharp. 'Brother Pitts,' says he, 'who wept?' The deacon see 't he'd got to put some kind of a face on 't, an' he looked up an' spoke out, as bold as brass. 'I conclude,' says he,—'I conclude 't was the judges!'"

Even Miss Ware smiled a little, and adjusted her gold beads. The others laughed out rich and free.

"Well, what'd that have to do with Isabel?" asked Mrs. Ellison, who never forgot the main issue.

"Why, everybody else drawed down their faces, an' tried to keep 'em straight, but Isabel, she begun to laugh, an' she laughed till the tears streamed down her cheeks. Deacon Pitts was real put out, for him, an' the parson tried not to take no notice. But it went so fur he couldn't help it, an' so he says, 'Miss Isabel, I'm real pained,' says he. But 't was jest as you'd cuff the kitten for snarlin' up your yarn."

"Well, what's Isabel goin' to do?" asked Mrs. Ellison. "S'pose she'll marry him?"

"Why, she won't unless he tells her to. If he does, I dunno but she'll think she's got to."

"I say it's a shame," put in Mrs. Robbins incisively; "an' Isabel with everything all fixed complete so 't she could have a good time. Her sister's well married, an' Isabel stays every night with her. Them two girls have been together ever sence their father died. An' here she's got the school, an' she's goin' to Sudleigh every Saturday to take lessons in readin', an' she'd be as happy as a cricket, if on'y he'd let her alone."

"She reads real well," said Mrs. Ellison. "She come over to our sociable an' read for us. She could turn herself into anybody she'd a mind to. Len wrote a notice of it for the 'Star.' That's the only time we've had oysters over our way."

"I'd let it be the last," piped up a thin old lady, with a long figured veil over her face. "It's my opinion oysters lead to dancin'."

"Well, let 'em lead," said optimistic Mrs. Page. "I guess we needn't foller."

"Them that have got rheumatism in their knees can stay behind," said the young married woman, drawn by the heat of the moment into a daring at once to be repented. "Mrs. Ellison, you're getting ahead of us over in your parish. They say you sing out of sheet music."

"Yes, they do say so," interrupted the old lady under the figured veil. "If there's any worship in sheet music, I'd like to know it!"

"Come, come!" said peace-loving Mrs. Page; "there's the men filin' in. We mustn't let 'em see us squabblin'. They think we're a lot o' cacklin' hens anyway, tickled to death over a piece o' chalk. There's Isabel, now. She's goin' to look like her aunt Mary Ellen, over to Saltash."

Isabel preceded the men, who were pausing for a word at the door, and went down the aisle to her pew. She bowed to one and another, in passing, and her color rose. They could not altogether restrain their guiltily curious gaze, and Isabel knew she had been talked over. She was a healthy-looking girl, with clear blue eyes and a quantity of soft brown hair. Her face was rather large-featured, and one could see that, if the world went well with her, she would be among those who develop beauty in middle life.

The group of dames dispersed to their several pews, and settled their faces into expressions more becoming a Sunday mood. The village folk, who had time for a hot dinner, dropped in, one by one, and by and by the parson came,—a gaunt man, with thick red-brown hair streaked with dull gray, and red-brown, sanguine eyes. He was much beloved, but something impulsive and unevenly balanced in his nature led even his people to regard him with more or less patronage. He kept his eyes rigorously averted from Isabel's pew, in passing; but when he reached the pulpit, and began unpinning his heavy gray shawl, he did glance at her, and his face grew warm. But Isabel did not look at him, and all through the service she sat with a haughty pose of the head, gazing down into her lap. When it was over, she waited for no one, since her sister was not at church, but sped away down the snowy road.

The next day, Isabel stayed after school, and so it was in the wintry twilight that she walked home, guarded by the few among her flock who had been kept to learn the inner significance of common fractions. Approaching her own house, she quickened her steps, for there before the gate (taken from its hinges and resting for the winter) stood a blue pung. The horse was dozing, his Roman nose sunken almost to the snow at his feet. He looked as if he had come to stay. Isabel withdrew her hand from the persistent little fingers clinging to it.

"Good-night, children," said she. "I guess I've got company. I must hurry in. Come bright and early to-morrow."

The little group marched away, swathed in comforters, each child carrying the dinner-pail with an easy swing. Their reddened faces lighted over the chorusing good-nights, and they kept looking back, while Isabel ran up the icy path to her own door. It was opened from within, before she reached it, and a tall, florid woman, with smoothly banded hair, stood there to receive her. Though she had a powerful frame, she gave one at the outset an impression of weak gentleness, and the hands she extended, albeit cordial, were somewhat limp. She wore her bonnet still, though she had untied the strings and thrown them back; and her ample figure was tightly laced under a sontag.

"Why, aunt Luceba!" cried Isabel, radiant. "I'm as glad as I can be. When did you rain down?"

"Be you glad?" returned aunt Luceba, her somewhat anxious look relaxing into a smile. "Well, I'm pleased if you be. Fact is, I run away, an' I'm jest comin' to myself, an' wonderin' what under the sun set me out to do it."

"Run away!" repeated Isabel, drawing her in, and at once peeping into the stove. "Oh, you fixed the fire, didn't you? It keeps real well. I put on coal in the morning, and then again at night."

"Isabel," began her aunt, standing by the stove, and drumming on it with agitated fingers, "I hate to have you live as you do. Why under the sun can't you come over to Saltash, an' stay with us?"

Isabel had thrown off her shawl and hat, and was standing on the other side of the stove; she was tingling with cold and youthful spirits.

"I'm keeping school," said she. "School can't keep without me. And I'm going over to Sudleigh, every Saturday, to take elocution lessons. I'm having my own way, and I'm happy as a clam. Now, why can't you come and live with me? You said you would, the very day aunt Eliza died."

"I know I did," owned the visitor, lowering her voice, and casting a glance over her shoulder. "But I never had an idea then how Mary Ellen 'd feel about it. She said she wouldn't live in this town, not if she was switched. I dunno why she's so ag'in' it, but she seems to be, an' there 't is!"

"Why, aunt Luceba!" Isabel had left her position to draw forward a chair. "What's that?" She pointed to the foot of the lounge, where, half hidden in shadow, stood a large, old-fashioned blue chest.

"'Sh! that's it! that's what I come for. It's her chist."

"Whose?"

"Your aunt 'Liza's." She looked Isabel in the face with an absurd triumph and awe. She had done a brave deed, the nature of which was not at once apparent.

"What's in it?" asked Isabel, walking over to it.

"Don't you touch it!" cried her aunt, in agitation. "I wouldn't have you meddle with it—But there! it's locked. I al'ays forgit that. I feel as if the things could git out an' walk. Here! you let it alone, an' byme-by we'll open it. Se' down here on the lounge. There, now! I guess I can tell ye. It was sister 'Liza's chist, an' she kep' it up attic. She begun it when we wa'n't more'n girls goin' to Number Six, an' she's been fillin' on 't ever sence."

"Begun it! You talk as if 't was a quilt!" Isabel began to laugh.

"Now don't!" said her aunt, in great distress. "Don't ye! I s'pose 't was because we was such little girls an' all when 'Liza started it, but it makes me as nervous as a witch, an' al'ays did. You see, 'Liza was a great hand for deaths an' buryin's; an' as for funerals, she'd ruther go to 'em than eat. I'd say that if she was here this minute, for more'n once I said it to her face. Well, everybody 't died, she saved suthin' they wore or handled the last thing, an' laid it away in this chist; an' last time I see it opened, 't was full, an' she kind o' smacked her lips, an' said she should have to begin another. But the very next week she was took away."

"Aunt Luceba," said Isabel suddenly, "was aunt Eliza hard to live with? Did you and aunt Mary Ellen have to toe the mark?"

"Don't you say one word," answered her aunt hastily. "That's all past an' gone. There ain't no way of settlin' old scores but buryin' of 'em. She was older'n we were, an' on'y a step-sister, arter all. We must think o' that. Well, I must come to the end o' my story, an' then we'll open the chist. Next day arter we laid her away, it come into my head, 'Now we can burn up them things.' It may ha' been wicked, but there 't was, an' the thought kep' arter me, till all I could think of was the chist; an' byme-by I says to Mary Ellen, one mornin', 'Le's open it to-day an' make a burnfire!' An' Mary Ellen she turned as white as a sheet, an' dropped her spoon into her sasser, an' she says: 'Not yet! Luceba, don't you ask me to touch it yet.' An' I found out, though she never 'd say another word, that it unset her more'n it did me. One day, I come on her up attic stan'in' over it with the key in her hand, an' she turned round as if I'd ketched her stealin', an' slipped off downstairs. An' this arternoon, she went into Tilly Ellison's with her work, an' it come to me all of a sudden how I'd git Tim Yatter to harness an' load the chist onto the pung, an' I'd bring it over here, an' we'd look it over together; an' then, if there's nothin' in it but what I think, I'd leave it behind, an' maybe you or Sadie 'd burn it. John Cole happened to ride by, and he helped me in with it. I ain't a-goin' to have Mary Ellen worried. She's different from me. She went to school, same's you have, an' she's different somehow. She's been meddled with all her life, an' I'll be whipped if she sha'n't make a new start. Should you jest as lieves ask Sadie or John?"

"Why, yes," said Isabel wonderingly; "or do it myself. I don't see why you care."

Aunt Luceba wiped her beaded face with a large handkerchief.

"I dunno either," she owned, in an exhausted voice. "I guess it's al'ays little things you can't stand. Big ones you can butt ag'inst. There! I feel better, now I've told ye. Here's the key. Should you jest as soon open it?"

Isabel drew the chest forward with a vigorous pull of her sturdy arm. She knelt before it and inserted the key. Aunt Luceba rose and leaned over her shoulder, gazing with the fascination of horror. At the moment the lid was lifted, a curious odor filled the room.

"My soul!" exclaimed Aunt Luceba. "O my soul!" She seemed incapable of saying more; and Isabel, awed in spite of herself, asked, in a whisper:—

"What's that smell? I know, but I can't think."

"You take out that parcel," said aunt Luceba, beginning to fan herself with her handkerchief. "That little one down there 't the end. It's that. My soul! how things come back! Talk about spirits! There's no need of 'em! Things are full bad enough!"

Isabel lifted out a small brown paper package, labeled in a cramped handwriting. She held it to the fading light. "'Slippery elm left by my dear father from his last illness,'" she read, with difficulty. "'The broken piece used by him on the day of his death.'"

"My land!" exclaimed aunt Luceba weakly. "Now what'd she want to keep that for? He had it round all that winter, an' he used to give us a little mite, to please us. Oh, dear! it smells like death. Well, le's lay it aside an' git on. The light's goin', an' I must jog along. Take out that dress. I guess I know what 't is, though I can't hardly believe it."

Isabel took out a black dress, made with a full, gathered skirt and an old-fashioned waist. "'Dress made ready for aunt Mercy,'" she read, "'before my dear uncle bought her a robe.' But, auntie," she added, "there's no back breadth!"

"I know it! I know it! She was so large they had to cut it out, for fear 't wouldn't go into the coffin; an' Monroe Giles said she was a real particular woman, an' he wondered how she'd feel to have the back breadth of her quilted petticoat showin' in heaven. I declare I'm 'most sick! What's in that pasteboard box?"

It was a shriveled object, black with long-dried mould.

"'Lemon held by Timothy Marden in his hand just before he died.' Aunt Luceba," said Isabel, turning with a swift impulse, "I think aunt Eliza was a horror!"

"Don't you say it, if you do think it," said her aunt, sinking into a chair and rocking vigorously. "Le's git through with it as quick 's we can. Ain't that a bandbox? Yes, that's great-aunt Isabel's leghorn bunnit. You was named for her, you know. An' there's cousin Hattie's cashmere shawl, an' Obed's spe'tacles. An' if there ain't old Mis' Eaton's false front! Don't you read no more. I don't care what they're marked. Move that box a mite. My soul! There's ma'am's checked apron I bought her to the fair! Them are all her things down below." She got up and walked to the window, looking into the chestnut branches, with unseeing eyes. She turned about presently, and her cheeks were wet. "There!" she said; "I guess we needn't look no more. Should you jest as soon burn 'em?"

"Yes," answered Isabel. She was crying a little, too. "Of course I will, auntie. I'll put 'em back now. But when you're gone, I'll do it; perhaps not till Saturday, but I will then."

She folded the articles, and softly laid them away. They were no longer gruesome, since even a few of them could recall the beloved and still remembered dead. As she was gently closing the lid, she felt a hand on her shoulder. Aunt Luceba was standing there, trembling a little, though the tears had gone from her face.

"Isabel," said she, in a whisper, "you needn't burn the apron, when you do the rest. Save it careful. I should like to put it away among my things."

Isabel nodded. She remembered her grandmother, a placid, hopeful woman, whose every deed breathed the fragrance of godly living.

"There!" said her aunt, turning away with the air of one who thrusts back the too insistent past, lest it dominate her quite. "It's gittin' along towards dark, an' I must put for home. I guess that hoss thinks he's goin' to be froze to the ground. You wrop up my soap-stone while I git on my shawl. Land! don't it smell hot? I wisht I hadn't been so spry about puttin' on 't into the oven." She hurried on her things; and Isabel, her hair blowing about her face, went out to uncover the horse and speed the departure. The reins in her hands, aunt Luceba bent forward once more to add, "Isabel, if there's one thing left for me to say, to tole you over to live with us, I want to say it."

Isabel laughed. "I know it," she answered brightly. "And if there's anything I can say to make you and aunt Mary Ellen come over here"—

Aunt Luceba shook her head ponderously, and clucked at the horse. "Fur's I'm concerned, it's settled now. I'd come, an' be glad. But there's Mary Ellen! Go 'long!" She went jangling away along the country road to the music of old-fashioned bells.

Isabel ran into the house, and, with one look at the chest, set about preparing her supper. She was enjoying her life of perfect freedom with a kind of bravado, inasmuch as it seemed an innocent delight of which nobody approved. If the two aunts would come to live with her, so much the better; but since they refused, she scorned the descent to any domestic expedient. Indeed, she would have been glad to sleep, as well as to eat, in the lonely house; but to that her sister would never consent, and though she had compromised by going to Sadie's for the night, she always returned before breakfast. She put up a leaf of the table standing by the wall, and arranged her simple supper there, uttering aloud as she did so fragments of her lesson, or dramatic sentences which had caught her fancy in reading or in speech. Finally, as she was dipping her cream toast, she caught herself saying, over and over, "My soul!" in the tremulous tone her aunt had used at that moment of warm emotion. She could not make it quite her own, and she tried again and again, like a faithful parrot. Then of a sudden the human power and pity of it flashed upon her, and she reddened, conscience-smitten, though no one was by to hear. She set her dish upon the table with indignant emphasis.

"I'm ashamed of myself!" said Isabel, and she sat down to her delicate repast, and forced herself, while she ate with a cordial relish, to fix her mind on what seemed to her things common as compared with her beloved ambition. Isabel often felt that she was too much absorbed in reading, and that, somehow or other, God would come to that conclusion also, and take away her wicked facility.

The dark seemed to drift quickly down, that night, because her supper had been delayed, and she washed her dishes by lamplight. When she had quite finished, and taken off her apron, she stood a moment over the chest, before sitting down to her task of memorizing verse. She was wondering whether she might not burn a few of the smaller things to-night; yet somehow, although she was quite free from aunt Luceba's awe of them, she did feel that the act must be undertaken with a certain degree of solemnity. It ought not to be accomplished over the remnants of a fire built for cooking; it should, moreover, be to the accompaniment of a serious mood in herself. She turned away, but at that instant there came a jingle of bells. It stopped at the gate. Isabel went into the dark entry, and pressed her face against the side-light. It was the parson. She knew him at once; no one in Tiverton could ever mistake that stooping figure, draped in a shawl. Isabel always hated him the more when she thought of his shawl. It flashed upon her then, as it often did when revulsion came over her, how much she had loved him until he had conceived this altogether horrible attachment for her. It was like a cherished friend who had begun to cut undignified capers. More than that, there lurked a certain cruelty in it, because he seemed to be trading on her inherited reverence for his office. If he should ask her to marry him, he was the minister, and how could she refuse? Unless, indeed, there were somebody else in the room, to give her courage, and that was hardly to be expected. Isabel began casting wildly about her for help. Her thoughts ran in a rushing current, and even in the midst of her tragic despair some sense of the foolishness of it smote her like a comic note, and she could have laughed hysterically.

"But I can't help it," she said aloud, "I am afraid. I can't put out the light. He's seen it. I can't slip out the back door. He'd hear me on the crust. He'll—ask me—to-night! Oh, he will! he will! and I said to myself I'd be cunning and never give him a chance. Oh, why couldn't aunt Luceba have stayed? My soul! my soul!" And then the dramatic fibre, always awake in her, told her that she had found the tone she sought.

He was blanketing his horse, and Isabel had flown into the sitting-room. Her face was alive with resolution and a kind of joy. She had thought. She threw open the chest, with a trembling hand, and pulled out the black dress.

"I'm sorry," she said, as she slipped it on over her head, and speaking as if she addressed some unseen guardian, "but I can't help it. If you don't want your things used, you keep him from coming in!"

The parson knocked at the door. Isabel took no notice. She was putting on the false front, the horn spectacles, the cashmere shawl, and the leghorn bonnet, with its long veil. She threw back the veil, and closed the chest. The parson knocked again. She heard him kicking the snow from his feet against the scraper. It might have betokened a decent care for her floors. It sounded to Isabel like a lover's haste, and smote her anew with that fear which is the forerunner of action. She blew out the lamp, and lighted a candle. Then she went to the door, schooling herself in desperation to remember this, to remember that, to remember, above all things, that her under dress was red and that her upper one had no back breadth. She threw open the door.

"Good-evening"—said the parson. He was about to add "Miss Isabel," but the words stuck in his throat.

"She ain't to home," answered Isabel. "My niece ain't to home."

The parson had bent forward, and was eyeing her curiously, yet with benevolence. He knew all the residents within a large radius, and he expected, at another word from the shadowy masker, to recognize her also. "Will she be away long?" he hesitated.

"I guess she will," answered Isabel promptly. "She ain't to be relied on. I never found her so." Her spirits had risen. She knew how exactly she was imitating aunt Luceba's mode of speech. The tones were dramatically exact, albeit of a more resonant quality. "Auntie's voice is like suet," she thought. "Mine is vinegar. But I've got it!" A merry devil assailed her, the child of dramatic triumph. She spoke with decision: "Won't you come in?"

The parson crossed the sill, and waited courteously for her to precede him; but Isabel thought, in time, of her back breadth, and stood aside.

"You go fust," said she, "an' I'll shet the door."

He made his way into the ill-lighted sitting-room, and began to unpin his shawl.

"I ain't had my bunnit off sence I come," announced Isabel, entering with some bustle, and taking her stand, until he should be seated, within the darkest corner of the hearth. "I've had to turn to an' clear up, or I shouldn't ha' found a spot as big as a hin's egg to sleep in to-night. Maybe you don't know it, but my niece Isabel's got no more faculty about a house 'n I have for preachin'—not a mite."

The parson had seated himself by the stove, and was laboriously removing his arctics. Isabel's eyes danced behind her spectacles as she thought how large and ministerial they were. She could not see them, for the spectacles dazzled her, but she remembered exactly how they looked. Everything about him filled her with glee, now that she was safe, though within his reach. "'Now, infidel,'" she said noiselessly, "'I have thee on the hip!'"

The parson had settled himself in his accustomed attitude when making parochial calls. He put the tips of his fingers together, and opened conversation in his tone of mild good-will:—

"I don't seem to be able to place you. A relative of Miss Isabel's, did you say?"

She laughed huskily. She was absorbed in putting more suet into her voice.

"You make me think of uncle Peter Nudd," she replied, "when he was took up into Bunker Hill Monument. Albert took him, one o' the boys that lived in Boston. Comin' down, they met a woman Albert knew, an' he bowed. Uncle Peter looked round arter her, an' then he says to Albert, 'I dunno 's I rightly remember who that is!'"

The parson uncrossed his legs and crossed them the other way. The old lady began to seem to him a thought too discursive, if not hilarious.

"I know so many of the people in the various parishes"—he began, but he was interrupted without compunction.

"You never'd know me. I'm from out West. Isabel's father's brother married my uncle—no, I would say my step-niece. An' so I'm her aunt. By adoption, 't ennyrate. We al'ays call it so, leastways when we're writin' back an' forth. An' I've heard how Isabel was goin' on, an' so I ketched up my bunnit, an' put for Tiverton. 'If she ever needed her own aunt,' says I—'her aunt by adoption—she needs her now.'"

Once or twice, during the progress of this speech, the visitor had shifted his position, as if ill at ease. Now he bent forward, and peered at his hostess.

"Isabel is well?" he began tentatively.

"Well enough! But, my sakes! I'd ruther she'd be sick abed or paraletic than carry on as she does. Slack? My soul! I wisht you could see her sink closet! I wisht you could take one look over the dirty dishes she leaves round, not washed from one week's end to another!"

"But she's always neat. She looks like an—an angel!"

Isabel could not at once suppress the gratified note which crept of itself into her voice.

"That's the outside o' the cup an' platter," she said knowingly. "I thank my stars she ain't likely to marry. She'd turn any man's house upside down inside of a week."

The parson made a deprecating noise in his throat. He seemed about to say something, and thought better of it.

"It may be," he hesitated, after a moment,—"it may be her studies take up too much of her time. I have always thought these elocution lessons"—

"Oh, my land!" cried Isabel, in passionate haste. She leaned forward as if she would implore him. "That's her only salvation. That's the makin' of her. If you stop her off there, I dunno but she'd jine a circus or take to drink! Don't you dast to do it! I'm in the family, an' I know."

The parson tried vainly to struggle out of his bewilderment.

"But," said he, "may I ask how you heard these reports? Living in Illinois, as you do—did you say Illinois or Iowa?"

"Neither," answered Isabel desperately. "'Way out on the plains. It's the last house afore you come to the Rockies. Law! you can't tell how a story gits started, nor how fast it will travel. 'T ain't like a gale o' wind; the weather bureau ain't been invented that can cal'late it. I heard of a man once that told a lie in California, an' 'fore the week was out it broke up his engagement in New Hampshire. There's the 'tater-bug—think how that travels! So with this. The news broke out in Missouri, an' here I be."

"I hope you will be able to remain."

"Only to-night," she said in haste. More and more nervous, she was losing hold on the sequence of her facts. "I'm like mortal life, here to-day an' there to-morrer. In the mornin' I sha'n't be found." ("But Isabel will," she thought, from a remorse which had come too late, "and she'll have to lie, or run away. Or cut a hole in the ice and drown herself!")

"I'm sorry to have her lose so much of your visit," began the parson courteously, but still perplexing himself over the whimsies of an old lady who flew on from the West, and made nothing of flying back. "If I could do anything towards finding her"—

"I know where she is," said Isabel unhappily. "She's as well on 't as she can be, under the circumstances. There's on'y one thing you could do. If you should be willin' to keep it dark't you've seen me, I should be real beholden to ye. You know there ain't no time to call in the neighborhood, an' such things make talk, an' all. An' if you don't speak out to Isabel, so much the better. Poor creatur', she's got enough to bear without that!" Her voice dropped meltingly in the keenness of her sympathy for the unfortunate girl who, embarrassed enough before, had deliberately set for herself another snare. "I feel for Isabel," she continued, in the hope of impressing him with the necessity for silence and inaction. "I do feel for her! Oh, gracious me! What's that?"

A decided rap had sounded at the front door. The parson rose also, amazed at her agitation.

"Somebody knocked," he said. "Shall I go to the door?"

"Oh, not yet, not yet!" cried Isabel, clasping her hands under her cashmere shawl. "Oh, what shall I do?"

Her natural voice had asserted itself, but, strangely enough, the parson did not comprehend. The entire scene was too bewildering. There came a second knock. He stepped toward the door, but Isabel darted in front of him. She forgot her back breadth, and even through that dim twilight the scarlet of her gown shone ruddily out. She placed herself before the door.

"Don't you go!" she entreated hoarsely. "Let me think what I can say."

Then the parson had his first inkling that the strange visitor must be mad. He wondered at himself for not thinking of it before, and the idea speedily coupled itself with Isabel's strange disappearance. He stepped forward and grasped her arm, trembling under the cashmere shawl.

"Woman," he demanded sternly, "what have you done with Isabel North?"

Isabel was thinking; but the question, twice repeated, brought her to herself. She began to laugh, peal on peal of hysterical mirth; and the parson, still holding her arm, grew compassionate.

"Poor soul!" said he soothingly. "Poor soul! sit down here by the stove and be calm—be calm!"

Isabel was overcome anew.

"Oh, it isn't so!" she gasped, finding breath. "I'm not crazy. Just let me be!"

She started under his detaining hand, for the knock had come again. Wrenching herself free, she stepped into the entry. "Who's there?" she called.

"It's your aunt Mary Ellen," came a voice from the darkness. "Open the door."

"O my soul!" whispered Isabel to herself. "Wait a minute!" she continued. "Only a minute!"

She thrust the parson back into the sitting-room, and shut the door. The act relieved her. If she could push a minister, and he could obey in such awkward fashion, he was no longer to be feared. He was even to be refused. Isabel felt equal to doing it.

"Now, look here," said she rapidly; "you stand right there while I take off these things. Don't you say a word. No, Mr. Bond, don't you speak!" Bonnet, false front, and spectacles were tossed in a tumultuous pile.

"Isabel!" gasped the parson.

"Keep still!" she commanded. "Here! fold this shawl!"

The parson folded it neatly, and meanwhile Isabel stepped out of the mutilated dress, and added that also to the heap. She opened the blue chest, and packed the articles hastily within. "Here!" said she; "toss me the shawl. Now if you say one word—Oh, parson, if you only will keep still, I'll tell you all about it! That is, I guess I can!" And leaving him standing in hopeless coma, she opened the door.

"Well," said aunt Mary Ellen, stepping in, "I'm afraid your hinges want greasing. How do you do, Isabel? How do you do?" She put up her face and kissed her niece. Aunt Mary Ellen was so pretty, so round, so small, that she always seemed timid, and did the commonest acts of life with a gentle grace. "I heard voices," she said, walking into the sitting-room. "Sadie here?"

The parson had stepped forward, more bent than usual, for he was peering down into her face.

"Mary Ellen!" he exclaimed.

The little woman looked up at him—very sadly, Isabel thought.

"Yes, William," she answered. But she was untying her bonnet, and she did not offer to shake hands.

Isabel stood by with downcast eyes, waiting to take her things, and aunt Mary Ellen looked searchingly up at her as she laid her mittens on the pile. The girl, without a word, went into the bedroom, and her aunt followed her.

"Isabel," said she rapidly, "I saw the chest. Have you burnt the things?"

"No," answered Isabel in wonder. "No."

"Then don't you! don't you touch 'em for the world." She went back into the sitting-room, and Isabel followed. The candle was guttering, and aunt Mary Ellen pushed it toward her. "I don't know where the snuffers are," she said. "Lamp smoke?"

Isabel did not answer, but she lighted the lamp. She had never seen her aunt so full of decision, so charged with an unfamiliar power. She felt as if strange things were about to happen. The parson was standing awkwardly. He wondered whether he ought to go. Aunt Mary Ellen smoothed her brown hair with both hands, sat down, and pointed to his chair.

"Sit a spell," she said. "I guess I shall have something to talk over with you."

The parson sat down. He tried to put his fingers together, but they trembled, and he clasped his hands instead.

"It's a long time since we've seen you in Tiverton," he began.

"It would have been longer," she answered, "but I felt as if my niece needed me."

Here Isabel, to her own surprise, gave a little sob, and then another. She began crying angrily into her handkerchief.

"Isabel," said her aunt, "is there a fire in the kitchen?"

"Yes," sobbed the girl.

"Well, you go out there and lie down on the lounge till you feel better. Cover you over, and don't be cold. I'll call you when there's anything for you to do."

Tall Isabel rose and walked out, wiping her eyes. Her little aunt sat mistress of the field. For many minutes there was silence, and the clock ticked. The parson felt something rising in his throat. He blew his nose vigorously.

"Mary Ellen"—he began. "But I don't know as you want me to call you so!"

"You can call me anything you're a mind to," she answered calmly. She was near-sighted, and had always worn spectacles. She took them off and laid them on her knee. The parson moved involuntarily in his chair. He remembered how she had used to do that when they were talking intimately, so that his eager look might not embarrass her. "Nothing makes much difference when folks get to be as old as you and I are."

"I don't feel old," said the parson resentfully. "I do not! And you don't look so."

"Well, I am. We're past our youth. We've got to the point where the only way to renew it is to look out for the young ones."

The parson had always had with her a way of reading her thought and bursting out boyishly into betrayal of his own.

"Mary Ellen," he cried, "I never should have explained it so, but Isabel looks like you!"

She smiled sadly. "I guess men make themselves think 'most anything they want to," she answered. "There may be a family look, but I can't see it. She's tall, too, and I was always a pint o' cider—so father said."

"She's got the same look in her eyes," pursued the parson hotly. "I've always thought so, ever since she was a little girl."

"If you begun to notice it then," she responded, with the same gentle calm, "you'd better by half ha' been thinking of your own wife and her eyes. I believe they were black."

"Mary Ellen, how hard you are on me! You did't use to be. You never were hard on anybody. You wouldn't have hurt a fly."

Her face contracted slightly. "Perhaps I wouldn't! perhaps I wouldn't! But I've had a good deal to bear this afternoon, and maybe I do feel a little different towards you from what I ever have felt. I've been hearing a loose-tongued woman tell how my own niece has been made town-talk because a man old enough to know better was running after her. I said, years ago, I never would come into this place while you was in it; but when I heard that, I felt as if Providence had marked out the way. I knew I was the one to step into the breach. So I had Tim harness up and bring me over, and here I am. William, I don't want you should make a mistake at your time of life!"

The minister seemed already a younger man. A strong color had risen in his face. He felt in her presence a fine exhilaration denied him through all the years without her. Who could say whether it was the woman herself or the resurrected spirit of their youth? He did not feel like answering her. It was enough to hear her voice. He leaned forward, looking at her with something piteous in his air.

"Mary Ellen," he ventured, "you might as well say 'another mistake.' I did make one. You know it, and I know it."

She looked at him with a frank affection, entirely maternal. "Yes, William," she said, with the same gentle firmness in her voice, "we've passed so far beyond those things that we can speak out and feel no shame. You did make a mistake. I don't know as 't would be called so to break with me, but it was to marry where you did. You never cared about her. You were good to her. You always would be, William; but 't was a shame to put her there."

The parson had locked his hands upon his knees. He looked at them, and sad lines of recollection deepened in his face.

"I was desperate," he said at length, in a low tone. "I had lost you. Some men take to drink, but that never tempted me. Besides, I was a minister. I was just ordained. Mary Ellen, do you remember that day?"

"Yes," she answered softly, "I remember." She had leaned back in her chair, and her eyes were fixed upon vacancy with the suffused look of tears forbidden to fall.

"You wore a white dress," went on the parson, "and a bunch of Provence roses. It was June. Your sister always thought you dressed too gay, but you said to her, 'I guess I can wear what I want to, to-day of all times.'"

"We won't talk about her. Yes, I remember."

"And, as God is my witness, I couldn't feel solemn, I was so glad! I was a minister, and my girl—the girl that was going to marry me—sat down there where I could see her, dressed in white. I always thought of you afterwards with that white dress on. You've stayed with me all my life, just that way."

Mary Ellen put up her hand with a quick gesture to hide her middle-aged face. With a thought as quick, she folded it resolutely upon the other in her lap. "Yes, William," she said. "I was a girl then. I wore white a good deal."

But the parson hardly heeded her. He was far away. "Mary Ellen," he broke out suddenly, a smile running warmly over his face, and creasing his dry, hollow cheeks, "do you remember that other sermon, my trial one? I read it to you, and then I read it to Parson Sibley. And do you remember what he said?"

"Yes, I remember. I didn't suppose you did." Her cheeks were pink. The corners of her mouth grew exquisitely tender.

"You knew I did! 'Behold, thou art fair, my love; behold, thou art fair; thou hast doves' eyes.' I took that text because I couldn't think of anything else all summer. I remember now it seemed to me as if I was in a garden—always in a garden. The moon was pretty bright, that summer. There were more flowers blooming than common. It must have been a good year. And I wrote my sermon lying out in the pine woods, down where you used to sit hemming on your things. And I thought it was the Church, but do all I could, it was a girl—or an angel!"

"No, no!" cried Mary Ellen, in bitterness of entreaty.

"And then I read the sermon to you under the pines, and you stopped sewing, and looked off into the trees; and you said 't was beautiful. But I carried it to old Parson Sibley that night, and I can see just how he looked sitting there in his study, with his great spectacles pushed up on his forehead, and his hand drumming on a book. He had the dictionary put in a certain place on his table because he found he'd got used to drumming on the Bible, and he was a very particular man. And when I got through reading the sermon, his face wrinkled all up, though he didn't laugh out loud, and he came over to me and put his hand on my shoulder. 'William,' says he, 'you go home and write a doctrinal sermon, the stiffest you can. This one's about a girl. You might give it to Mary Ellen North for a wedding-present.'"

The parson had grown almost gay under the vivifying influence of memory. But Mary Ellen did not smile.

"Yes," she repeated softly, "I remember."

"And then I laughed a little, and got out of the study the best way I could, and ran over to you to tell you what he said. And I left the sermon in your work-basket. I've often wished, in the light of what came afterwards—I've often wished I'd kept it. Somehow 't would have brought me nearer to you."

It seemed as if she were about to rise from her chair, but she quieted herself and dulled the responsive look upon her face.

"Mary Ellen," the parson burst forth, "I know how I took what came on us the very next week, but I never knew how you took it. Should you just as lieves tell me?"

She lifted her head until it held a noble pose. Her eyes shone brilliantly, though indeed they were doves' eyes.

"I'll tell you," said she. "I couldn't have told you ten years ago,—no, nor five! but now it's an old woman talking to an old man. I was given to understand you were tired of me, and too honorable to say so. I don't know what tale was carried to you"—

"She said you'd say 'yes' to that rich fellow in Sudleigh, if I'd give you a chance!"

"I knew 't was something as shallow as that. Well, I'll tell you how I took it. I put up my head and laughed. I said, 'When William Bond wants to break with me, he'll say so.' And the next day you did say so."

The parson wrung his hands in an involuntary gesture of appeal.

"Minnie! Minnie!" he cried, "why didn't you save me? What made you let me be a fool?"

She met his gaze with a tenderness so great that the words lost all their sting.

"You always were, William," she said quietly. "Always rushing at things like Job's charger, and having to rush back again. Never once have I read that without thinking of you. That's why you fixed up an angel out of poor little Isabel."

The parson made a fine gesture of dissent. He had forgotten Isabel.

"Do you want to know what else I did?" Her voice grew hard and unfamiliar. "I'll tell you. I went to my sister Eliza, and I said: 'Some way or another, you've spoilt my life. I'll forgive you just as soon as I can—maybe before you die, maybe not. You come with me!' and I went up garret, where she kept the chest with things in it that belonged to them that had died. There it sets now. I stood over it with her. 'I'm going to put my dead things in here,' I said. 'If you touch a finger to 'em, I'll get up in meeting and tell what you've done. I'm going to put in everything left from what you've murdered; and every time you come here, you'll remember you were a murderer.' I frightened her. I'm glad I did. She's dead and gone, and I've forgiven her; but I'm glad now!"

The parson looked at her with amazement. She seemed on fire. All the smouldering embers of a life denied had blazed at last. She put on her glasses and walked over to the chest.

"Here!" she continued; "let's uncover the dead. I've tried to do it ever since she died, so the other things could be burned; but my courage failed me. Could you turn these screws, if I should get you a knife? They're in tight. I put 'em in myself, and she stood by."

The little lid of the till had been screwed fast. The two middle-aged people bent over it together, trying first the scissors and then the broken blade of the parson's old knife. The screws came slowly. When they were all out, he stood back a pace and gazed at her. Mary Ellen looked no longer alert and vivified. Her face was haggard.

"I shut it," she said, in a whisper. "You lift it up."

The parson lifted the lid. There they lay, her poor little relics,—a folded manuscript, an old-fashioned daguerreotype, and a tiny locket. The parson could not see. His hand shook as he took them solemnly out and gave them to her. She bent over the picture, and looked at it, as we search the faces of the dead. He followed her to the light, and, wiping his glasses, looked also.

"That was my picture," he said musingly. "I never've had one since. And that was mother's locket. It had"—He paused and looked at her.

"Yes," said Mary Ellen softly; "it's got it now." She opened the little trinket; a warm, thick lock of hair lay within, and she touched it gently with her finger. "Should you like the locket, because 't was your mother's?"

She hesitated; and though the parson's tone halted also, he answered at once:—

"No, Mary Ellen, not if you'll keep it. I should rather think 'twas with you."

She put her two treasures in her pocket, and gave him the other.

"I guess that's your share," she said, smiling faintly. "Don't read it here. Just take it away with you."

The manuscript had been written in the cramped and awkward hand of his youth, and the ink upon the paper was faded after many years. He turned the pages, a smile coming now and then.

"'Thou hast doves' eyes,'" he read,—"'thou hast doves' eyes!'" He murmured a sentence here and there. "Mary Ellen," he said at last, shaking his head over the manuscript in a droll despair, "it isn't a sermon. Parson Sibley had the rights of it. It's a love-letter!" And the two old people looked in each other's wet eyes and smiled.

The woman was the first to turn away.

"There!" said she, closing the lid of the chest; "we've said enough. We've wiped out old scores. We've talked more about ourselves than we ever shall again; for if old age brings anything, it's thinking of other people—them that have got life before 'em. These your rubbers?"

The parson put them on, with a dazed obedience. His hand shook in buckling them. Mary Ellen passed him his coat, but he noticed that she did not offer to hold it for him. There was suddenly a fine remoteness in her presence, as if a frosty air had come between them. The parson put the sermon in his inner pocket, and buttoned his coat tightly over it. Then he pinned on his shawl. At the door he turned.

"Mary Ellen," said he pleadingly, "don't you ever want to see the sermon again? Shouldn't you like to read it over?"

She hesitated. It seemed for a moment as if she might not answer at all. Then she remembered that they were old folks, and need not veil the truth.

"I guess I know it 'most all by heart," she said quietly. "Besides, I took a copy before I put it in there. Good-night!"

"Good-night!" answered the parson joyously. He closed the door behind him and went crunching down the icy path. When he had unfastened the horse and sat tucking the buffalo-robe around him, the front door was opened in haste, and a dark figure came flying down the walk.

"Mr. Bond!" thrilled a voice.

"Whoa!" called the parson excitedly. He was throwing back the robe to leap from the sleigh when the figure reached him. "Oh!" said he; "Isabel!"

She was breathing hard with excitement and the determination grown up in her mind during that last half hour of her exile in the kitchen.

"Parson,"—forgetting a more formal address, and laying her hand on his knee,—"I've got to say it! Won't you please forgive me? Won't you, please? I can't explain it"—

"Bless your heart, child!" answered the parson cordially; "you needn't try to. I guess I made you nervous."

"Yes," agreed Isabel, with a sigh of relief, "I guess you did." And the parson drove away.

Isabel ran, light of heart and foot, back into the warm sitting-room, where aunt Mary Ellen was standing just where he had left her. She had her glasses off, and she looked at Isabel with a smile so vivid that the girl caught her breath, and wondered within herself how aunt Mary Ellen had looked when she was young.

"Isabel," said she, "you come here and give me a corner of your apron to wipe my glasses. I guess it's drier 'n my handkerchief."

HORN O' THE MOON

If you drive along Tiverton Street, and then turn to the left, down the Gully Road, you journey, for the space of a mile or so, through a bewildering succession of damp greenery, with noisy brooks singing songs below you, on either side, and the treetops on the level with your horse's feet. Few among the older inhabitants ever take this drive, save from necessity, because it is conceded that the dampness there is enough, even in summer, to "give you your death o' cold;" and as for the young, to them the place wears an eerie look, with its miniature suggestion of impassable gulfs and roaring torrents. Yet no youth reaches his majority without exploring the Gully. He who goes alone is the more a hero; but even he had best leave two or three trusty comrades reasonably near, not only to listen, should he call, but to stand his witnesses when he afterwards declares where he has been. It is a fearsome thing to explore that lower stratum of this round world, so close to the rushing brook that it drowns your thoughts, though not your apprehensions, and to go slipping about over wet boulders and among dripping ferns; but your fears are fears of the spirit. They are inherited qualms. You shiver because your grandfathers and fathers and uncles have shivered there before you. If you are very brave indeed, and naught but the topmost round of destiny will content you, possibly you penetrate still further into green abysses, and come upon the pool where, tradition says, an ancient trout has his impregnable habitation. Apparently, nobody questions that the life of a trout may be indefinitely prolonged, under the proper conditions of a retired dusk; and the same fish that served our grandfathers for a legend now enlivens our childish days. When you meet a youngster, ostentatiously setting forth for the Gully Road, with bait-box and pole, you need not ask where he is going; though if you have any human sympathy in the pride of life, you will not deny him his answer:—

"Down to have a try for the old trout!"

The pool has been still for many years. Not within the memory of aged men has the trout turned fin or flashed a speckled side; but he is to this day an historical present. He has lived, and therefore he lives always.

Those who do not pause upon the Gully Road, but keep straight on into the open, will come into the old highway leading up and up to Horn o' the Moon. It is an unshaded, gravelly track, pointing duly up-hill for three long miles; and it has become a sober way to most of us, in this generation: for we never take it unless we go on the solemn errand of getting Mary Dunbar, that famous nurse, to care for our sick or dead. There is a tradition that a summer visitor once hired a "shay," and drove, all by herself, up to Horn o' the Moon, drawn on by the elusive splendor of its name. But she met such a dissuading flood of comment by the way as to startle her into the state of mind commonly associated with the Gully Road. Farmers, haying in the field, came forward, to lean on the fence, and call excitedly,—

"Where ye goin'?"

"Horn o' the Moon," replied she, having learned in Tiverton the value of succinct replies.

"Who's sick?"

"Nobody."

"Got any folks up there?"

"No. Going to see the place."

The effect of this varied. Some looked in amazement; one ventured to say, "Well, that's the beater!" and another dropped into the cabalistic remark which cannot be defined, but which has its due significance, "Well, you must be sent for!" The result of all this running commentary was such that, when the visitor reached the top of the hill where Horn o' the Moon lies, encircled by other lesser heights, she was stricken by its exceeding desolation, and had no heart to cast more than a glance at the noble view below. She turned her horse, and trotted, recklessly and with many stumblings, down again into friendly Tiverton.

Horn o' the Moon is unique in its melancholy. It has so few trees, and those of so meagre and wind-swept a nature, that it might as well be entirely bald. No apples grow there; and in the autumn, the inhabitants make a concerted sally down into Tiverton Street, to purchase their winter stock, such of them as can afford it. The poorer folk—and they are all poor enough—buy windfalls, and string them to dry; and so common is dried-apple-pie among them that, when a Tivertonian finds this makeshift appearing too frequently on his table, he has only to remark, "I should think this was Horn o' the Moon!" and it disappears, to return no more until the slur is somewhat outworn.

There is very little grass at the top of the lonely height, and that of a husky, whispering sort, in thin ribbons that flutter low little songs in the breeze. They never cease; for, at Horn o' the Moon, there is always a wind blowing, differing in quality with the season. Sometimes it is a sighing wind from other heights, happier in that they are sweet with firs. Sometimes it is exasperating enough to make the March breezes below seem tender; then it tosses about in snatching gusts, buffeting, and slapping, and excoriating him who stands in its way. Somehow, all the peculiarities of Horn o' the Moon seem referable, in a mysterious fashion, to the wind. The people speak in high, strenuous voices, striving to hold their own against its wicked strength. Most of them are deaf. Is that because the air beats ceaselessly against the porches of their ears? They are a stunted race; for they have grown into the habit of holding the head low, and plunging forward against that battling element. Even the fowl at Horn o' the Moon are not of the ordinary sort. Their feathers grow the wrong way, standing up in a ragged and disorderly fashion; and they, too, have the effect of having been blown about and disarranged, until nature yielded, and agreed to their permanent roughness.

Moreover, all the people are old or middle-aged and possibly that is why, again, the settlement is so desolate. It is a disgrace for us below to marry with Horn o' the Mooners, though they are a sober folk; and now it happens that everybody up there is the cousin of everybody else. The race is dying out, we say, as if we considered it a distinct species; and we agree that it would have been wiped away long ago, by weight of its own eccentricity, had not Mary Dunbar been the making of it. She is the one righteous among many. She is the good nurse whom we all go to seek, in our times of trouble, and she perpetually saves her city from the odium of the world.

Mary was born in Tiverton Street. We are glad to remember that, we who condemn by the wholesale, and are assured that no good can come out of Nazareth. When she was a girl of eighteen, her father and mother died; and she fell into a state of spiritual exaltation, wherein she dreamed dreams, and had periods of retirement within her house, communing with other intelligences. We said Mary had lost her mind; but that was difficult to believe, since no more wholesome type of womanhood had ever walked our streets. She was very tall, built on the lines of a beauty transcending our meagre strain. Nobody approved of those broad shoulders and magnificent arms. We said it was a shame for any girl to be so overgrown; yet our eyes followed her, delighted by the harmony of line and action. Then we whispered that she was as big as a moose, and that, if we had such arms, we never'd go out without a shawl. Her "mittins" must be wide enough for any man!

Mary did everything perfectly. She walked as if she went to meet the morning, and must salute it worthily. She carried a weight as a goddess might bear the infant Bacchus; and her small head, poised upon that round throat, wore the crown of simplicity, and not of pride. But we only told how strong she was, and how much she could lift. We loved Mary, but sensibility had to shrink from those great proportions and that elemental strength.

One snowy morning, Mary's spiritual vision called her out of our midst, to which she never came back save as we needed her. The world was very white that day, when she rose, in her still house, dressed herself hastily, and roused a neighbor, begging him to harness, and drive her up to Horn o' the Moon. Folks were sick there, with nobody to take care of them. The neighbor reasoned, and then refused, as one might deny a person, however beloved, who lives by the intuitions of an unseen world. Mary went home again, and, as he believed, to stay. But she had not hesitated in her allegiance to the heavenly voice. Somehow, through the blinding snow and unbroken road, she ploughed her way up to Horn o' the Moon, where she found an epidemic of diphtheria; and there she stayed. We marveled over her guessing how keenly she was needed; but since she never explained, it began to be noised abroad that some wandering peddler told her. That accounted for everything and Mary had no time for talk. She was too busy, watching with the sick, and going about from house to house, cooking delicate gruels and broiling chicken for those who were getting well. It is said that she even did the barn work, and milked the cows, during that tragic time. We were not surprised. Mary was a great worker, and she was fond of "creatur's."

Whether she came to care for these stolid people on the height, or whether the vision counseled her, Mary gave up her house in the village, and bought a little old dwelling under an overhanging hillside, at Horn o' the Moon. It was a nest built into the rock, its back sitting snugly there. The dark came down upon it quickly. In winter, the sun was gone from the little parlor as early as three o'clock; but Mary did not mind. That house was her temporary shell; she only slept in it in the intervals of hurrying away, with blessed feet, to tend the sick, and hold the dying in untiring arms. I shall never forget how, one morning, I saw her come out of the door, and stand silent, looking toward the rosy east. There was the dawn, and there was she, its priestess, while all around her slept. I should not have been surprised had her lips, parted already in a mysterious smile, opened still further in a prophetic chanting to the sun. But Mary saw me, and the alert, answering look of one who is a messenger flashed swiftly over her face. She advanced like the leader of a triumphal procession.

"Anybody want me?" she called. "I'll get my bunnit."

It was when she was twenty, and not more than settled in the little house at Horn o' the Moon, that her story came to her. The Veaseys were her neighbors, perhaps five doors away; and one summer morning, Johnnie Veasey came home from sea. He brought no money, no coral from foreign parts, nor news of grapes in Eshcol. He simply came empty-handed, as he always did, bearing only, to vouch for his wanderings, a tanned face, and the bright, red-brown eyes that had surely looked on things we never saw. Adam Veasey, his brother, had been paralyzed for years. He sat all day in the chimney corner, looking at his shaking hands, and telling how wide a swathe he could cut before he was afflicted. Mattie, Adam's wife, had long dealt with the problem of an unsupported existence. She had turned into a flitting little creature with eager eyes, who made it her business to prey upon a more prosperous world. Mattie never went about without a large extra pocket attached to her waist; into this, she could slip a few carrots, a couple of doughnuts, or even a loaf of bread. She laid a lenient tax upon the neighbors and the town below. Was there a frying of doughnuts at Horn o' the Moon? No sooner had the odor risen upon the air, than Mattie stood on the spot, dumbly insistent on her toll. Her very clothes smelled of food; and it was said that, in fly-time, it was a sight to see her walk abroad, because of the hordes of insects settling here and there on her odoriferous gown. When Johnnie Veasey appeared, Mattie's soul rose in arms. Their golden chance had come at last.

"You got paid off?" she asked him, three minutes after his arrival, and Johnnie owned, with the cheerfulness of those rich only in hope, that he did get paid, and lost it all, the first night on shore. He got into the wrong boarding-house, he said. It was the old number, but new folks.

Mattie acquiesced, with a sigh. He would make his visit and go again, and, that time, perhaps fortune might attend him. So she went over to old Mrs. Hardy's, to borrow a "riz loaf," and the wanderer was feasted, according to her little best.

Johnnie stayed, and Horn o' the Moon roused itself, finding that he had brought the antipodes with him. He was the teller of tales. He described what he had seen, and then, by easy transitions, what others had known and he had only heard, until the intelligence of these stunted, wind-blown creatures, on their island hill, took fire; and every man vowed he wished he had gone to sea, before it was too late, or even to California, when the gold craze was on. Johnnie had the tongue of the improvisator, and he loved a listener. He liked to sit out on a log, in the sparse shadow of the one little grove the hill possessed, and, with the whispering leaves above him tattling uncomprehended sayings brought them by the wind, gather the old men about him, and talk them blind. As he sat there, Mary came walking swiftly by, a basket in her hand. Johnnie came bolt upright, and took off his cap. He looked amazingly young and fine, and Mary blushed as she went by.

"Who's that?" asked Johnnie of the village fathers.

"That's only Mary Dunbar. Guess you ain't been here sence she moved up."

Johnnie watched her walking away, for the rhythm of her motion attracted him. He did not think her pretty; no one ever thought that.

It happened, then, that he spent two or three evenings at the Hardys', where Mary went, every night, to rub grandmother and put her to bed; and while she sat there in the darkened room, soothing the old woman for her dreary vigil, she heard his golden tales of people in strange lands. It seemed very wonderful to Mary. She had not dreamed there were such lands in all the world; and when she hurried home, it was to hunt out her old geography, and read it until after midnight. She followed rivers to their sources, and dwelt upon mountains with amazing names. She was seeing the earth and its fullness, and her heart beat fast.

Next day she went away for a long case, giving only one little sigh in the going, to the certainty that, when she came back, Johnnie Veasey would be off on another voyage to lands beyond the sea. Mary was not of the sort who cry for the moon just because they have seen it. She had simply begun to read a fairy tale, and somebody had taken it away from her and put it high on the shelf. But on the very first morning after her return, when she rose early, longing for the blissful air of her own bleak solitude, Mattie Veasey stood there at her door. Mary had but one first question for every comer:—

"Anybody sick?"

"You let me step in," answered Mattie, a determined foot on the sill. "I want to tell you how things stand."

It was evident that Mattie was going on a journey. She was an exposition of the domestic resources of Horn o' the Moon. Her dress came to the tops of her boots. It was the plaid belonging to Stella Hardy, who had died in her teens. It hooked behind; but that was no matter, for the enveloping shawl, belonging to old Mrs. Titcomb, concealed that youthful eccentricity. Her shoes—congress, with world-weary elastics at the side—were her own, inherited from an aunt; and her bonnet was a rusty black, with a mourning veil. There was, at that time, but one new bonnet at Horn o' the Moon, and its owner had sighed, when Mattie proposed for it, brazenly saying that she guessed nobody'd want anything that set so fur back. Whereupon the suppliant sought out Mrs. Pillsbury, whose mourning headgear, bought in a brief season of prosperity, nine years before, had become, in a manner, village property. It was as duly in public requisition as the hearse; and its owner cherished a melancholy pride in this official state. She never felt as if she owned it,—only that she was the keeper of a sacred trust; and Mattie, in asking for it, knew that she demanded no more than her due, as a citizen should. It was an impersonal matter between her and the bonnet; and though she should wear it on a secular errand, the veil did not signify. She knew everybody else knew whose bonnet it was; and that if anybody supposed she had met with a loss, they had only to ask, and she to answer. So, in the consciousness of an armor calculated to meet the world, she skillfully brought her congress boots into Mary's kitchen, and sat down, her worn little hands clasped under the shawl.

"You've just got home," said she. "I s'pose you ain't heard what's happened to Johnnie?"

Mary rose, a hand upon her chair.

"No! no! He don't want no nussin'. You set down. I can't talk so—ready to jump an' run. My! how good that tea does smell!"

Mary brought a cup, and placed it at her hand, with the deft manner of those who have learned to serve. Mattie sugared it, and tasted, and sugared again.

"My! how good that is!" she repeated. "You don't steep it to rags, as some folks do. I have to, we're so nigh the wind. Well, you hadn't been gone long before Johnnie had a kind of a fall. 'T wa'n't much of a one, neither,—down the ledge. I dunno how he done it—he climbs like a cat—seems as if the Old Boy was in it—but half his body he can't move. Palsy, I s'pose; numb, not shakin', like Adam's."

Mary listened gravely, her hands on her knees.

"How long's he been so?"

"Nigh on to five weeks."

"Had the doctor?"

"Yes, we called in that herb-man over to Saltash, an' he says there ain't no chance for him. He's goin' to be like Adam, only wuss. An' I've been down to the Poor Farm, to tell 'em they've got to take him in." Her little hands worked; her eager eyes ate their way into the heart. Mary could see exactly how she had had her way with the selectmen. "I told 'em they'd got to," she repeated. "He ain't got no money, an' we ain't got nuthin', an' have two paraletics on my hands I can't. So they told me they'd give me word to-day; an' I'm goin' down to settle it. I'm in hopes they'll bring me back, an' take him along down."

"Yes," answered Mary gravely. "Yes."

"Well, now I've come to the beginnin' o' my story." Mattie took that last delicious sip of tea at the bottom of the cup. "He's layin' in bed, an' Adam's settin' by the stove; an' I wanted to know if you wouldn't run in, long towards noon, an' warm up suthin' for 'em."

"Yes, indeed," said Mary Dunbar. "I'll be there."

She rose, and Mattie, albeit she dearly loved to gossip, felt that she must rise, too, and be on her way. She tried to amplify on what she had already said, but Mary did not seem to be listening; so, treading carefully, lest the dust and dew beset her precious shoes, she took her way down the hill, like a busy little ant, born to scurry and gather.

Mary looked hastily about the room, to see if its perfect order needed a farewell touch; and then she drank her cup of tea, and stepped out into the morning. The air was fresh and sweet. She wore no shawl, and the wind lifted the little brown rings on her forehead, and curled them closer. Mary held a hand upon them, and hurried on. She had no more thought of appearances than a woman in a desert land, or in the desert made by lack of praise; for she knew no one looked at her. To be clean and swift was all her life demanded.

Adam sat by the stove, where the ashes were still warm. It was not a day for fires, but he loved his accustomed corner. He was a middle-aged man, old with the suffering which is not of years, and the pathos of his stricken state hung about him, from his unkempt beard to the dusty black clothing which had been the Tiverton minister's outworn suit. One would have said he belonged to the generation before his brother.

"That you, Mary?" he asked, in his shaking voice. "Now, ain't that good? Come to set a spell?"

"Where is he?" responded Mary, in a swift breathlessness quite new to her.

"In there. We put up a bed in the clock-room."

It was the unfinished part of the house. The Veaseys had always meant to plaster, but that consummation was still afar. The laths showed meagrely; it was a skeleton of a room,—and, sunken in the high feather-bed between the two windows, lay Johnnie Veasey, his buoyancy all gone, his face quite piteous to see, now that its tan had faded. Mary went up to the bed-side, and laid one cool, strong hand upon his wrist. His eyes sought her with a wild entreaty; but she knew, although he seemed to suffer, that this was the misery of delirium, and not the conscious mind. Adam had come trembling to the door, and stood there, one hand beating its perpetual tattoo upon the wall. Mary looked up at him with that abstracted gaze with which we weigh and judge.

"He's feverish," said she. "Mattie didn't tell me that. How long's he been so?"

"I dunno. I guess a matter o' two days."

"Two days?"

"Well, it might be off an' on ever sence he fell." Adam was helpless. He depended upon Mattie, and Mattie was not there.

"What did the doctor leave?"

Adam looked about him. "'T was the herb doctor," he said. "He had her steep some trade in a bowl."

Mary Dunbar drew her hand away, and walked two or three times up and down the bare, bleak room. The seeking eyes were following her. She knew how little their distended agony might mean; but nevertheless they carried an entreaty. They leaned upon her, as the world, her sick world, was wont to lean. Mary was, in many things, a child; but her attitude had grown to be maternal. Suddenly she turned to Adam, where he stood, shaking and hesitating, in the doorway.

"You goin' to send him off?"

"'Pears as if that's the only way," shuffled Adam.

"To-day?"

"Well, I dunno's they'll come"—

Mary walked past him, her mind assured.

"There, that'll do," said she. "You set down in your corner. I'll be back byme-by."

She hurried out into the bleak world which was her home, and, at that moment, it looked very fair and new. The birds were singing, loudly as they ever sang up here where there were few leaves to nest in. Mary stopped an instant to listen, and lifted her face wordlessly to the clear blue sky. It seemed as if she had been given a gift. There, before one of the houses, she called aloud, with a long, lingering note, "Jacob!" and Jacob Pease rose from his milking-stool, and came forward. Jacob was tall and snuff-colored, a widower of three years' standing. There was a theory that he wanted Mary, and lacked the courage to ask her.

"That you, Mary Dunbar?" said he. "Anything on hand?"

"I want you to come and help me lift," answered Mary.

Jacob set down his milk pail, and followed her into the Veaseys' kitchen. She drew out the tin basin, and filled it at the sink.

"Wash your hands," said she. "Adam, you set where you generally do. You'll be in the way."

Jacob followed her into the sick-room, and Adam weakly shuffled in behind.

"For the land's sake!" he began, but Mary was at the head of the bed, and Jacob at the foot.

"I'll carry his shoulders," she said, in the voice that admits no demur. "You take his feet and legs. Sort o' fold the feather-bed up round him, or we never shall get him through the door."

"Which way?" asked Jacob, still entirely at rest on a greater mind.

"Out!" commanded Mary,—"out the front door."

Adam, in describing that dramatic moment, always declared that nobody but Mary Dunbar could have engineered a feather-bed through the narrow passage, without sticking midway. He recalled an incident of his boyhood when, in the Titcomb fire, the whole family had spent every available instant before the falling of the roof, in trying to push the second-best bed through the attic window, only to leave it there to burn. But Mary Dunbar took her patient through the doorway as Napoleon marched over the Alps; she went with him down the road toward her own little house under the hill. Only then did Adam, still shuffling on behind, collect his intelligence sufficiently to shout after her,—

"Mary, what under the sun be you doin' of? What you want me to tell Mattie? S'pose she brings the selec'men, Mary Dunbar!"

She made no reply, even by a glance. She walked straight on, as if her burden lightened, and into her own cave-like house and her little neat bedroom.

"Lay him down jest as he is," she said to Jacob. "We won't try to shift him to-day. Let him get over this."

Jacob stretched himself, after his load, put his hands in his pockets, and made up his mouth into a soundless whistle.

"Yes! well!" said he. "Guess I better finish milkin'."

Mary put her patient "to-rights," and set some herb drink on the back of the stove. Presently the little room was filled with the steamy odor of a bitter healing, and she was on the battlefield where she loved to conquer. In spite of her heaven-born instinct, she knew very little about doctors and their ways of cure. Earth secrets were hers, some of them inherited and some guessed at, and luckily she had never been involved in those greater issues to be dealt with only by an exalted science. Later in her life, she was to get acquainted with the young doctor, down in Tiverton Street, and hear from him what things were doing in his world. She was to learn that a hospital is not a slaughter house incarnadined with writhing victims, as some of us had thought. She was even to witness the magic of a great surgeon; though that was in her old age, when her attitude toward medicine had become one of humble thankfulness that, in all her daring, she had done no harm. To-day, she thought she could set a bone or break up a fever; and there was no doubt in her mind that, if other deeds were demanded of her, she should be led in the one true way. So she sat down by her patient, and was watching there, hopeful of moisture on his palm, when Mattie broke into the front room, impetuous as the wind. Mary rose and stepped out to meet her, shutting the door as she went. Passing the window, she saw the selectmen, in the vehicle known as a long-reach, waiting at the gate.

"Hush, Mattie!" said she, "you'll wake him."

Mattie, in her ill-assorted respectabilities of dress, seemed to have been involved but recently in some bacchanalian orgie. Her shawl was dragged to one side, and her bonnet sat rakishly. She was intoxicated with her own surprise.

"Mary Dunbar!" cried she, "I'd like to know the meanin' of all this go-round!"

"There!" answered Mary, with a quietude like that of the sea at ebb, "I can't stop to talk. I'll settle it with the selec'men. You come, too."

Mattie's eyes were seeking the bedroom. Leave her alone, and her feet would follow. "You come along," repeated Mary, and Mattie came.

When the three selectmen saw Mary Dunbar stepping down the little slope, they gathered about them all their official dignity. Ebenezer Tolman sat a little straighter than usual, and uttered a portentous cough. Lothrop Wilson, mild by nature, and rather prone to whiffling in times of difficulty, frowned, with conscious effort; but that was only because he knew, in his own soul, how loyally he loved the under-dog, let justice go as it might. Then there was Eli Pike, occupying himself in pulling a rein from beneath the horse's tail. These two hated warfare, and were nervously conscious that, should they fail in firmness, Ebenezer would deal with them. Mary went swiftly up to the wagon, and laid one hand upon the wheel.

"I've got John Veasey in my house," she began rapidly. "I can't stop to talk. He's pretty sick."

Ebenezer cleared his throat again.

"We understood his folks had put him on the town," said he.

Mattie made a little eager sound, and then stopped.

"He ain't on the town yet," said Mary. "He's in my bedroom. An' there he's goin' to stay. I've took this job." She turned away from them, erect in her decision, and went up the path. Eli Pike looked after her, with an understanding sympathy. He was the man who had walked two miles, one night, to shoot a fox, trapped, and left there helpless with a broken leg. Lothrop gazed straight ahead, and said nothing.

"Look here!" called Ebenezer. "Mary! Mary! you look here!"

Mary turned about at the door. She was magnificent in her height and dignity. Even Ebenezer felt almost ashamed of what he had to say; but still the public purse must be regarded.

"You can't bring in a bill for services," he announced. "If he's on the town, he'll have to go right into the Poorhouse with the rest."

Mary made no answer. She stood there a second, looking at him, and he remarked to Eli, "I guess you might drive on."

But Mattie, following Mary up to the house, to talk it over, tried the door in vain.

"My land!" she ejaculated, "if she ain't bolted it!" So the nurse and her patient were left to themselves.

As to the rest of the story, I tell it as we hear it still in Tiverton. At first, it was reckoned among the miracles; but when the new doctor came, he explained that it accorded quite honestly with the course of violated nature, and that, with some slight pruning here and there, the case might figure in his books. What science would say about it, I do not know; tradition was quite voluble.

It proved a very long time before Johnnie grew better, and in all those days Mary Dunbar was a happy woman. She stepped about the house, setting it in order, watching her charge, and making delicate possets for him to take. When the "herb-man" came, she turned him away from the door with a regal courtesy. It was not so much that she despised his knowledge, as that he knew no more than she, and this was her patient. The young doctor in Tiverton told her afterwards that she had done a dangerous thing in not calling in some accredited wearer of the cloth; but Mary did not think of that. She went on her way of innocence, delightfully content. And all those days, Johnnie Veasey, as soon as he came out of his fever, lay there and watched her with eyes full of a listless wonder. He was still in that borderland of helplessness where the unusual seems only a part of the new condition of things. Neighbors called, and Mary refused them entrance, with a finality which admitted no appeal.

"I've got sickness here," she would say, standing in the doorway confronting them. "He's too weak to see anybody. I guess I won't ask you in."

But one day, the minister appeared, his fat gray horse climbing painfully up from the Gully Road. It was a warm afternoon; and as soon as Mary saw him, she went out of her house, and closed the door behind her. When he had tied his horse, he came toward her, brushing the dust of the road from his irreproachable black. He was a new minister, and very particular. Mary shook hands with him, and then seated herself on the step.

"Won't you set down here?" she asked. "I've got sickness, an' I can't have talkin' any nearer. I'm glad it's a warm day."

The minister looked at the step, and then at Mary. He felt as if his dignity had been mildly assaulted, and he preferred to stand.

"I should like to offer prayer for the young man," he said. "I had hoped to see him."

Mary smiled at him in that impersonal way of hers.

"I don't let anybody see him," said she. "I guess we shall all have to pray by ourselves."

The minister was somewhat nettled. He was young enough to feel the slight to his official position; and moreover, there were things which his rigid young wife, primed by the wonder of the town, had enjoined upon him to say. He flushed to the roots of his smooth brown hair.

"I suppose you know," said he, "that you're taking a very peculiar stand."

Mary turned her head, to listen. She thought she heard her patient breathing, and her mind was with him.

"You seem," said the minister, "to have taken in a man who has no claim on you, instead of letting him stay with his people. If you are going to marry him, let me advise you to do it now, and not wait for him to get well. The opinion of the world is, in a measure, to be respected,—though only in a measure."

Mary had risen to go in, but now she turned upon him.

"Married!" she repeated; and then again, in a hushed voice,—"married!"

"Yes," replied the minister testily, standing by his guns, "married."

Mary looked at him a moment, and then again she moved away. She glanced round at him, as she entered the door, and said very gently, "I guess you better go now. Good-day."

She closed the door, and the minister heard her bolt it. He told his wife briefly, on reaching home, that there wasn't much chance to talk with Mary, and perhaps the less there was said about it the better.

But as Mary sat down by her patient's bed, her face settled into sadness, because she was thinking about the world. It had not, heretofore, been one of her recognized planets; now that it had swung her way, she marveled at it.

The very next night, while she was eating her supper in the kitchen, the door opened, and Mattie walked in. Mattie had been washing late that afternoon. She always washed at odd times, and often in dull weather her undried clothes hung for days upon the line. She was "all beat out," for she had begun at three, and steamed through her work, to have an early supper at five.

"There, Mary Dunbar!" cried she; "I said I'd do it, an' I have. There ain't a neighbor got into this house for weeks, an' folks that want you to go nussin' have been turned away. I says to Adam, this very afternoon, 'I'll be whipped if I don't git in an' see what's goin' on!' There's some will have it Johnnie's got well, an' drove away without saying good-by to his own folks, an' some say he ain't likely to live, an' there he lays without a last word to his own brother! As for the childern, they've got an idea suthin' 's been done to uncle Johnnie, an' you can't mention him but they cry."

Mary rose calmly and began clearing her table. "I guess I wouldn't mention him, then," said she.

A muffled sound came from the bedroom. It might have been laughter. Then there was a little crack, and Mary involuntarily looked at the lamp chimney. She hurried into the bedroom, and stopped short at sight of her patient, lying there in the light of the flickering fire. His face had flushed, and his eyes were streaming.

"I laughed so," he said chokingly. "She always makes me. And something snapped into place in my neck. I don't know what it was,—but I can move!"

He held out his hand to her. Mary did not touch it; she only stood looking at him with a wonderful gaze of pride and recognition, and yet a strange timidity. She, too, flushed, and tears stood in her eyes.

"I'll go and tell Mattie," said she, turning toward the door. "You want to see her?"

"For God's sake, no! not till I'm on my feet." He was still laughing. "I guess I can get up to-morrow."

Mary went swiftly out, and shut the door behind her.

"I guess you better not see him to-night," she said. "You can come in to-morrer. I shouldn't wonder if he'd be up then."

"I told Adam"—began Mattie, but Mary put a hand on her thin little arm, and held it there.

"I'd rather talk to-morrer," said she gently. "Don't you come in before 'leven; but you come. Tell Adam to, if he wants. I guess your brother'll be gettin' away before long." She opened the outer door, and Mattie had no volition but to go. "It's a nice night, ain't it?" called Mary cheerfully, after her. "Seems as if there never was so many stars."

Then she went back into the kitchen, and with the old thrift and exactitude prepared her patient's supper. He was sitting upright, bolstered against the head of the bed; and he looked like a great mischievous boy, who had, in some way, gained a long-desired prize.

"See here!" he called. "Tell me I can't get up to-morrow? Why, I could walk!"

They had a very merry time while he ate. Mary remembered that afterwards, with a bruised wonder that laughter comes so cheap. Johnnie talked incessantly, not any more of the wonders of the deep, but what he meant to do when he got into the world again.

"How'd I come here in your house, any way?" he asked. "Mattie and Adam put me here to get rid of me? Tell me all over again."

"I take care of folks, you know," answered Mary briefly. "I have, for more'n two years. It's my business."

Johnnie looked at her a moment, crimsoning as he tried to speak.

"What you goin' to ask?"

Mary started. Then she answered steadily,—

"That's all right. I don't ask much, anyway; but when folks don't have ready money, I never ask anything. There, you mustn't talk no more, even if you are well. I've got to wash these dishes."

She left him to his meditations, and only once more that evening did they speak together. When she came to the door, to say good-night, he was flat among his pillows, listening for her.

"Say!" he called, "you come in. No, you needn't unless you want to; but if ever I earn another cent of money, you'll see. And I ain't the only friend you've got. There's a girl down in Southport would do anything in the world for you, if she only knew."

Next morning, Johnnie walked weakly out of doors, despite his nurse's cautions; for, not knowing what had happened to him, she was in a wearying dark as to whether it might not happen again. After his breakfast, he got a ride with Jacob Pease, who was going down Sudleigh way, and Jacob came back without him. He bore a message, full of gratitude, to Mary. At Sudleigh, Johnnie had telegraphed, to find out whether the ship Firewing was still in port; and he had heard that he must lose no time in joining her. He should never forget what Mary had done for him. So Jacob said; but he was a man of tepid words, and perhaps he remembered the message too coldly.

When Mattie came over, that afternoon, to make her call, she found the house closed. Mary had gone on foot down into Tiverton, where old Mrs. Lamson, who was sick with a fever, lay still in need. It was many weeks before she came home again to Horn o' the Moon; and then Grandfather Sinclair had broken his leg, so that interest in her miracle became temporarily inactive.

Two years had gone when there came to her a little package, through the Tiverton mail. It was tied with the greatest caution, and directed in a straggling hand. Mary opened it just as she struck into the Gully Road, on her way home. Inside was a little purse, and three gold pieces. She paused there, under the branches, the purse in one hand, and the gold lying within her other palm. For a long time she stood looking at them, her face set in that patient sadness seen in those whose only holding is the past. It was all over and done, and yet it had never been at all. She thought a little about herself, and that was very rare, for Mary. She was not the poorer for what her soul desired; she was infinitely the richer, and she remembered the girl at Southport, not with the pang that once afflicted her heart, but with a warm, outrushing sense of womanly sympathy. If he had money, perhaps he could marry. Perhaps he was married now. Coming out of the Gully Road, she opened the purse again, and the sun struck richly upon the gold within. Mary smiled a little, wanly, but still with a sense of the good, human kinship in life.

"I won't ever spend 'em," she said to herself. "I'll keep 'em to bury me."

A STOLEN FESTIVAL

David Macy's house stood on the spur of a breezy upland at the end of a road. The far-away neighbors, who lived on the main highway and could see the passin', often thanked their stars that they had been called to no such isolation; you might, said they, as well be set down in the middle of a pastur'. They wondered how David's Letty could stand it. She had been married 'most a year, and before that she was forever on the go. But there! if David Macy had told her the sun rose in the west, she'd ha' looked out for it there every identical mornin'.

The last proposition had some color in it; for Letty was very much in love. To an impartial view, David was a stalwart fellow with clear gray eyes and square shoulders, a prosperous yeoman of the fibre to which America owes her being. But according to Letty he was something superhuman in poise and charm. David had no conception of his heroic responsibilities; nothing could have puzzled him more than to guess how the ideal of him grew and strengthened in her maiden mind, and how her after-worship exalted it into something thrilling and passionate, not to be described even by a tongue more facile than hers. Letty had a vivid nature, capable of responding to those delicate influences which move to spiritual issues. There were throes of love within her, of aspiration, of an ineffable delight in being. She never tried to understand them, nor did she talk about them; but then, she never tried to paint the sky or copy the robin's song. Life was very mysterious; but one thing was quite as mysterious as another. She did sometimes brood for a moment over the troubled sense that, in some fashion, she spoke in another key from "other folks," who did not appear to know that joy is not altogether joy, but three-quarters pain, and who had never learned how it brings its own aching sense of incompleteness; but that only seemed to her a part of the general wonder of things. There had been one strange May morning in her life when she went with her husband into the woods, to hunt up a wild steer. She knew every foot of the place, and yet one turn of the path brought them into the heart of a picture thrillingly new with the unfamiliarity of pure and living beauty. The evergreens enfolded them in a palpable dusk; but entrancingly near, shimmering under a sunny gleam, stood a company of birches in their first spring wear. They were trembling, not so much under the breeze as from the hurrying rhythm of the year. Their green was vivid enough to lave the vision in light; and Letty looked beyond it to a brighter vista still. There, in an opening, lay a bank of violets, springing in the sun. Their blue was a challenge to the skyey blue above; it pierced the sight, awaking new longings and strange memories. It seemed to Letty as if some invisible finger touched her on the heart and made her pause. Then David turned, smiling kindly upon her, and she ran to him with a little cry, and put her arms about his neck.

"What is it?" he asked, stroking her hair with a gentle hand. "What is it, little child?"

"Oh, it's nothin'!" said Letty chokingly. "It's only—I like you so!"

The halting thought had no purple wherein to clothe itself; but it meant as much as if she had read the poets until great words had become familiar, and she could say "love." He was the spring day, the sun, the blue of the sky, the quiver of leaves; and she felt it, and had a pain at her heart.

Now, on an autumn morning, David was standing within the great space in front of the barn, greasing the wheels preliminary to a drive to market; and Letty stood beside him, bareheaded, her breakfast dishes forgotten. She was a round thing, with quick movements not ordinarily belonging to one so plump; her black hair was short, and curled roughly, and there were freckles on her little snub nose. David looked up at her red cheeks and the merry shine of her eyes, and smiled upon her.

"You look pretty nice this mornin'," he remarked.

Letty gave a little dancing step and laughed. The sun was bright; there was a purple haze over the hills, and the nearer woods were yellow. The world was a jewel newly set for her.

"I am nice!" said she. "David, do you know our anniversary's comin' on? It's 'most a year since we were married,—a year the fifteenth."

David loosened the last wheel, and rose to look at her.

"Sho!" said he, with great interest. "Is that so? Well, 't was a good bargain. Best trade I ever made in my life!"

"And we've got to celebrate," said Letty masterfully. "I'll tell you how. I've had it all planned for a month. We'll get up at four, have our breakfast, ride over to Star Pond, and picnic all day long. We'll take a boat and go out rowin', and we'll eat our dinner on the water!"

David smiled back at her, and then, with a sudden recollection, pursed his lips.

"I'm awful sorry, Letty," he said honestly, "but I've got to go over to Long Pastur' an' do that fencin', or I can't put the cattle in there before we turn 'em into the shack. You know that fence was all done up in the spring, but that cussed breachy cow o' Tolman's hooked it down; an' if I wait for him to do it—well, you know what he is!"

"Oh, you can put off your fencin'!" cried Letty. "Only one day! Oh, you can!"

"I could 'most any other time," said David, with reason, "but here it is 'most Saturday, an' next week the thrashin'-machine's comin'. I'm awful sorry, Letty. I am, honest!"

Letty turned half round like a troubled child, and began grinding one heel into the turf. She was conscious of an odd mortification. It was not, said her heart, that the thing itself was so dear to her; it was only that David ought to want immeasurably to do it. She always put great stress upon the visible signs of an invisible bond, and she would be long in getting over her demand for the unreason of love.

David threw down the monkey-wrench, and put an arm about her waist.

"Come, now, you don't care, do you?" he asked lovingly. "One day's the same as another, now ain't it?"

"Is it?" said Letty, a smile running over her face and into her wet eyes. "Well, then, le's have Fourth o' July fireworks next Sunday mornin'!"

David looked a little hurt; but that was only because he was puzzled. His sense of humor wore a different complexion from Letty's. He liked a joke, and he could tell a good story, but they must lie within the logic of fun. Letty could put her own interpretation on her griefs, and twist them into shapes calculated to send her into hysterical mirth.

"You see," said David soothingly, "we're goin' to be together as long as we live. It ain't as if we'd got to rake an' scrape an' plan to git a minute alone, as it used to be, now is it? An' after the fencin' 's done, an' the thrashin', an' we've got nothin' on our minds, we'll take both horses an' go to Star Pond. Come, now! Be a good girl!"

The world seemed very quiet because Letty was holding silence, and he looked anxiously down at the top of her head. Then she relented a little and turned her face up to his—her rebellious eyes and unsteady mouth. But meeting the loving honesty of his look, her heart gave a great bound of allegiance, and she laughed aloud.

"There!" she said. "Have it so. I won't say another word. I don't care!"

These were David's unconscious victories, born, not of his strength or tyranny, but out of the woman's maternal comprehension, her lavish concession of all the small things of life to the one great code. She had taken him for granted, and thenceforth judged him by the intention and not the act.

David was bending to kiss her, but he stopped midway, and his arm fell.

"There's Debby Low," said he. "By jinks! I ain't more'n half a man when she's round, she makes me feel so sheepish. I guess it's that eye o' her'n. It goes through ye like a needle."

Letty laughed light-heartedly, and looked down the path across the lot. Debby, a little, bent old woman, was toiling slowly along, a large carpet-bag swinging from one hand. Letty drew a long breath and tried to feel resigned.

"She's got on her black alpaca," said she. "She's comin' to spend the day!"

David answered her look with one of commiseration, and, gathering up his wrench and oil, "put for" the barn.

"I'd stay, if I could do any good," he said hastily, "but I can't. I might as well stan' from under."

Debby threw her empty carpet-bag over the stone wall, and followed it, clambering slowly and painfully. Her large feet were clad in congress boots; and when she had alighted, she regarded them with deep affection, and slowly wiped them upon either ankle, a stork-like process at which David, safe in the barn, could afford to smile.

"If it don't rain soon," she called fretfully, "I guess you'll find yourselves alone an' forsaken, like pelicans in the wilderness. Anybody must want to see ye to traipse up through that lot as I've been doin', an' git their best clo'es all over dirt."

"You could ha' come in the road," said Letty, smiling. Letty had a very sweet temper, and she had early learned that it takes all sorts o' folks to make a world. It was a part of her leisurely and generous scheme of life to live and let live.

"Ain't the road dustier 'n the path?" inquired Debby contradictorily. "My stars! I guess 't is. Well, now, what do you s'pose brought me up here this mornin'?"

Letty's eyes involuntarily sought the bag, whose concave sides flapped hungrily together; but she told her lie with cheerfulness. "I don't know."

"I guess ye don't. No, I ain't comin' in. I'm goin' over to Mis' Tolman's, to spend the day. I'm in hopes she's got b'iled dish. You look here!" She opened the bag, and searched portentously, the while Letty, in some unworthy interest, regarded the smooth, thick hair under her large poke-bonnet. Debby had an original fashion of coloring it; and this no one had suspected until her little grandson innocently revealed the secret. She rubbed it with a candle, in unconscious imitation of an actor's make-up, and then powdered it with soot from the kettle. "I believe to my soul she does!" said Letty to herself.

But Debby, breathing hard, had taken something from the bag, and was holding it out on the end of a knotted finger.

"There!" she said, "ain't that your'n? Vianna said 't was your engagement ring."

Letty flushed scarlet, and snatched the ring tremblingly. She gave an involuntary look at the barn, where David was whistling a merry stave.

"Oh, my!" she breathed. "Where'd you find it?"

"Well, that's the question!" returned Debby triumphantly. "Where'd ye lose it?"

But Letty had no mind to tell. She slipped the ring on her finger, and looked obstinate.

"Can't I get you somethin' to put in your bag?" she asked cannily. Debby was diverted, though only for the moment.

"I should like a mite o' pork," she answered, lowering her voice and giving a glance, in her turn, at the barn. "I s'pose ye don't want him to know of it?"

"I should like to be told why!" flamed Letty, in an indignation disproportioned to its cause. Debby had unconsciously hit the raw. "Do you s'pose I'd do anything David can't hear?"

"Law, I didn't know," said Debby, as if the matter were of very little consequence. "Mis' Peleg Chase, she gi'n me a beef-bone, t' other day, an' she says, 'Don't ye tell him!' An' Mis' Squire Hill gi'n me a pail o' lard; but she hid it underneath the fence, an' made me come for 't after dark. I dunno how you're goin' to git along with men-folks, if ye offer 'em the whip-hand. They'll take it, anyways. Well, don't you want to know where I come on this ring?"

Letty had taken a few hasty steps toward the house. "Yes, I do," owned she, turning about. "Where was it?"

"Well, Sammy was in swimmin', an' he dove into the Old Hole, to see'f't had any bottom to 't. Vianna made him vow he wouldn't go in whilst he had that rash; but he come home with his shirt wrong side out, an' she made him own up. But he'd ha' told anyway, he was so possessed to show that ring. He see suthin' gleamin' on a willer root nigh the bank, an' he dove, an' there 't was. I told Sammy mebbe you'd give him suthin' for 't, an' he said there wa'n't nothin' in the world he wanted but a mite o' David's solder, out in the shed-chamber."

"He shall have it," said Letty hastily. "I'll get it now. Don't you say anything!" And then she knew she had used the formula she detested, and that she was no better than Mrs. Peleg Chase, or the wife of Squire Hill.

She ran frowning into the house, and down and up from kitchen to cellar. Presently she reappeared, panting, with a great tin pan borne before her like a laden salver. She set it down at Debby's feet, and began packing its contents into the yawning bag.

"There!" she said, working with haste. "There's the solder, all of it. And here's some of our sweet corn. We planted late."

Debby took an ear from the pan, and, tearing open the husk, tried a kernel with a critical thumb.

"Tough, ain't it?" she remarked, disparagingly. "Likely to be, this time o' year. Is that the pork?"

It was a generous cube, swathed in a fresh white cloth.

"Yes, it is," said Letty breathlessly, thrusting it in and shutting the bag. "There!"

"Streak o' fat an' streak o' lean?" inquired Debby remorselessly.

"It's the best we've got; that's all I can say. Now I've got to speak to David before he harnesses. Good-by!"

In a fever of impatience, she fled away to the barn.

"Well, if ever!" ejaculated Debby, lifting the bag and turning slowly about, to take her homeward path. "Great doin's, I say!" And she made no reply when Letty, prompted by a tardy conscience, stopped in the barn doorway and called to her, "Tell Sammy I'm much obliged. Tell him I shall make turn-overs to-morrow." Debby was thinking of the pork, and the likelihood of its being properly diversified.

Letty swept into the barn like a hurrying wind. The horses backed, and laid their ears flat, and David, grooming one of them, gentled him and inquired of him confidentially what was the matter.

"Oh, David, come out here! please come out!" called Letty breathlessly. "I've got to see you."

David appeared, with some wonderment on his face, and Letty precipitated herself upon him, mindless of curry-comb and horse-hairs and the fact that she was presently to do butter. "David," she cried, "I can't stand it. I've got to tell you. You know this ring?"

David looked at it, interested and yet perplexed.

"Seems if I'd seen you wear it," said he.

Letty gave way, and laughed hysterically.

"Seems if you had!" she repeated. "I've wore it over a year. There ain't a girl in town but knows it. I showed it to 'em all. I told 'em 't was my engagement ring."

David looked at it, and then at her. She seemed to him a little mad. He could quiet the horses, but not a woman, in so vague an exigency.

"What made you tell 'em that?" he asked, at a venture.

"Don't you see? There wasn't one of 'em that was engaged but had a ring—and presents, David—and they knew I never had anything, or I'd have showed 'em."

David was not a dull man; he had very sound views on the tariff, and, though social questions might thrive outside his world, the town blessed him for an able citizen. But he felt troubled; he was condemned, and it was the world's voice which had condemned him.

"I don't know's I ever did give you anything, Letty," he said, with a new pain stirring in his face. "I don't b'lieve I ever thought of it. It wasn't that I begrudged anything."

"Oh, my soul, no!" cried Letty, in an agony of her own. "I knew how 't was. It wa'n't your way, but they didn't know that. And I couldn't have 'em thinkin' what they did think, now could I? So I bought me—David, I bought me that high comb I used to wear, and—and a blue handkerchief—and a thimble—and—and—this ring. And I said you give 'em to me. And I trusted to chance for your never findin' it out. But I always hated the things; and as soon as we were married, I broke the comb, and burnt up the handkerchief, and hammered the thimble into a little wad, and buried it. But I didn't dare to stop wearin' the ring, for fear folks would notice. Then t' other day I felt so about it I knew the time had come, and I went down to the Old Hole and threw it in. And now that hateful Sammy's found it and brought it back, and I've sent him your solder, and Debby's promised me she wouldn't tell you about the pork, and I—I'm no better than the rest of 'em that lie and lie and don't let their men-folks know!" Letty was sobbing bitterly, and David drew her into his arms and laid his cheek down on her hair. His heart was aching too. They had all the passionate sorrow of children over some grief not understood.

"Why didn't you tell me?" he asked at length.

"When?" said Letty chokingly.

"Then—when folks expected things—before we were married."

"Oh, David, I couldn't!"

"No," said David sadly, "I s'pose you couldn't."

Letty had been holding one hand very tightly clenched. It was a plump hand, with deep dimples and firm, short fingers. She unclasped it, and stretched out toward him a wet, pink palm.

"There!" she said despairingly. "There's the ring."

Again David felt his inadequacy to the situation. "Don't you want to wear it?" he hesitated. "It's real pretty. What's that red stone?"

"I hate it!" cried Letty viciously. "It's a garnet. Oh, David, don't you ever let me set eyes on it again!"

David took it slowly from her hand. He drew out his pocket-book, opened it, and dropped the ring inside. "There!" he said, "I guess't won't do me no hurt to come acrost it once in a while." Then they kissed each other again, like two children; Letty's tears wet his face, and he felt them bitterer than if they had been his own.

But for Letty the air had cleared. Now, she felt, there was no trouble in her path. She had all the irresponsible joy of one who has had a secret, and feels the burden roll away. She was like Christian without his pack. She put her hands on David's shoulders, and looked at him radiantly.

"Oh, I'm so glad!" she cried. "I'm just as wicked as I was before; but it don't seem to make any difference, now you know it!"

Though David also smiled, he was regarding her with a troubled wonder. He never expected to follow these varying moods. They were like swallow-flights, and he was content to see the sun upon their wings. So he drove thoughtfully off, and Letty went back to her work with a singing heart. She was not quite sure that it was right to be happy again, all at once, but she could not still her blood. To be forgiven, to find herself free from the haunting consciousness that she could deceive the creature to whom she held such passionate allegiance—this was enough to shape a new heaven and a new earth. Her simple household duties took on the significance of noble ceremonies. She sang as she went about them, and the words were those of a joyous hymn. She seemed to be serving in a temple, making it clean and fragrant in the name of love.

Saturday was a day born of heavenly intentions. Letty ran out behind the house, where the ground rose abruptly, and looked off, entranced, into the blue distance. It was the stillest day of all the fall. Not a breath stirred about her; but in the maple grove at the side of the house, where the trees had turned early under the chill of an unseasonable night, yellow leaves were sifting down without a sound. Goldenrod was growing dull, clematis had ripened into feathery spray, and she knew how the closed gentians were painting great purple dashes by the side of the road. "Oh!" she cried aloud, in rapture. It was her wedding day; a year ago the sun had shone as warmly and benignantly as he was shining now, and the same haze had risen, like an exhalation, from the hills. She saw a special omen in it, and felt herself the child of happy fortune, to be so mothered by the great blue sky. Then she ran in to give David his breakfast, and tell him, as they sat down, that it was their wedding morning. As she went, she tore a spray of blood-red woodbine from the wall, and bound it round her waist.

But David was not ready for breakfast; he was talking with a man at the barn, and half an hour later came hurrying in to his retarded meal.

"I've got to eat an' run," said he; "Job Fisher kep' me. It's about that ma'sh. But the time wa'n't wasted. He'll sell ten acres for twenty dollars less'n he said last week. Too bad to keep you waitin'! You'd ought to eat yours while 't was hot."

Letty, with a little smile all to herself, sat demurely down and poured coffee; this was no time to talk of anniversaries. David ate in haste, and said good-by.

"I'm goin' down the lot to get my withes," said he. "Whilst I'm gone, you put me up a mite o' luncheon. I sha'n't lay off to come home till night."

"Oh, David!" said Letty, with a little cry. Then the same knowing smile crept over her face. "No, I sha'n't," added she willfully. "I'm goin' to bring it to you."

"Fetch me my dinner? Why, it's a mile and a half 'cross lots! I guess you won't!"

"You go right along, David," said Letty decisively. "I don't want to hear another word. I ain't seen the Long Pastur' this summer, and I'm comin'. Good-by!" She disappeared down the cellar stairs with the butter-plate poised on a pyramid of dishes, and David, having no time to argue, went off to his work.

About ten o'clock Letty took her way down to the Long Pasture; she was a very happy woman, and she could hold her happiness before her face, regarding it frankly and with a full delight. The material joys of life might seem to escape her; but she could have them, after all. The great universe, warm with sun and warm with love, was on her side. Even the day seemed something tangible in gracious being; and as Letty trudged along, her basket on her arm, she reasoned upon her own riches and owned she had enough. David was not like anybody else; but he was better than anybody else, and he was hers. Even his faults were dearer than other men's virtues. She heard the sound of his axe upon the stakes, breaking the lovely stillness with a significance lovelier still.

"David!" she called, long before reaching the little brook that runs beneath the bank, and he leaped the fence and came to meet her. "David!" she repeated, and looked up in his face with eyes so solemn and so full of light that he held her still a moment to look at her.

"Letty," he said, "you're real pretty!" And then they both laughed, and walked on together through the shade.

The day knit up its sweet, long minutes full of the serious beauty of the woods. David worked hard, and for a time Letty lingered near him; then she strayed away, and came back to him, from moment to moment, with wonderful treasures. Now it was cress from the spring, now a palm-full of partridge berries, or a cluster of checkerberry leaves for a "cud," or a bit of wood-sorrel. By and by the fall stillness gave out a breath of heat, and the sun stood high overhead. Letty spread out her dinner, and David made her a fire among the rocks. The smoke rose in a blue efflorescence; and with the sweet tang of burning wood yet in the air, they sat down side by side, drinking from one cup, and smiling over the foolish nothings of familiar talk. At the end of the meal, Letty took a parcel from the basket, something wrapped in a very fine white napkin. She flushed a little, unrolling it, and her eyes deepened.

"What's all this?" asked David, sniffing the air. "Fruit-cake?"

Letty nodded without looking at him; there was a telltale quivering in her face. She divided the cake carefully, and gave her husband half. David had lain back on a piny bank; and as he ate, his eyes followed the treetops, swaying a little now in a rhythmic wind. But Letty ate her piece as if it were sacramental bread. She put out her hand to him, and he stroked the short, faithful fingers, and then held them close. He smiled at her; and for a moment he mused again over that starry light in her eyes. Then his lids fell, and he had a little nap, while Letty sat and dreamed back over the hours, a year and more ago, when her mother's house smelled of spices, and this cake was baked for her wedding day.

When they went home again, side by side, the fencing was all done, and David had an after-consciousness of happy playtime. He carried the basket, with his axe, and Letty, like an untired little dog, took brief excursions of discovery here and there, and came back to his side with her weedy treasures. Once—was it something in the air?—he called to her:—

"Say, Letty, wa'n't it about this kind o' weather the day we were married?"

But Letty gave a little cry, and pointed out a frail white butterfly on a mullein leaf. "See there, David! how cold he looks! I'd like to take him along. He'll freeze to-night." David forgot his question, and she was glad. Some inner voice was at her heart, warning her to leave the day unspoiled. Her joy lay in remembering; it seemed a small thing to her that he should forget.

"We've had a real good time," he said, as he gave her the basket at the kitchen door. "Now, as soon as thrashin' 's done, we'll go to Star Pond."

After supper they covered up the squashes, for fear of a frost; and then they stood for a moment in the field, and looked at the harvest moon, risen in a great effrontery of splendor.

"Letty," asked David suddenly, "shouldn't you like to put on your little ring? It's right here in my pocket."

"No! no!" said Letty hastily. "I never want to set eyes on it again."

"I guess I'll get you another one 't you could wear. I looked t' other day when I went to market; but there was so many I didn't das't to make a choice unless you was with me."

Letty clung to him passionately. "Oh, David," she cried, with a break in her voice, "I don't want any rings. I want just you."

David put out one hand and softly touched the little blue kerchief about her head. "Anyway," he said, "we won't have any more secrets from one another, will we?"

Letty gave a little start, and she caught her breath before answering:—

"No, we won't—not unless they're nice ones!"

A LAST ASSEMBLING

This happened in what Dilly Joyce, in deference to a form of speech, was accustomed to call her young days; though really her spirit seemed to renew itself with every step, and her body was to the last a willing instrument. She lived in a happy completeness which allowed her to carry on the joys of youth into the maturity of years. But things did happen to her from twenty to thirty-five which could never happen again. When Dilly was a girl, she fell in love, and was very heartily and honestly loved back again. She had been born into such willing harmony with natural laws, that this in itself seemed to belong to her life. It partook rather of the faithfulness of the seasons than of human tragedy or strenuous overthrow. Even so early she felt great delight in natural things; and when her heart turned to Jethro Moore, she had no doubt whatever of the straightness of its path. She trusted all the primal instincts without knowing she trusted them. She was thirsty; here was water, and she drank. Jethro was a little older than she, the son of a minister in a neighboring town. His father had marked out his plan of life; but Jethro had had enough to do with the church on hot summer Sundays, when "fourthly" and "sixthly" lulled him into a pleasing coma, and when even the shimmer of Mrs. Chase's shot silk failed to awaken his deep eyes to their accustomed delight in fabric and color. To him, the church was a concrete and very dull institution: to his father, it was a city set on a hill, whence a shining path led direct to God's New Jerusalem. Therefore it was easy enough for the boy to say he preferred business, and that he wanted uncle Silas to take him into his upholstery shop; and he never, so long as he lived, understood his father's tragic silence over the choice. He had broken the succession in a line of priests; but it seemed to him that he had simply told what he wanted to do for a living. So he went away to the city, and news came flying back of his wonderful fitness for the trade. He understood colors, fabrics, design; he had been sent abroad for ideas, and finally he was dispatched to the Chicago house, to oversee the business there. Thus it was many years before Dilly met him again; but they remained honestly faithful, each from a lovely simplicity of nature, but a simplicity quite different in kind. Jethro did not grow rich very fast (uncle Silas saw to that), but he did prosper; and he was ready to marry his girl long before she owned herself ready to marry him. She took care of a succession of aged relatives, all afflicted by a strange and interesting diversity of trying diseases; and then, after the last death, she settled down, quite poor, in a little house on the Tiverton Road, and "went out nussin'," the profession for which her previous life had fitted her. With a careless generosity, she made over to her brother the old farmhouse where they were born, because he had a family and needed it. But he died, and was soon followed by his wife and child; and now Dilly was quite alone with the house and the family debts. The time had come, wrote Jethro, for them to marry. She was free, at last, and he had enough. Would she take him, now? Dilly answered quite frankly and from a serenity born of faith in the path before her and a certainty that no feet need slip. She was ready, she wrote. She hoped he was willing she should sell the old place, to pay Tom's debts. That would leave her without a cent; but since he was coming for her, and she needn't go to Chicago alone, she didn't know that there was anything to worry about. He would buy her ticket. There was an ineffable simplicity about Dilly. She had no respect whatever for money, save as a puzzling means to a few necessary ends. And now the place had been sold, and Jethro was coming in a month. Meanwhile Dilly was to pack up the few family effects she could afford to keep, and the rest would go by auction.

Little as she was accustomed to dread experiences which came in the inevitable order of nature, she did think of the last day and night in the old house as something of an ordeal. People felt that the human meant very little to Dilly; but that was not true. It was only true that she held herself remote from personal intimacies; but all the fine, invisible bonds of race and family took hold of her like irresistible factors, and welded her to the universe anew.

As she started out from her little house, this summer morning, and began her three-mile walk to the old homestead, she felt as if some solemn event in her life were about to happen; her heart beat higher, and brought about the suffocating feeling of a hand laid upon the throat. She was a slight creature, with a delicate face and fine black hair. Her slender body seemed all made for action, and the poise of an assured motion dwelt in it and wrapped about its angularity like a gracious charm. She was walking down a lane, her short skirts brushed by the morning dew. She chose to go 'cross lots, not because in this case it was nearer than the road, but because it seemed impossible to go another way. Yet never in her life had she seen less of the outward garment of things than she was seeing this morning. A flouting bobolink flew from stake to stake in front of her, and bubbled out in melody. She heard a scythe swishing in a neighboring field, and the musical call of the mowing-machine afar, and she did not look up. Dumb to the beautiful outer world, she was broad awake to human souls: the souls of the Joyces, alive so long before her and stretching back into an unknown past. They had lived, one after another, in the old house, since colonial times; and now, after this quiet act of a concluding drama, Dilly was going to lower the curtain, and sweep them from the stage.

Her mind was peopled with figures. She thought of Jethro, too. He seemed to be coming ever nearer and nearer. She could hear his tread marching into her life, and could see his face. It was very moving, as she remembered it. A long line of scholarly forbears had dowered him with a refinement and grace quite startling in this unornamented spot, and some old Acadian ancestor had lent him beauty. His eyes were dark, and they held an unfathomable melancholy. The line of his forehead and nose ran haughtily and yet delicate; and even after years of absence, Dilly sometimes caught her breath when she thought of the way his head was set upon his shoulders. She had never in her life seen a man or woman who was entirely beautiful, and he saturated her longing like a prodigal stream.

She was a little dazed when she climbed the low stone wall, crossed the road, and came into the grassy wilderness of the Joyce back yard. Nature had triumphed riotously, as she will when niggardly thrift is away. The grass lay rich and shining, lodged by last night's shower, and gate and cellar-case were choked by it. The cinnamon roses bloomed in a spicy hardiness of pink, and the gnarled apple-trees had shed their broken branches, and were covered with little green buttons of fruit. Dilly stopped to look about her, and her eyes filled. The tears were hot; they hurt her, and so recalled her to the needs of life.

"There!" she said, "I mustn't do so!"—and she walked straight forward through the open shed, and fitted her key in the lock. The door sagged; but she pushed it open and stepped in. The deserted kitchen lay there in desolate order, and the old Willard clock slept upon the wall. Dilly hastily pushed a chair before it (this was the only chair old Daniel Joyce would allow the children to climb in) and wound the clock. It began ticking slowly, with the old, remembered sound. Somehow it seemed beautiful to Dilly that the clock should speak with the voice of all those years agone; it was a kind of loyalty which appealed to the soul like a piercing miracle. Then she ran through to the sitting-room, and started the old eight-day in the corner; and the house breathed and was alive again. She threw open the windows, all save those on the Dilloway side (lest kindly neighbors should discover she was at home), and the soft rose-scented air flooded the rooms like an invisible presence, and bore out the smell of age upon gracious wings. Now, Dilly worked fast and steadily, lest some human thing should come upon her. She tied up bedclothes, and opened long-closed cupboards. She made careful piles of clothing from the attic; and finally, her mind a little tired, she sat down on the floor and began looking over papers and daguerreotypes from her father's desk. Just as she had lost herself in the ancient history of which they were the signs, there came a knock at the back door. So assured had become her idea of a continued housekeeping, that the summons did not seem in the least strange. The house lived again; it had thrown open its arms to human kind.

"Come in!" she called; and a light step sounded in the kitchen and crossed the sill. It was a man, dark-eyed and very handsome. "Oh!" murmured Dilly, catching her breath and holding both hands clasped upon the papers in her lap. "Jethro!"

The stranger was much moved, and his black eyes deepened. He looked at her kindly, perhaps lovingly, too. "Yes," he said, at last. "So you'd know me?"

Dilly got lightly up, and the papers fell about her in a shower; yet she made no motion toward him. "Oh, yes," she said softly, "I should know you. You ain't changed at all."

That was not true. He looked ten years older than his real age; yet time had only dowered him with a finer grace and charm. All the lines in his face were those of gentleness and truth. His mouth had the old delicate curves. One meeting him that day might have said, with a throb of involuntary homage, "How beautiful he must have been when he was young!" But to Dilly he bore even a more subtile distinction than in that far-away time; he had ripened into something harmonizing with her own years. He came forward a little, and held out both hands; but Dilly did not take them, and he dropped the left one. Then she laid her fingers lightly in his, and they greeted each other like old acquaintances. A flush rose in her smooth brown cheek. Her eyes grew bright with that startled questioning which is of the woods. He looked at her the more intently, and his breath quickened. She had none of the blossomy charm of more robust womanhood; but he recognized the old gypsy element which had once bewitched him, and felt he loved her still.

"Well," he said, and his voice shook a little, "are you glad to see me?"

Dilly moved back, and sat down in her mother's little sewing-chair by the desk. "I don't know as I can tell," she answered. "This is a strange day."

Jethro nodded. "I meant to surprise you," he said. "So I never wrote I was coming on so soon. I was real disappointed to find your house shut up; but the neighbors told me where you'd gone, and what you'd gone for. Then I walked over here."

Dilly's face brightened all over with a responsive smile. "Did you come through the woods?" she asked. "What made you?"

"Why, I knew you'd go that way," he answered. "I thought you'd get wool-gathering over some weed or another, and maybe I'd overtake you."

They both laughed, and the ice was broken. Dilly got briskly up and gathered a drawer-full of papers into her apron.

"I can't stop workin'," she said. "I want to fix it so's not to stay here more'n one night. Now you talk! I know what these are. I can run 'em over an' listen too."

"I think't was real good of you to turn in the place to Tom's folks," said Jethro, also seating himself, and, as Dilly saw with a start, as if it were an omen, in her father's great chair. "Not that you'll ever need it, Dilly. You won't want for a thing. I've done real well."

Dilly's long fingers assorted papers and laid them at either side, with a neat precision. She looked up at him then, and her eyes had again the quick, inquiring glance of some wild creature in a situation foreign to its habits.

"Well," she said, "well! I guess I don't resk anything. An' if I did—why, I'd resk it!"

Jethro bent forward a little. He was smiling, and Dilly met the glance, half fascinated. She wondered that she could forget his smile; and yet she had forgotten it. Like running water, it was never twice the same.

"Dilly," said he, much moved, "you'll have a good time from this out, if ever a woman did. You'll keep house in a brick block, where the cars run by your door, and you can hire two girls."

"Oh, my!" breathed Dilly. A quick look of trouble darkened her face, as a shadow sweeps across the field.

"What is it?" asked Jethro, in some alarm. "Don't you like what I said?"

Dilly smiled, though her eyes were still apprehensive.

"It ain't that," she answered slowly, striving in her turn to be kind. "Only I guess I never happened to think before just how't would be. I never spec'lated much on keepin' house."

"But somebody'd have to keep it," said Jethro good-naturedly, smiling on her. "We can get good help. You'll like to have a real home table, and you can invite company every day, if you say so. I never was close, Dilly,—you know that. I sha'n't make you account for things."

Dilly got up, and, still holding her papers in her apron, walked swiftly to the window. There she stood, a moment, looking out into the orchard, where the grass lay tangled under the neglected, happy trees. Her eyes traveled mechanically from one to another. She knew them all. That was the "sopsyvine," its red fruitage fast coming on; there was the Porter she had seen her father graft; and down in the corner grew the August sweet. Life out there looked so still and sane and homely. She knew no city streets,—yet the thought of them sounded like a pursuit. She turned about, and came back to her chair.

"I guess I never dreamt how you lived, Jethro," she said gently. "But it don't make no matter. You're contented with it."

"I ain't a rich man," said Jethro, with some quiet pride; "but I've got enough. Yes, I like my business; and city life suits me. You'll fall in with it, too."

Then silence settled between them; but that never troubled Dilly. She was used to long musings on her walks to and from her patients, and in her watching beside their beds. Conversation seemed to her a very spurious thing when there is nothing to say.

"What you thinking about?" he asked suddenly.

Dilly looked up at him with her bright, truth-telling glance. "I was thinkin'," she answered, with a clarity never ruthless, because it was so sweet,—"I was thinkin' you make me homesick, somehow or another."

Jethro looked at her doubtfully, and then, as she smiled at him, he smiled also.

"I don't believe it's me," he said, confidently. "It's because you're going over things here. It's the old house."

"Maybe," said Dilly, nodding and tying her last bundle of papers. "But I don't know. I never had quite such feelin's before. It's the nearest to bein' afraid of anything I've come acrost. I guess I shall have to run out into the lot an' take my bearin's."

Jethro got up, put his hands in his pockets, and walked about the room. He was very gentle, but he did at heart cherish the masculine theory that the unusual in woman is never to be judged by rules.

"But it is a queer kind of a day," owned Dilly, pushing in the last drawer. "Why, Jethro!" She faced him, and her voice broke in excitement. "You don't know, I ain't begun to tell you, how queer it seems to me. Why, I've dreaded this day for weeks! but when it come nigh, it begun to seem to me like a joyful thing. I felt as if they all knew of it: them that was gone. It seemed as if they stood 'round me, ready to uphold me in what I was doin'. I shouldn't be surprised if they were all here now. I don't feel a mite alone."

Her voice shook with excitement; her eyes were big and black. Jethro came up to her, and laid a kindly hand on her shoulder. It was a fine hand, long and shapely, and Dilly, looking down at it, remembered, with a strange regretfulness, how she had once loved its lines.

"There, poor girl!" he said, "you're tired thinking about it. No wonder you've got fancies. I guess the ghosts won't trouble us. There's nothing here worse than ourselves." And again, in spite of the Joyces, Dilly felt homesick and alone.

There came a soft thudding sound upon the kitchen floor, and she turned, alert, to listen. This was Mrs. Eli Pike in her carpet slippers; she had stood so much over soap-making that week that her feet had taken to swelling. She was no older than Dilly, but she had seemed matronly in her teens. She looked very large, as she padded forward through the doorway, and her pink face and double chin seemed to exude kindliness as she came.

"There, Dilly Joyce! if this ain't jest like you!" she exclaimed. "Creep in here an' not let anybody know! Why, Jethro, that you? Recognize you! Well, I guess I should!"

She included them both in a neighborly glance, and Dilly was very grateful. Yet it seemed to her that now, at last, she might break down and cry. The tone of olden friendliness was hard to bear, when no other voices answered. She could endure the silent house, but not the intercourse of a life so sadly changed.

"There!" continued Mrs. Pike, with a nod, "I guess I know! You're tired to pieces with this pickin' and sortin', an' you're comin' over to dinner, both on ye. Eli's dressed a hin. I had to wring her neck. He wouldn't ha' done it; you know that, Dilly! An' I've been beatin' up eggs. Now don't you say one word. You be there by twelve. Jethro, you got a watch? You see 't she starts, now!" And Mrs. Pike marched away victorious, her apron over her head, and waving one hand before her as she went. She had once been stung by bees, on just such a morning as this, and she had a set theory that they infested all strange dooryards.

Dilly felt as if even the Joyces could not save her day in its solemn significance unless, indeed, they should appear in their proper persons. She thought of her bread and butter and boiled eggs, lying in her little bundle, and the simple meal seemed as unattainable as if it were some banquet dreamed of in delirium. It was of one piece with cars going by the house, and two maid-servants to correct. To Dilly, a car meant a shrieking monster propelled by steam: yet not even that drove her to such insanity of revulsion as the two servants. They alone made her coming life seem like one eternal school, with the committee ever on the platform, and no recess. But she worked very meekly and soberly, and Jethro took off his coat and helped her; then, just before twelve, they washed their hands and went across the orchard to Mrs. Pike's.

The rest of the day seemed to Dilly like a confused though not an unfamiliar dream. She knew that the dinner was very good, and that it choked her, so that Mrs. Pike, alert in her first pride of housekeeping, was quite cordially harsh with her for not eating more; and that Jethro talked about Chicago; and Eli Pike, older than his wife and graver, said "Do tell!" now and again, and seemed to picture in his mind the outlines of city living. She escaped from the table as soon as possible, under pretext of the work to be done, and slipped back to the empty house; and there Jethro found her, and began helping her again.

The still afternoon settled down in its grooves of beauty, and its very loveliness gave Dilly a pain at the heart. She remembered that this was the hour when her mother used to yawn over her long seam, or her knitting, and fall asleep by the window, while the bees droned outside in the jessamine, and a humming-bird—there had always been one, year after year, and Dilly could never get over the impression that it was the same bird—hovered on his invisible perch and thrilled his wings divinely. Then the day slipped over an unseen height, and fell into a sheltered calm. The work was not done, and they had to go over to Mrs. Pike's again to supper, and to spend the night. Dilly longed to stretch herself on the old kitchen lounge in her own home; but Mrs. Pike told her plainly that she was crazy, and Jethro, with a kindly authority, bade her yield. And because words were like weapons that returned upon her to hurt her anew, she did yield, and talked patiently to one and another neighbor as they came in to see Jethro, and to inquire when he meant to be married.

"Soon," said Jethro, with assurance. "As soon as Dilly makes up her mind."

All that evening, Eli Pike sat on the steps, where he could hear the talk in the sitting-room without losing the whippoorwill's song from the Joyce orchard, and Dilly longed to slip out and sit quietly beside him. He would know. But she could only be civil and grateful, and when half past eight came, take her lamp and go up to bed. Jethro was given the best chamber, because he had succeeded and came from Chicago; but Dilly had a little room that looked straight out across the treetops down to her own home.

At first, after closing the door behind her, she felt only the great blessedness of being alone. She put out the light and threw herself, as she was, face downwards on the bed. There she lay for long moments, suffering; and this was one of the few times in her life when she was forced to feel that human pain which is like a stab in the heart. For she was one of those wise creatures who give themselves long spaces of silence, and so heal them quickly of their wounds, like the sage little animals that slip away from combat, to cure their hurt with leaves. Presently, a great sense of rest enfolded her, a rest ineffably precious because it was so soon to be over. It was like great riches lent only for a time. Outside this familiar quiet was the world, thrilled by a terrifying life pressing upon her and calling. She longed to put her hands before her eyes, and shut out the possibility of meeting its garish glory; she did cover her ears, lest its cry should pierce them and she could not resist. And so she lay there shivering, until a strange inviting that was peace and not commotion seemed to approach her from another side, and her inner self became conscious of unheard voices. They were not clamorous, but sweet, and they drowned her will, and drew her to themselves. She got softly up, and, going to the darkened window, looked out across the orchard. There, in the greenness, lay the old house. It called on her to come. It seemed to Dilly that she could not make haste enough to be there. She slipped softly down the narrow stairway, and across the kitchen, where the shadows of the moonlit windows lay upon the floor. A great excitement thrilled her blood; and though quite safe from discovery, she was not wholly at ease until she had entered the orchard path, and knew her feet were wet with dew, and heard the whippoorwill, so near now that she might have startled him from his neighboring tree. No other bird note could have fitted her mood so well. The wild melancholy of his tone, his home in the night, and the omens blended with his song seemed to remove him from the world as she herself was removed; and she hastened on with a fine exaltation, fitted her key again in the lock, and shut the door behind her.

As soon as Dilly had entered the sitting-room, where the old desk stood in its place, and the clock was ticking, she felt as if all her confusion and trouble were over. She smiled to herself in the darkness. She had come home, and it was very good. They had begun with the attic, in their rearranging, and this room remained unchanged. It had been her wish to keep it, in its sweet familiarity, unaltered till the last. She drew forward her father's chair, and sat down in it, with luxurious abandonment, to rest. Her mother's little cricket was by her side, and she put her feet on it and exhaled a long sigh of content. Her eyes rested on the dark cavern which was the fireplace; and there fell upon her a sweet sense of completed bliss, as if it were alight and she could watch the dancing flames. And suddenly Dilly was aware that the Joyces were all about her.

She had been sure, in her coming through the woods, that they knew and cared; now she was certain that, in some fashion, they recognized their bondage and loyalty to the place, as she recognized her own, and that they upheld her to her task. She thought them over, as she sat there, and saw their souls more keenly than if she had met them, men and women, face to face. There was the shoe-maker among them, who, generations back, was sitting on his bench when news came of the battle of Lexington, and who threw down hammer and last, and ran wildly out into the woods, where he stayed three days and nights, calling with a loud voice upon Almighty God to save him from ill-doing. Then he had drowned himself in a little brook too shallow for the death of any but a desperate man. He had been the disgrace of the Joyces; they dared not think of him, and they know, even to this day, that he is remembered among their townsmen as the Joyce who was a coward, and killed himself rather than go to war. But here he stood—was it the man, or some secret intelligence of him?—and Dilly, out of all his race, was the one to comprehend him. She saw, with a thrill of passionate sympathy, how he had believed with all his soul in the wickedness of war, and how the wound to his country so roused in him the desire of blood that he fled away and prayed his God to save him from mortal guilt,—and how, finding that he saw with an overwhelming delight the red of anticipated slaughter, and knew his traitorous feet were bearing him to the ranks, he chose the death of the body rather than sin against the soul. And Dilly was glad; the blood in her own veins ran purer for his sake.

There was old Delilah Joyce, who went into a decline for love, and wasted quite away. She had been one of those tragic fugitives on the island of being, driven out into the storm of public sympathy to be beaten and undone; for she was left on her wedding day by her lover, who vowed he loved her no more. But now Dilly saw her without the pathetic bravery of her silken gown which was never worn, and knew her for a woman serene and glad. That very day she had unfolded the gown in the attic, where it had lain, year upon year, wrapped about by the poignant sympathy of her kin, a perpetual reminder of the hurts and faithlessness of life. It had become a relic, set aside from modern use. She felt now as if she could even wear it herself, though silk was not for her, or deck some little child in its shot and shimmering gayety. For it came to her, with a glad rush of acquiescent joy, that all his life, the man, though blinded by illusion, had been true to her whom he had left; and that, instead of being poor, she was very rich. It was from that moment that Dilly began to understand that the soul does not altogether weld its own bonds, but that they lie in the secret core of things, as the planet rushes on its appointed way.

There was Annette Joyce, who married a Stackpole, and, to the disgust of her kin, clung to him through one debauch after another, until the world found out that Annette "couldn't have much sense of decency herself, or she wouldn't put up with such things." But on this one night Dilly found out that Annette's life had been a continual laying hold of Eternal Being, not for herself, but for the creature she loved; that she had shown the insolence and audacity of a thousand spirits in one, besieging high heaven and crying in the ear of God: "I demand of Thee this soul that Thou hast made." And somehow Dilly knew now that she was of those who overcome.

So the line stretched on, until she was aware of souls of which she had never heard; and she knew that, faulty as their deeds might be, they had striven, and the strife was not in vain. She felt herself to be one drop in a mighty river, flowing into the water which is the sum of life; and she was content to be absorbed in that great stream. There was human comfort in the moment, too; for all about her were those whom she had seen with her bodily eyes, and their presence brought an infinite cheer and rest. Dilly felt the safety of the universe; she smiled lovingly over the preciousness of all its homely ways. She thought of the twilights when she had sat on the doorstone, eating huckleberries and milk, and seeing the sun drop down the west; she remembered one night when her little cat came home, after it had been lost, and felt the warm touch of its fur against her hand. She saw how the great chain of things is held by such slender links, and how there is nothing that is not most sacred and most good. The hum of summer life outside the window seemed to her the life in her own veins, and she knew that nothing dwells apart from anything else, and that, whether we wot of it or not, we are of one blood.

The night went on to that solemn hush that comes before the dawn. Dilly felt the presence of the day, and what it would demand of her; but now she did not fear. For Jethro, too, had been with her; and at last she understood his power over her and could lay it away like a jewel in a case, a precious thing, and yet not to be worn. She saw him, also, in his stream of being, as she was swept along through hers, and knew how that old race had given him a beauty which was not his, but theirs,—and how, in the melancholy of his eyes, she loved a soul long passed, and in the wonder of his hand the tender lines of other hands, waving to fiery action. He was an inheritor; and she had loved, not him, but his inheritance.

Now it was the later dusk of night, and the cocks crowed loudly in a clear diminuendo, dying far away. Dilly pressed her hands upon her eyes, and came awake to the outer world. She looked about the room with a warm smile, and reviewed, in feeling, her happy night. It was no longer hard to dismantle the place. The room, the house, the race were hers forever; she had learned the abidingness of what is real. When she closed the door behind her, she touched the casing as if she loved it, and, crossing the orchard, she felt as if all the trees could say: "We know, you and we!"

As she entered the Pike farmyard, Eli was just going to milking, with clusters of shining pails.

"You're up early," said he. "Well, there's nothin' like the mornin'!"

"No," answered Dilly, smiling at him with the radiance of one who carries good news, "except night-time! There's a good deal in that!" And while Eli went gravely on, pondering according to his wont, she ran up to smooth her tumbled bed.

After breakfast, while Mrs. Pike was carrying away the dishes, Dilly called Jethro softly to one side.

"You come out in the orchard. I want to speak to you."

Her voice thrilled with something like the gladness of confidence, and Jethro's own face brightened. Dilly read that vivid anticipation, and caught her breath. Though she knew it now, the old charm would never be quite gone. She took his hand and drew him forward. She seemed like a child, unaffected and not afraid. Out in the path, under the oldest tree of all, she dropped his hand and faced him.

"Jethro," she said, "we can't do it. We can't get married."

He looked at her amazed. She seemed to be telling good news instead of bad. She gazed up at him smilingly. He could not understand.

"Don't you care about me?" he asked at length, haltingly; and again Dilly smiled at him in the same warm confidence.

"Oh, yes," she said eagerly. "I do care, ever and ever so much. But it's your folks I care about. It ain't you. I've found it all out, Jethro. Things don't al'ays belong to us. Sometimes they belong to them that have gone before; an' half the time we don't know it."

Jethro laid a gentle hand upon her arm. "You're all tired out," he said soothingly. "Now you give up picking over things, and let me hire somebody. I'll be glad to."

But Dilly withdrew a little from his touch. "You're real good, Jethro," she answered steadily. She had put aside her exaltation, and was her old self, full of common-sense and kindly strength. "But I don't feel tired, an' I ain't a mite crazed. All you can do is to ride over to town with Eli—he's goin' after he feeds the pigs—an' take the cars from there. It's all over, Jethro. It is, truly. I ain't so sorry as I might be; for it's borne in on me you won't care this way long. An' you needn't, dear; for nothin' between us is changed a mite. The only trouble is, it ain't the kind of thing we thought."

She looked in his eyes with a long, bright farewell glance, and turned away. She had left behind her something which was very fine and beautiful; but she could not mourn. And all that morning, about the house, she sang little snatches of song, and was content. The Joyces had done their work, and she was doing hers.

THE WAY OF PEACE

It was two weeks after her mother's funeral when Lucy Ann Cummings sat down and considered. The web of a lifelong service and devotion still clung about her, but she was bereft of the creature for whom it had been spun. Now she was quite alone, save for her two brothers and the cousins who lived in other townships, and they all had homes of their own. Lucy Ann sat still, and thought about her life. Brother Ezra and brother John would be good to her. They always had been. Their solicitude redoubled with her need, and they had even insisted on leaving Annabel, John's daughter, to keep her company after the funeral. Lucy Ann thought longingly of the healing which lay in the very loneliness of her little house; but she yielded, with a patient sigh. John and Ezra were men-folks, and doubtless they knew best.

A little more than a week had gone when school "took up," rather earlier than had been intended, and Annabel went away in haste, to teach. Then Lucy Ann drew her first long breath. She had resisted many a kindly office from her niece, with the crafty innocence of the gentle who can only parry and never thrust. When Annabel wanted to help in packing away grandma's things, aunt Lucy agreed, half-heartedly, and then deferred the task from day to day. In reality, Lucy Ann never meant to pack them away at all. She could not imagine her home without them; but that, Annabel would not understand, and her aunt pushed aside the moment, reasoning that something is pretty sure to happen if you put things off long enough. And something did; Annabel went away. It was then that Lucy Ann took a brief draught of the cup of peace.

Long before her mother's death, when they both knew how inevitably it was coming, Lucy Ann had, one day, a little shock of surprise. She was standing before the glass, coiling her crisp gray hair, and thinking over and over the words the doctor had used, the night before, when he told her how near the end might be. Her delicate face fell into deeper lines. Her mouth dropped a little at the corners; her faded brown eyes were hot with tears, and stopping to wipe them, she caught sight of herself in the glass.

"Why," she said aloud, "I look jest like mother!"

And so she did, save that it was the mother of five years ago, before disease had corroded the dear face, and patience wrought its tracery there.

"Well," she continued, smiling a little at the poverty of her state, "I shall be a real comfort to me when mother's gone!"

Now that her moment of solitude had struck, grief came also. It glided in, and sat down by her, to go forth no more, save perhaps under its other guise of a patient hope. She rocked back and forth in her chair, and moaned a little to herself.

"Oh, I never can bear it!" she said pathetically, under her breath. "I never can bear it in the world!"

The tokens of illness were all put away. Her mother's bedroom lay cold in an unsmiling order. The ticking of the clock emphasized the inexorable silence of the house. Once Lucy Ann thought she heard a little rustle and stir. It seemed the most natural thing in the world, coming from the bedroom, where one movement of the clothes had always been enough to summon her with flying feet. She caught her breath, and held it, to listen. She was ready, undisturbed, for any sign. But a great fly buzzed drowsily on the pane, and the fire crackled with accentuated life. She was quite alone. She put her hand to her heart, in that gesture of grief which is so entirely natural when we feel the stab of destiny; and then she went wanly into the sitting-room, looking about her for some pretense of duty to solace her poor mind. There again she caught sight of herself in the glass.

"Oh, my!" breathed Lucy Ann. Low as they were, the words held a fullness of joy.

Her face had been aging through these days of grief; it had grown more and more like her mother's. She felt as if a hand had been stretched out to her, holding a gift, and at that moment something told her how to make the gift enduring. Running over to the little table where her mother's work-basket stood, as it had been, undisturbed, she took out a pair of scissors, and went back to the glass. There she let down her thick gray hair, parted it carefully on the sides, and cut off lock after lock about her face. She looked a caricature of her sober self. But she was well used to curling hair like this, drawing its crisp silver into shining rings; and she stood patiently before the glass and coaxed her own locks into just such fashion as had framed the older face. It was done, and Lucy Ann looked at herself with a smile all suffused by love and longing. She was not herself any more; she had gone back a generation, and chosen a warmer niche. She could have kissed her face in the glass, it was so like that other dearer one. She did finger the little curls, with a reminiscent passion, not daring to think of the darkness where the others had been shut; and, at that instant, she felt very rich. The change suggested a more faithful portraiture, and she went up into the spare room and looked through the closet where her mother's clothes had been hanging so long, untouched. Selecting a purple thibet, with a little white sprig, she slipped off her own dress, and stepped into it. She crossed a muslin kerchief on her breast, and pinned it with the cameo her mother had been used to wear. It was impossible to look at herself in the doing; but when the deed was over, she went again to the glass and stood there, held by a wonder beyond her will. She had resurrected the creature she loved; this was an enduring portrait, perpetuating, in her own life, another life as well.

"I'll pack away my own clo'es to-morrer," said Lucy Ann to herself. "Them are the ones to be put aside."

She went downstairs, hushed and tremulous, and seated herself again, her thin hands crossed upon her lap; and there she stayed, in a pleasant dream, not of the future, and not even of the past, but face to face with a recognition of wonderful possibilities. She had dreaded her loneliness with the ache that is despair; but she was not lonely any more. She had been allowed to set up a little model of the tabernacle where she had worshiped; and, having that, she ceased to be afraid. To sit there, clothed in such sweet familiarity of line and likeness, had tightened her grasp upon the things that are. She did not seem to herself altogether alive, nor was her mother dead. They had been fused, by some wonderful alchemy; and instead of being worlds apart, they were at one. So, John Cummings, her brother, stepping briskly in, after tying his horse at the gate, came upon her unawares, and started, with a hoarse, thick cry. It was in the dusk of evening; and, seeing her outline against the window, he stepped back against the wall and leaned there a moment, grasping at the casing with one hand. "Good God!" he breathed, at last, "I thought 't was mother!"

Lucy Ann rose, and went forward to meet him.

"Then it's true," said she. "I'm so pleased. Seems as if I could git along, if I could look a little mite like her."

John stood staring at her, frowning in his bewilderment.

"What have you done to yourself?" he asked. "Put on her clo'es?"

"Yes," said Lucy Ann, "but that ain't all. I guess I do resemble mother, though we ain't any of us had much time to think about it. Well, I am pleased. I took out that daguerreotype she had, down Saltash way, though it don't favor her as she was at the end. But if I can take a glimpse of myself in the glass, now and then, mebbe I can git along."

They sat down together in the dark, and mused over old memories. John had always understood Lucy Ann better than the rest. When she gave up Simeon Bascom to stay at home with her mother, he never pitied her much; he knew she had chosen the path she loved. The other day, even, some one had wondered that she could have heard the funeral service so unmoved; but he, seeing how her face had seemed to fade and wither at every word, guessed what pain was at her heart. So, though his wife had sent him over to ask how Lucy Ann was getting on, he really found out very little, and felt how painfully dumb he must be when he got home. Lucy Ann was pretty well, he thought he might say. She'd got to looking a good deal like mother.

They took their "blindman's holiday," Lucy Ann once in a while putting a stick on the leaping blaze, and, when John questioned her, giving a low-toned reply. Even her voice had changed. It might have come from that bedroom, in one of the pauses between hours of pain, and neither would have been surprised.

"What makes you burn beech?" asked John, when a shower of sparks came crackling at them.

"I don't know," she answered. "Seems kind o' nat'ral. Some of it got into the last cord we bought, an' one night it snapped out, an' most burnt up mother's nightgown an' cap while I was warmin' 'em. We had a real time of it. She scolded me, an' then she laughed, an' I laughed—an' so, when I see a stick or two o' beech to-day, I kind o' picked it out a-purpose."

John's horse stamped impatiently from the gate, and John, too, knew it was time to go. His errand was not done, and he balked at it.

"Lucy Ann," said he, with the bluntness of resolve, "what you goin' to do?"

Lucy Ann looked sweetly at him through the dark. She had expected that. She smoothed her mother's dress with one hand, and it gave her courage.

"Do?" said she; "why, I ain't goin' to do nothin'. I've got enough to pull through on."

"Yes, but where you goin' to live?"

"Here."

"Alone?"

"I don't feel so very much alone," said she, smiling to herself. At that moment she did not. All sorts of sweet possibilities had made themselves real. They comforted her, like the presence of love.

John felt himself a messenger. He was speaking for others that with which his soul did not accord.

"The fact is," said he, "they're all terrible set ag'inst it. They say you're gittin' along in years. So you be. So are we all. But they will have it, it ain't right for you to live on here alone. Mary says she should be scairt to death. She wants you should come an' make it your home with us."

"Yes, I dunno but Mary would be scairt," said Lucy Ann placidly. "But I ain't. She's real good to ask me; but I can't do it, no more'n she could leave you an' the children an' come over here to stay with me. Why, John, this is my home!"

Her voice sank upon a note of passion. It trembled with memories of dewy mornings and golden eves. She had not grown here, through all her youth and middle life, like moss upon a rock, without fitting into the hollows and softening the angles of her poor habitation. She had drunk the sunlight and the rains of one small spot, and she knew how both would fall. The place, its sky and clouds and breezes, belonged to her: but she belonged to it as well.

John stood between two wills, his own and that of those who had sent him. Left to himself, he would not have harassed her. To him, also, wedded to a hearth where he found warmth and peace, it would have been sweet to live there always, though alone, and die by the light of its dying fire. But Mary thought otherwise, and in matters of worldly judgment he could only yield.

"I don't want you should make a mistake," said he. "Mebbe you an' I don't look for'ard enough. They say you'll repent it if you stay, an' there'll be a hurrah-boys all round. What say to makin' us a visit? That'll kind o' stave it off, an' then we can see what's best to be done."

Lucy Ann put her hands to her delicate throat, where her mother's gold beads lay lightly, with a significant touch. She, like John, had an innate gentleness of disposition. She distrusted her own power to judge.

"Maybe I might," said she faintly. "Oh, John, do you think I've got to?"

"It needn't be for long," answered John briefly, though he felt his eyes moist with pity of her. "Mebbe you could stay a month?"

"Oh, I couldn't do that!" cried Lucy Ann, in wild denial. "I never could in the world. If you'll make it a fortnight, an' harness up yourself, an' bring me home, mebbe I might."

John gave his word, but when he took his leave of her, she leaned forward into the dark, where the impatient horse was fretting, and made her last condition.

"You'll let me turn the key on things here jest as they be? You won't ask me to break up nuthin'?"

"Break up!" repeated John, with the intensity of an oath. "I guess you needn't. If anybody puts that on you, you send 'em to me."

So Lucy Ann packed her mother's dresses into a little hair trunk that had stood in the attic unused for many years, and went away to make her visit. When she drove up to the house, sitting erect and slender in her mother's cashmere shawl and black bonnet, Mary, watching from the window, gave a little cry, as at the risen dead. John had told her about Lucy Ann's transformation, but she put it all aside as a crazy notion, not likely to last: now it seemed less a pathetic masquerade than a strange bypath taken by nature itself.

The children regarded it with awe, and half the time called Lucy Ann "grandma." That delighted her. Whenever they did it, she looked up to say, with her happiest smile,—

"There! that's complete. You'll remember grandma, won't you? We mustn't ever forget her."

Here, in this warm-hearted household, anxious to do her service in a way that was not her own, she had some happiness, of a tremulous kind; but it was all built up of her trust in a speedy escape. She knit mittens, and sewed long seams; and every day her desire to fill the time was irradiated by the certainty that twelve hours more were gone. A few more patient intervals, and she should be at home. Sometimes, as the end of her visit drew nearer, she woke early in the morning with a sensation of irresponsible joy, and wondered, for an instant, what had happened to her. Then it always came back, with an inward flooding she had scarcely felt even in her placid youth. At home there would be so many things to do, and, above all, such munificent leisure! For there she would feel no need of feverish action to pass the time. The hours would take care of themselves; they would fleet by, while she sat, her hands folded, communing with old memories.

The day came, and the end of her probation. She trembled a good deal, packing her trunk in secret, to escape Mary's remonstrances; but John stood by her, and she was allowed to go.

"You'll get sick of it," called Mary after them. "I guess you'll be glad enough to see the children again, an' they will you. Mind, you've got to come back an' spend the winter."

Lucy Ann nodded happily. She could agree to anything sufficiently remote; and the winter was not yet here.

The first day in the old house seemed to her like new birth in Paradise. She wandered about, touching chairs and tables and curtains, the manifest symbols of an undying past. There were loving duties to be done, but she could not do them yet. She had to look her pleasure in the face, and learn its lineaments.

Next morning came brother Ezra, and Lucy Ann hurried to meet him with an exaggerated welcome. Life was never very friendly to Ezra, and those who belonged to him had to be doubly kind. They could not change his luck, but they might sweeten it. They said the world had not gone well with him; though sometimes it was hinted that Ezra, being out of gear, could not go with the world. All the rivers ran away from him, and went to turn some other mill. He was ungrudging of John's prosperity, but still he looked at it in some disparagement, and shook his head. His cheeks were channeled long before youth was over; his feet were weary with honest serving, and his hands grown hard with toil. Yet he had not arrived, and John was at the goal before him.

"We heard you'd been stayin' with John's folks," said he to Lucy Ann. "Leastways, Abby did, an' she thinks mebbe you've got a little time for us now, though we ain't nothin' to offer compared to what you're used to over there."

"I'll come," said Lucy Ann promptly. "Yes, I'll come, an' be glad to."

It was part of her allegiance to the one who had gone.

"Ezra needs bracin'," she heard her mother say, in many a sick-room gossip. "He's got to be flattered up, an' have some grit put into him."

It was many weeks before Lucy Ann came home again. Cousin Rebecca, in Saltash, sent her a cordial letter of invitation for just as long as she felt like staying; and the moneyed cousin at the Ridge wrote in like manner, following her note by a telegram, intimating that she would not take no for an answer. Lucy Ann frowned in alarm when the first letter came, and studied it by daylight and in her musings at night, as if some comfort might lurk between the lines. She was tempted to throw it in the fire, not answered at all. Still, there was a reason for going. This cousin had a broken hip, she needed company, and the flavor of old times. The other had married a "drinkin' man," and might feel hurt at being refused. So, fortifying herself with some inner resolution she never confessed, Lucy Ann set her teeth and started out on a visiting campaign. John was amazed. He drove over to see her while she was spending a few days with an aunt in Sudleigh.

"When you been home last, Lucy Ann?" asked he.

A little flush came into her face, and she winked bravely.

"I ain't been home at all," said she, in a low tone. "Not sence August."

John groped vainly in mental depths for other experiences likely to illuminate this. He concluded that he had not quite understood Lucy Ann and her feeling about home; but that was neither here nor there.

"Well," he remarked, rising to go, "you're gittin' to be quite a visitor."

"I'm tryin' to learn how," said Lucy Ann, almost gayly. "I've been a-cousinin' so long, I sha'n't know how to do anything else."

But now the middle of November had come, and she was again in her own house. Cousin Titcomb had brought her there and driven away, concerned that he must leave her in a cold kitchen, and only deterred by a looming horse-trade from staying to build a fire. Lucy Ann bade him good-by, with a gratitude which was not for her visit, but all for getting home; and when he uttered that terrifying valedictory known as "coming again," she could meet it cheerfully. She even stood in the door, watching him away; and not until the rattle of his wheels had ceased on the frozen road, did she return to her kitchen and stretch her shawled arms pathetically upward.

"I thank my heavenly Father!" said Lucy Ann, with the fervency of a great experience.

She built her fire, and then unpacked her little trunk, and hung up the things in the bedroom where her mother's presence seemed still to cling.

"I'll sleep here now," she said to herself. "I won't go out of this no more."

Then all the little homely duties of the hour cried out upon her, like children long neglected; and, with the luxurious leisure of those who may prolong a pleasant task, she set her house in order. She laid out a programme to occupy her days. The attic should be cleaned to-morrow. In one day? Nay, why not three, to hold Time still, and make him wait her pleasure? Then there were the chambers, and the living-rooms below. She felt all the excited joy of youth; she was tasting anticipation at its best.

"It'll take me a week," said she. "That will be grand." She could hardly wait even for the morrow's sun; and that night she slept like those of whom much is to be required, and who must wake in season. Morning came, and mid-forenoon, and while she stepped about under the roof where dust had gathered and bitter herbs told tales of summers past, John drove into the yard. Lucy Ann threw up the attic window and leaned out.

"You put your horse up, an' I'll be through here in a second," she called. "The barn's open."

John was in a hurry.

"I've got to go over to Sudleigh, to meet the twelve o'clock," said he. "Harold's comin'. I only wanted to say I'll be over after you the night before Thanksgivin'. Mary wants you should be sure to be there to breakfast. You all right? Cephas said you seemed to have a proper good time with them."

John turned skillfully on the little green and drove away. Lucy Ann stayed at the window watching him, the breeze lifting her gray curls, and the sun smiling at her. She withdrew slowly into the attic, and sank down upon the floor, close by the window. She sat there and thought, and the wind still struck upon her unheeded. Was she always to be subject to the tyranny of those who had set up their hearth-stones in a more enduring form? Was her home not a home merely because there were no men and children in it? She drew her breath sharply, and confronted certain problems of the greater world, not knowing what they were. To Lucy Ann they did not seem problems at all. They were simply touches on the individual nerve, and she felt the pain. Her own inner self throbbed in revolt, but she never guessed that any other part of nature was throbbing with it. Then she went about her work, with the patience of habit. It was well that the attic should be cleaned, though the savor of the task was gone.

Next day, she walked to Sudleigh, with a basket on her arm. Often she sent her little errands by the neighbors; but to-day she was uneasy, and it seemed as if the walk might do her good. She wanted some soda and some needles and thread. She tried to think they were very important, though some sense of humor told her grimly that household goods are of slight use to one who goes a-cousining. Her day at John's would be prolonged to seven; nay, why not a month, when the winter itself was not too great a tax for them to lay upon her? In her deserted house, soda would lose its strength, and even cloves decay. Lucy Ann felt her will growing very weak within her; indeed, at that time, she was hardly conscious of having any will at all.

It was Saturday, and John and Ezra were almost sure to be in town. She thought of that, and how pleasant it would be to hear from the folks: so much pleasanter than to be always facing them on their own ground, and never on hers. At the grocery she came upon Ezra, mounted on a wagon-load of meal-bags, and just gathering up the reins.

"Hullo!" he called. "You didn't walk?"

"Oh, I jest clipped it over," returned Lucy Ann carelessly. "I'm goin' to git a ride home. I see Marden's wagon when I come by the post-office."

"Well, I hadn't any expectation o' your bein' here," said Ezra. "I meant to ride round to-morrer. We want you to spend Thanksgivin' Day with us. I'll come over arter you."

"Oh, Ezra!" said Lucy Ann, quite sincerely, with her concession to his lower fortunes, "why didn't you say so! John's asked me."

"The dogs!" said Ezra. It was his deepest oath. Then he drew a sigh. "Well," he concluded, "that's our luck. We al'ays come out the leetle end o' the horn. Abby'll be real put out. She 'lotted on it. Well, John's inside there. He's buyin' up 'bout everything there is. You'll git more'n you would with us."

He drove gloomily away, and Lucy Ann stepped into the store, musing. She was rather sorry not to go to Ezra's, if he cared. It almost seemed as if she might ask John to let her take the plainer way. John would understand. She saw him at once where he stood, prosperous and hale, in his great-coat, reading items from a long memorandum, while Jonathan Stevens weighed and measured. The store smelled of spice, and the clerk that minute spilled some cinnamon. Its fragrance struck upon Lucy Ann like a call from some far-off garden, to be entered if she willed. She laid a hand on her brother's arm, and her lips opened to words she had not chosen:—

"John, you shouldn't ha' drove away so quick, t' other day. You jest flung out your invitation an' run. You never give me no time to answer. Ezra's asked me to go there."

"Well, if that ain't smart!" returned John. "Put in ahead, did he? Well, I guess it's the fust time he ever got round. I'm terrible sorry, Lucy. The children won't think it's any kind of a Thanksgivin' without you. Somehow they've got it into their heads it's grandma comin'. They can't seem to understand the difference."

"Well, you tell 'em I guess grandma's kind o' pleased for me to plan it as I have," said Lucy Ann, almost gayly. Her face wore a strange, excited look. She breathed a little faster. She saw a pleasant way before her, and her feet seemed to be tending toward it without her own volition. "You give my love to 'em. I guess they'll have a proper nice time."

She lingered about the store until John had gone, and then went forward to the counter. The storekeeper looked at her respectfully. Everybody had a great liking for Lucy Ann. She had been a faithful daughter, and now that she seemed, in so mysterious a way, to be growing like her mother, even men of her own age regarded her with deference.

"Mr. Stevens," said she, "I didn't bring so much money with me as I might if I'd had my wits about me. Should you jest as soon trust me for some Thanksgivin' things?"

"Certain," replied Jonathan. "Clean out the store, if you want. Your credit's good." He, too, felt the beguilement of the time.

"I want some things," repeated Lucy Ann, with determination. "Some cinnamon an' some mace—there! I'll tell you, while you weigh."

It seemed to her that she was buying the spice islands of the world; and though the money lay at home in her drawer, honestly ready to pay, the recklessness of credit gave her an added joy. The store had its market, also, at Thanksgiving time, and she bargained for a turkey. It could be sent her, the day before, by some of the neighbors. When she left the counter, her arms and her little basket were filled with bundles. Joshua Marden was glad to take them.

"No, I won't ride," said Lucy Ann. "Much obliged to you. Jest leave the things inside the fence. I'd ruther walk. I don't git out any too often."

She took her way home along the brown road, stepping lightly and swiftly, and full of busy thoughts. Flocks of birds went whirring by over the yellowed fields. Lucy Ann could have called out to them, in joyous understanding, they looked so free. She, too, seemed to be flying on the wings of a fortunate wind.

All that week she scrubbed and regulated, and took a thousand capable steps as briskly as those who work for the home-coming of those they love. The neighbors dropped in, one after another, to ask where she was going to spend Thanksgiving. Some of them said, "Won't you pass the day with us?" but Lucy Ann replied blithely:—

"Oh, John's invited me there!"

All that week, too, she answered letters, in her cramped and careful hand; for cousins had bidden her to the feast. Over the letters she had many a troubled pause, for one cousin lived near Ezra, and had to be told that John had invited her; and to three others, dangerously within hail of each, she made her excuse a turncoat, to fit the time. Duplicity in black and white did hurt her a good deal, and she sometimes stopped, in the midst of her slow transcription, to look up piteously and say aloud:—

"I hope I shall be forgiven!" But by the time the stamp was on, and the pencil ruling erased, her heart was light again. If she had sinned, she was finding the path intoxicatingly pleasant.

Through all the days before the festival, no house exhaled a sweeter savor than this little one on the green. Lucy Ann did her miniature cooking with great seriousness and care. She seemed to be dwelling in a sacred isolation, yet not altogether alone, but with her mother and all their bygone years. Standing at her table, mixing and tasting, she recalled stories her mother had told her, until, at moments, it seemed as if she not only lived her own life, but some previous one, through that being whose blood ran with hers. She was realizing that ineffable sense of possession born out of knowledge that the enduring part of a personality is ours forever, and that love is an unquenched fire, fed by memory as well as hope.

On Thanksgiving morning, Lucy Ann lay in bed a little later, because that had been the family custom. Then she rose to her exquisite house, and got breakfast ready, according to the unswerving programme of the day. Fried chicken and mince pie: she had had them as a child, and now they were scrupulously prepared. After breakfast, she sat down in the sunshine, and watched the people go by to service in Tiverton Church. Lucy Ann would have liked going, too; but there would be inconvenient questioning, as there always must be when we meet our kind. She would stay undisturbed in her seclusion, keeping her festival alone. The morning was still young when she put her turkey in the oven, and made the vegetables ready. Lucy Ann was not very fond of vegetables, but there had to be just so many—onions, turnips, and squash baked with molasses—for her mother was a Cape woman, preserving the traditions of dear Cape dishes. All that forenoon, the little house throbbed with a curious sense of expectancy. Lucy Ann was preparing so many things that it seemed as if somebody must surely keep her company; but when dinner-time struck, and she was still alone, there came no lull in her anticipation. Peace abode with her, and wrought its own fair work. She ate her dinner slowly, with meditation and a thankful heart. She did not need to hear the minister's careful catalogue of mercies received. She was at home; that was enough.

After dinner, when she had done up the work, and left the kitchen without spot or stain, she went upstairs, and took out her mother's beautiful silk poplin, the one saved for great occasions, and only left behind because she had chosen to be buried in her wedding gown. Lucy Ann put it on with careful hands, and then laid about her neck the wrought collar she had selected the day before. She looked at herself in the glass, and arranged a gray curl with anxious scrutiny. No girl adorning for her bridal could have examined every fold and line with a more tender care. She stood there a long, long moment, and approved herself.

"It's a wonder," she said reverently. "It's the greatest mercy anybody ever had."

The afternoon waned, though not swiftly; for Time does not always gallop when happiness pursues. Lucy Ann could almost hear the gliding of his rhythmic feet. She did the things set aside for festivals, or the days when we have company. She looked over the photograph album, and turned the pages of the "Ladies' Wreath." When she opened the case containing that old daguerreotype, she scanned it with a little distasteful smile, and then glanced up at her own image in the glass, nodding her head in thankful peace. She was the enduring portrait. In herself, she might even see her mother grow very old. So the hours slipped on into dusk, and she sat there with her dream, knowing, though it was only a dream, how sane it was, and good. When wheels came rattling into the yard, she awoke with a start, and John's voice, calling to her in an inexplicable alarm, did not disturb her. She had had her day. Not all the family fates could take it from her now. John kept calling, even while his wife and children were climbing down, unaided, from the great carryall. His voice proclaimed its own story, and Lucy Ann heard it with surprise.

"Lucy! Lucy Ann!" he cried. "You here? You show yourself, if you're all right."

Before they reached the front door, Lucy Ann had opened it and stood there, gently welcoming.

"Yes, here I be," said she. "Come right in, all of ye. Why, if that ain't Ezra, too, an' his folks, turnin' into the lane. When 'd you plan it?"

"Plan it! we didn't plan it!" said Mary testily. She put her hand on Lucy Ann's shoulder, to give her a little shake; but, feeling mother's poplin, she forbore.

Lucy Ann retreated before them into the house, and they all trooped in after her. Ezra's family, too, were crowding in at the doorway; and the brothers, who had paused only to hitch the horses, filled up the way behind. Mary, by a just self-election, was always the one to speak.

"I declare, Lucy!" cried she, "if ever I could be tried with you, I should be now. Here we thought you was at Ezra's, an' Ezra's folks thought you was with us; an' if we hadn't harnessed up, an' drove over there in the afternoon, for a kind of a surprise party, we should ha' gone to bed thinkin' you was somewhere, safe an' sound. An' here you've been, all day long, in this lonesome house!"

"You let me git a light," said Lucy Ann calmly. "You be takin' off your things, an' se' down." She began lighting the tall astral lamp on the table, and its prisms danced and swung. Lucy Ann's delicate hand did not tremble; and when the flame burned up through the shining chimney, more than one started, at seeing how exactly she resembled grandma, in the days when old Mrs. Cummings had ruled her own house. Perhaps it was the royalty of the poplin that enwrapped her; but Lucy Ann looked very capable of holding her own. She was facing them all, one hand resting on the table, and a little smile flickering over her face.

"I s'pose I was a poor miserable creatur' to git out of it that way," said she. "If I'd felt as I do now, I needn't ha' done it. I could ha' spoke up. But then it seemed as if there wa'n't no other way. I jest wanted my Thanksgivin' in my own home, an' so I throwed you off the track the best way I could. I dunno's I lied. I dunno whether I did or not; but I guess, anyway, I shall be forgiven for it."

Ezra spoke first: "Well, if you didn't want to come"—

"Want to come!" broke in John. "Of course she don't want to come! She wants to stay in her own home, an' call her soul her own—don't you, Lucy?"

Lucy Ann glanced at him with her quick, grateful smile.

"I'm goin' to, now," she said gently, and they knew she meant it.

But, looking about among them, Lucy Ann was conscious of a little hurt unhealed; she had thrown their kindness back.

"I guess I can't tell exactly how it is," she began hesitatingly; "but you see my home's my own, jest as yours is. You couldn't any of you go round cousinin', without feelin' you was tore up by the roots. You've all been real good to me, wantin' me to come, an' I s'pose I should make an awful towse if I never was asked; but now I've got all my visitin' done up, cousins an' all, an' I'm goin' to be to home a spell. An' I do admire to have company," added Lucy Ann, a bright smile breaking over her face. "Mother did, you know, an' I guess I take arter her. Now you lay off your things, an' I'll put the kettle on. I've got more pies 'n you could shake a stick at, an' there's a whole loaf o' fruit-cake, a year old."

Mary, taking off her shawl, wiped her eyes surreptitiously on a corner of it, and Abby whispered to her husband, "Dear creatur'!" John and Ezra turned, by one consent, to put the horses in the barn; and the children, conscious that some mysterious affair had been settled, threw themselves into the occasion with an irresponsible delight. The room became at once vocal with talk and laughter, and Lucy Ann felt, with a swelling heart, what a happy universe it is where so many bridges lie between this world and that unknown state we call the next. But no moment of that evening was half so sweet to her as the one when little John, the youngest child of all, crept up to her and pulled at her poplin skirt, until she bent down to hear.

"Grandma," said he, "when 'd you get well?"

THE EXPERIENCE OF HANNAH PRIME

Tiverton Hollow had occasionally an evening meeting; this came about naturally whenever religious zeal burned high, or when the congregation felt, with some uneasiness, that it had remained too long aloof from spiritual things. To-night, the schoolhouse had been designated for an assembling place, and the neighborhood trooped thither, animated by an excited importance, and doing justice to the greatness of the occasion by "dressing up." Farmers had laid aside their ordinary mood, with overalls and jumpers, and donned an uncomfortable solemnity, an enforced attitude of theological reflection, with their stocks. Wives had urged their patient fingers into cotton gloves, and in cashmere shawls, and bonnets retrimmed with reference to this year's style, pressed into the uncomfortable chairs, and folded their hands upon the desks before them in a sweet seriousness not unmingled with the desire of thriftily completing a duty no less exigent than pickle-making, or the work of spring and fall. Last came the boys, clattering with awkward haste over the dusty floor which had known the touch of their bare feet on other days. They looked about the room with some awe and a puzzled acceptance of its being the same, yet not the same. It was their own. There were the maps of North and South America; the yellowed evergreens, relic of "Last Day," still festooned the windows, and an intricate "sum," there explained to the uncomprehending admiration of the village fathers, still adorned the blackboard. Yet the room had strangely transformed itself into an alien temple, invaded by theology and the breath of an unknown world. But though sobered, they were not cast down; for the occasion was enlivened, in their case, by a heaven-defying profligacy of intent. Every one of them knew that Sammy Forbes had in his pocket a pack of cards, which he meant to drop, by wicked but careless design, just when Deacon Pitts led in prayer, and that Tom Drake was master of a concealed pea-shooter, which he had sworn, with all the asseverations held sacred by boys, to use at some dramatic moment. All the band were aware that neither of these daring deeds would be done. The prospective actors themselves knew it; but it was a darling joy to contemplate the remote possibility thereof.

Deacon Pitts opened the meeting, reminding his neighbors how precious a privilege it is for two or three to be gathered together. His companion had not been able to come. (The entire neighborhood knew that Mrs. Pitts had been laid low by an attack of erysipelas, and that she was, at the moment, in a dark bedroom at home, helpless under elderblow.)

"She lays there on a bed of pain," said the deacon. "But she says to me, 'You go. Better the house o' mournin' than the house o' feastin',' she says. Oh, my friends! what can be more blessed than the counsel of an aged and feeble companion?"

The deacon sat down, and Tom Drake, his finger on the pea-shooter, assured himself, in acute mental triumph, that he had almost done it that time.

Then followed certain incidents eminently pleasing to the boys. To their unbounded relief, Sarah Frances Giles rose to speak, weeping as she began. She always wept at prayer meeting, though at the very moment of asserting her joy that she cherished a hope, and her gratitude that she was so nearly at an end of this earthly pilgrimage and ready to take her stand on the sea of glass mingled with fire. The boys reveled in her testimony. They were in a state of bitter uneasiness before she rose, and gnawed with a consuming impatience until she began to cry. Then they wondered if she could possibly leave out the sea of glass; and when it duly came, they gave a sigh of satiated bliss and sank into acquiescence in whatever might happen. This was a rich occasion to their souls, for Silas Marden, who was seldom moved by the spirit, fell upon his knees to pray; but at the same unlucky instant, his sister-in-law, for whom he cherished an unbounded scorn, rose (being "nigh-eyed" and ignorant of his priority) and began to speak. For a moment, the two held on together, "neck and neck," as the happy boys afterward remembered, and then Silas got up, dusted his knees, and sat down, not to rise again at any spiritual call. "An' a madder man you never see," cried all the Hollow next day, in shocked but gleeful memory.

Taking it all in all, the meeting had thus far mirrored others of its class. If the droning experiences were devoid of all human passion, it was chiefly because they had to be expressed in the phrases of strict theological usage. There was an unspoken agreement that feelings of this sort should be described in a certain way. They were not the affairs of the hearth and market; they were matters pertaining to that awful entity called the soul, and must be dressed in the fine linen which she had herself elected to wear.

Suddenly, in a wearisome pause, when minds had begun to stray toward the hayfield and to-morrow's churning, the door was pushed open, and the Widow Prime walked in. She was quite unused to seeking her kind, and the little assembly at once awoke, under the stimulus of surprise. They knew quite well where she had been walking: to Sudleigh Jail, to visit her only son, lying there for the third time, not, as usual, for drunkenness, but for house-breaking. She was a wiry woman, a mass of muscles animated by an eager energy. Her very hands seemed knotted with clenching themselves in nervous spasms. Her eyes were black, seeking, and passionate, and her face had been scored by fine wrinkles, the marks of anxiety and grief. Her chocolate calico was very clean, and her palm-leaf shawl and black bonnet were decent in their poverty. The vague excitement created by her coming continued in a rustling like that of leaves. The troubles of Hannah Prime's life had been very bitter—so bitter that she had, as Deacon Pitts once said, after undertaking her conversion, turned from "me and the house of God." A quickening thought sprang up now in the little assembly that she was "under conviction," and that it had become the present duty of every professor to lead her to the throne of grace. This was an exigency for which none were prepared. At so strenuous a challenge, the old conventional ways of speech fell down and collapsed before them, like creatures filled with air. Who should minister to one set outside their own comfortable lives by bitter sorrow and wounded pride? What could they offer a woman who had, in one way or another, sworn to curse God and die? It was Deacon Pitts who spoke, but in a tone hushed to the key of the unexpected.

"Has any one an experience to offer? Will any brother or sister lead in prayer?"

The silence was growing into a thing to be recognized and conquered, when, to the wonder of her neighbors, Hannah Prime herself rose. She looked slowly about the room, gazing into every face as if to challenge an honest understanding. Then she began speaking in a low voice thrilled by an emotion not yet explained. Unused to expressing herself in public, she seemed to be feeling her way. The silence, pride, endurance, which had been her armor for many years, were no longer apparent; she had thrown down all her defenses with a grave composure, as if life suddenly summoned her to higher issues.

"I dunno's I've got an experience to offer," she said. "I dunno's it's religion. I dunno what 't is. Mebbe you'd say it don't belong to a meetin'. But when I come by an' see you all settin' here, it come over me I'd like to tell somebody. Two weeks ago I was most crazy"—She paused of necessity, for something broke in her voice.

"That's the afternoon Jim was took," whispered a woman to her neighbor. Hannah Prime went on.

"I jest as soon tell it now. I can tell ye all together what I couldn't say to one on ye alone; an' if anybody speaks to me about it arterwards, they'll wish they hadn't. I was all by myself in the house. I set down in my clock-room, about three in the arternoon, an' there I set. I didn't git no supper. I couldn't. I set there an' heard the clock tick. Byme-by it struck seven, an' that waked me up. I thought I'd gone crazy. The figgers on the wall-paper provoked me most to death; an' that red-an'-white tidy I made, the winter I was laid up, seemed to be talkin' out loud. I got up an' run outdoor jest as fast as I could go. I run out behind the house an' down the cart-path to that pile o' rocks that overlooks the lake; an' there I got out o' breath an' dropped down on a big rock. An' there I set, jest as still as I'd been settin' when I was in the house."

Here a little girl stirred in her seat, and her mother leaned forward and shook her, with alarming energy. "I never was so hard with Mary L. afore," she explained the next day, "but I was as nervous as a witch. I thought, if I heard a pin drop, I should scream."

"I dunno how long I set there," went on Hannah Prime, "but byme-by it begun to come over me how still the lake was. 'Twas like glass; an' way over where it runs in 'tween them islands, it burnt like fire. Then I looked up a little further, to see what kind of a sky there was. 'T was light green, with clouds in it, all fire, an' it begun to seem to me as if it was a kind o' land an' water up there—like our'n, on'y not solid. I set there an' looked at it; an' I picked out islands, an' ma'sh-land, an' p'ints running out into the yeller-green sea. An' everything grew stiller an' stiller. The loons struck up, down on the lake, with that kind of a lonesome whinner; but that on'y made the rest of it seem quieter. An' it begun to grow dark all 'round me. I dunno's I ever noticed before jest how the dark comes. It sifted down like snow, on'y you couldn't see it. Well, I set there, an' I tried to keep stiller an' stiller, like everything else. Seemed as if I must. An' pretty soon I knew suthin' was walkin' towards me over the lot. I kep' my eyes on the sky; for I knew 'twould break suthin' if I turned my head, an' I felt as if I couldn't bear to. An' It come walkin', walkin', without takin' any steps or makin' any noise, till It come right up 'side o' me an' stood still. I didn't turn round. I knew I mustn't. I dunno whether It touched me; I dunno whether It said anything—but I know It made me a new creatur'. I knew then I shouldn't be afraid o' things no more—nor sorry. I found out 't was all right. 'I'm glad I'm alive,' I said. 'I'm thankful!' Seemed to me I'd been dead for the last twenty year. I'd come alive.

"An' so I set there an' held my breath, for fear 'twould go. I dunno how long, but the moon riz up over my left shoulder, an' the sky begun to fade. An' then it come over me 'twas goin'. I knew 'twas terrible tender of me, an' sorry, an' lovin', an' so I says, 'Don't you mind; I won't forgit!' An' then It went. But that broke suthin', an' I turned an' see my own shadder on the grass; an' I thought I see another, 'side of it. Somehow that scairt me, an' I jumped up an' whipped it home without lookin' behind me. Now that's my experience," said Hannah Prime, looking her neighbors again in the face, with dauntless eyes. "I dunno what 'twas, but it's goin' to last. I ain't afraid no more, an' I ain't goin' to be. There ain't nuthin' to worry about. Everything's bigger'n we think." She folded her shawl more closely about her and moved toward the door. There she again turned to her neighbors.

"Good-night!" she said, and was gone.

They sat quite still until the tread of her feet had ceased its beating on the dusty road. Then, by one consent, they rose and moved slowly out. There was no prayer that night, and "Lord dismiss us" was not sung.

HONEY AND MYRRH

The neighborhood, the township, and the world had been snowed in. Snow drifted the road in hills and hollows, and hung in little eddying wreaths, where the wind took it, on the pasture slopes. It made solid banks in the dooryards, and buried the stone walls out of sight. The lacework of its fantasy became daintily apparent in the conceits with which it broidered over all the common objects familiar in homely lives. The pump, in yards where that had supplanted the old-fashioned curb, wore a heavy mob-cap. The vane on the barn was delicately sifted over, and the top of every picket in the high front-yard fence had a fluffy peak. But it was chiefly in the woods that the rapture and flavor of the time ran riot in making beauty. There every fir branch swayed under a tuft of white, and the brown refuse of the year was all hidden away.

That morning, no one in Tiverton Hollow had gone out of the house, save to shovel paths and do the necessary chores. The road lay untouched until ten o'clock, when a selectman gave notice that it was an occasion for "breakin' out," by starting with his team, and gathering oxen by the way until a conquering procession ground through the drifts, the men shoveling at intervals where the snow lay deepest, the oxen walking swayingly, head to the earth, and the faint wreath of their breath ascending and cooling on the air. It was "high times" in Tiverton Hollow when a road needed opening; some idea of the old primitive way of battling with the untouched forces of nature roused the people to an exhilaration dashed by no uncertainty of victory.

By afternoon, the excitement had quieted. The men had come in, reddened by cold, and eaten their noon dinner in high spirits, retailing to the less fortunate women-folk the stories swapped on the march. Then, as one man, they succumbed to the drowsiness induced by a morning of wind in the face, and sat by the stove under some pretense of reading the county paper, but really to nod and doze, waking only to put another stick of wood on the fire. So passed all the day before Christmas, and in the evening the shining lamps were lighted (each with a strip of red flannel in the oil, to give color), and the neighborhood rested in the tranquil certainty that something had really come to pass, and that their communication with the world was reëstablished.

Susan Peavey sat by the fire, knitting on a red mitten, and the young schoolmaster presided over the other hearth corner, reading very hard, at intervals, and again sinking into a drowsy study of the flames. There was an impression abroad in Tiverton that the schoolmaster was going to be somebody, some time. He wrote for the papers. He was always receiving through the mail envelopes marked "author's proofs," which, the postmistress said, indicated that he was an author, whatever proofs might be. She had an idea they might have something to do with photographs; perhaps his picture was going into a book. It was very well understood that teaching school at the Hollow, at seven dollars a week, was an interlude in the life of one who would some day write a spelling-book, or exercise senatorial rights at Washington. He was a long-legged, pleasant looking youth, with a pale cheek, dark eyes, and thick black hair, one lock of which, hanging low over his forehead, he twisted while he read. He kept glancing up at Miss Susan and smiling at her, whenever he could look away from his book and the fire, and she smiled back. At last, after many such wordless messages, he spoke.

"What lots of red mittens you do knit! Do you send them all away to that society?"

Miss Susan's needles clicked.

"Every one," said she.

She was a tall, large woman, well-knit, with no superfluous flesh. Her head was finely set, and she carried it with a simple unconsciousness better than dignity. Everybody in Tiverton thought it had been a great cross to Susan Peavey to be so overgrown. They conceded that it was a mystery she had not turned out "gormin'." But that was because Susan had left her vanity behind with early youth, in the days when, all legs and arms, she had given up the idea of beauty. Her face was strong-featured, overspread by a healthy color, and her eyes looked frankly out, as if assured of finding a very pleasant world. The sick always delighted in Susan's nearness; her magnificent health and presence were like a supporting tide, and she seemed to carry outdoor air in her very garments. The schoolmaster still watched her. She rested and fascinated him at once by her strength and homely charm.

"I shall call you the Orphans' Friend," said he.

She laid down her work.

"Don't you say one word," she answered, with an air of abject confession. "It don't interest me a mite! I give because it's my bounden duty, but I'll be whipped if I want to knit warm mittens all my life, an' fill poor barrels. Sometimes I wisht I could git a chance to provide folks with what they don't need ruther'n what they do."

"I don't see what you mean," said the schoolmaster. "Tell me."

Miss Susan was looking at the hearth. A warmer flush than that of firelight alone lay on her cheek. She bent forward and threw on a pine knot. It blazed richly. Then she drew the cricket more securely under her feet, and settled herself to gossip.

"Anybody'd think I'd most talked myself out sence you come here to board," said she, "but you're the beatemest for tolin' anybody on. I never knew I had so much to say. But there! I guess we all have, if there's anybody 't wants to listen. I never've said this to a livin' soul, an' I guess it's sort o' heathenish to think, but I'm tired to death o' fightin' ag'inst poverty, poverty! I s'pose it's there, fast enough, though we're all so well on 't we don't realize it; an' I'm goin' to do my part, an' be glad to, while I'm above ground. But I guess heaven'll be a spot where we don't give folks what they need, but what they don't."

"There is something in your Bible," began the schoolmaster hesitatingly, "about a box of precious ointment." He always said "your Bible," as if church members held a proprietary right.

"That's it!" replied Miss Susan, brightening. "That's what I al'ays thought. Spill it all out, I say, an' make the world smell as sweet as honey. My! but I do have great projicks settin' here by the fire alone! Great projicks!"

"Tell me some!"

"Well, I dunno's I can, all of a piece, so to speak; but when it gits along towards eight o'clock, an' the room's all simmerin', an' the moon lays out on the snow, it does seem as if we made a pretty poor spec' out o' life. We don't seem to have no color in it. Why, don't you remember 'Solomon in all his glory'? I guess 't wouldn't ha' been put in jest that way if there wa'n't somethin' in it. I s'pose he had crowns an' rings an' purple velvet coats an' brocade satin weskits, an' all manner o' things. Sometimes seems as I could see him walkin' straight in through that door there." She was running a knitting needle back and forth through her ball of yarn as she spoke, without noticing that some one had been stamping the snow from his feet on the doorstone outside. The door, after making some bluster of refusal, was pushed open, and on the heels of her speech a man walked in.

"My land!" cried Miss Susan, aghast. Then she and the schoolmaster, by one accord, began to laugh.

But the man did not look at them until he had scrupulously wiped his feet on the husk mat, and stamped them anew. Then he turned down the legs of his trousers, and carefully examined the lank green carpet-bag he had been carrying.

"I guess I trailed it through some o' the drifts," he remarked. "The road's pretty narrer, this season o' the year."

"You give us a real start," said Susan. "We thought be sure 't was Solomon, an' mebbe the Queen o' Sheba follerin' arter. Why, Solon Slade, you ain't walked way over to Tiverton Street!"

"Yes, I have," asserted Solon. He was a slender, sad-colored man, possibly of her own age, and he spoke in a very soft voice. He was Susan's widowed brother-in-law, and the neighbors said he was clever, but hadn't no more spunk'n a wet rag.

Susan had risen and laid down her knitting. She approached the table and rested one hand on it, a hawk-like brightness in her eyes.

"What you got in that bag?" asked she.

Solon was enjoying his certainty that he held the key to the situation.

"I got a mite o' cheese," he answered, approaching the fire and spreading his hands to the blaze.

"You got anything else? Now, Solon, don't you keep me here on tenter-hooks! You got a letter?"

"Well," said Solon, "I thought I might as well look into the post-office an' see."

"You thought so! You went a-purpose! An' you walked because you al'ays was half shackled about takin' horses out in bad goin'. You hand me over that letter!"

Solon approached the table, a furtive twinkle in his blue eyes. He lifted the bag and opened it slowly. First, he took out a wedge-shaped package.

"That's the cheese," said he. "Herb."

"My land!" ejaculated Miss Susan, while the schoolmaster looked on and smiled. "You better ha' come to me for cheese. I've got a plenty, tansy an' sage, an' you know it. I see it! There! you gi' me holt on 't!" It was a fugitive white gleam in the bottom of the bag; she pounced upon it and brought up a letter. Midway in the act of tearing it open, she paused and looked at Solon with droll entreaty. "It's your letter, by rights!" she added tentatively.

"Law!" said he, "I dunno who it's directed to, but I guess it's as much your'n as anybody's."

Miss Susan spread open the sheets with an air of breathless delight. She bent nearer the lamp. "'Dear father and auntie,'" she began.

"There!" remarked Solon, in quiet satisfaction, still warming his hands at the blaze. "There! you see 't is to both."

"My! how she does run the words together! Here!" Miss Susan passed it to the schoolmaster. "You read it. It's from Jenny. You know she's away to school, an' we didn't think best for her to come home Christmas. I knew she'd write for Christmas. Solon, I told you so!"

The schoolmaster took the letter, and read it aloud. It was a simple little message, full of contentment and love and a girl's new delight in life. When he had finished, the two older people busied themselves a moment without speaking, Solon in picking up a chip from the hearth, and Susan in mechanically smoothing the mammoth roses on the side of the carpet-bag.

"Well, I 'most wish we'd had her come home," said he at last, clearing his throat.

"No, you don't either," answered Miss Susan promptly. "Not with this snow, an' comin' out of a house where it's het up, into cold beds an' all. Now I'm goin' to git you a mite o' pie an' some hot tea."

She set forth a prodigal supper on a leaf of the table, and Solon silently worked his will upon it, the schoolmaster eating a bit for company. Then Solon took his way home to the house across the yard, and she watched at the window till she saw the light blaze up through his panes. That accomplished, she turned back with a long breath and began clearing up.

"I'm worried to death to have him over there all by himself," said she. "S'pose he should be sick in the night!"

"You'd go over," answered the schoolmaster easily.

"Well, s'pose he couldn't git me no word?"

"Oh, you'd know it! You're that sort."

Miss Susan laughed softly, and so seemed to put away her recurrent anxiety. She came back to her knitting.

"How long has his wife been dead?" asked the schoolmaster.

"Two year. He an' Jenny got along real well together, but sence September, when she went away, I guess he's found it pretty dull pickin'. I do all I can, but land! 't ain't like havin' a woman in the house from sunrise to set."

"There's nothing like that," agreed the wise young schoolmaster. "Now let's play some more. Let's plan what we'd like to do to-morrow for all the folks we know, and let's not give them a thing they need, but just the ones they'd like."

Miss Susan put down her knitting again. She never could talk to the schoolmaster and keep at work. It made her dreamy, exactly as it did to sit in the hot summer sunshine, with the droning of bees in the air.

"Well," said she, "there's old Ann Wheeler that lives over on the turnpike. She don't want for nothin', but she keeps her things packed away up garret, an' lives like a pig."

"'Sold her bed and lay in the straw.'"

"That's it, on'y she won't sell nuthin'. I'd give her a house all winders, so 't she couldn't help lookin' out, an' velvet carpets 't she'd got to walk on."

"Well, there's Cap'n Ben. The boys say he's out of his head a good deal now; he fancies himself at sea and in foreign countries."

"Yes, so they say. Well, I'd let him set down a spell in Solomon's temple an' look round him. My sake! do you remember about the temple? Why, the nails was all gold. Don't you wish we'd lived in them times? Jest think about the wood they had—cedars o' Lebanon an' fir-trees. You know how he set folks to workin' in the mountains. I've al'ays thought I'd like to ben up on them mountains an' heard the axes ringin' an' listened to the talk. An' then there was pomegranates an' cherubim, an' as for silver an' gold, they were as common as dirt. When I was a little girl, I learnt them chapters, an' sometimes now, when I'm settin' by the fire, I say over that verse about the 'man of Tyre, skillful to work in gold, and in silver, in brass, in iron, in stone, and in timber, in purple, in blue, and in fine linen, and in crimson.' My! ain't it rich?"

She drew a long breath of surfeited enjoyment. The schoolmaster's eyes burned under his heavy brows.

"Then things smelt so good in them days," continued Miss Susan. "They had myrrh an' frankincense, an' I dunno what all. I never make my mincemeat 'thout snuffin' at the spice-box to freshen up my mind. No matter where I start, some way or another I al'ays git back to Solomon. Well, if Cap'n Ben wants to see foreign countries, I guess he'd be glad to set a spell in the temple. Le's have on another stick—that big one there by you. My! it's the night afore Christmas, ain't it? Seems if I couldn't git a big enough blaze. Pile it on. I guess I'd as soon set the chimbly afire as not!"

There was something overflowing and heady in her enjoyment. It exhilarated the schoolmaster, and he lavished stick after stick on the ravening flames. The maple hardened into coals brighter than its own panoply of autumn; the delicate bark of the birch flared up and perished.

"Miss Susan," said he, "don't you want to see all the people in the world?"

"Oh, I dunno! I'd full as lieves set here an' think about 'em. I can fix 'em up full as well in my mind, an' perhaps they suit me better'n if I could see 'em. Sometimes I set 'em walkin' through this kitchen, kings an' queens an' all. My! how they do shine, all over precious stones. I never see a di'mond, but I guess I know pretty well how 't would look."

"Suppose we could give a Christmas dinner,—what should we have?"

"We'd have oxen roasted whole, an' honey—an'—but that's as fur as I can git."

The schoolmaster had a treasury of which she had never learned, and he said musically:—

"Yes, that has a real nice sound. It ain't like the Bible, but it's nice."

They sat and dreamed and the fire flared up into living arabesques and burnt blue in corners. A stick parted and fell into ash, and Miss Susan came awake. She had the air of rousing herself with vigor.

"There!" said she, "sometimes I think it's most sinful to make believe, it's so hard to wake yourself up. Arter all this, I dunno but when Solon comes for the pigs' kittle to-morrer, I shall ketch myself sayin', 'Here's the frankincense!'"

They laughed together, and the schoolmaster rose to light his lamp. He paused on his way to the stairs, and came back to set it down again.

"There are lots of people we haven't provided for," he said. "We haven't even thought what we'd give Jenny."

"I guess Jenny's got her heart's desire." Miss Susan nodded sagely. "I've sent her a box, with a fruit-cake an' pickles and cheese. She's all fixed out."

The schoolmaster hesitated, and turned the lamp-wick up and down. Then he spoke, somewhat timidly, "What should you like to give her father?"

Miss Susan's face clouded with that dreamy look which sometimes settled upon her eyes like haze.

"Well," said she, "I guess whatever I should give him 'd only make him laugh."

"Flowers—and velvet—and honey—and myrrh?"

"Yes," answered Miss Susan with gravity. "Perhaps it's jest as well some things ain't to be had at the shops."

The schoolmaster took up his lamp again and walked to the door.

"We never can tell," he said. "It may be people want things awfully without knowing it. And suppose they do laugh! They'd better laugh than cry. I should give all I could. Good-night."

Miss Susan banked up the fire and set her rising of dough on the hearth, after a discriminating peep to see whether it was getting on too fast. After that, she covered her plants by the window and blew out the light, so that the moon should have its way. She lingered for a moment, looking out into a glittering world. Not a breath stirred. The visible universe lay asleep, and only beauty waked. She was aching with a tumultuous emotion—the sense that life might be very fair and shining, if we only dared to shape it as it seems to us in dreams. The loveliness and repose of the earth appealed to her like a challenge; they alone made it seem possible for her also to dare.

Next morning, she rose earlier than usual, while the schoolmaster was still fast bound in sleep. She stayed only to start her kitchen fire, and then stood motionless a moment for a last decision. The great white day was beginning outside with slow, unconscious royalty. The pale winter dawn yielded to a flush of rose; nothing in the aspect of the heavens contradicted the promise of the night before. It seemed to her a wonderful day, dramatic, visible in peace, because, on that morning, all the world was thinking of the world and not of individual desires. She went to the bureau drawer in the sitting-room and looked, a little scornfully, at two packages hidden there. Handkerchiefs for the schoolmaster, stockings and gloves for Solon! Shutting the drawer, she hurried out into the kitchen, snatching her scissors from the work-basket by the way. She gave herself no time to think, but went up to her flower-stand and began to cut the geranium blossoms and the rose. The fuchsias hung in flaunting grace. They were dearer to her than all. She snipped them recklessly, and because the bunch seemed meagre still, broke the top from her sweet-scented geranium and disposed the flowers hastily in the midst. Her posy was sweet-smelling and good; it spoke to the heart. Putting a shawl over her head, she rolled the flowers in her apron from the frost, and stepped out into the brilliant day. The little cross-track between her house and the other was snowed up; but she took the road and, hurrying between banks of carven whiteness, went up Solon's path to the side door. She walked in upon him where he was standing over the kitchen stove, warming his hands at the first blaze. Susan's cheeks were red with the challenge of the stinging air, but she had the look of one who, living by a larger law, has banished the foolishness of fear. She walked straight up to him and proffered him her flowers.

"Here, Solon," she said, "it's Christmas. I brought you these."