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 reestablished.

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:—

... "'a heap Of candied apple, quince, and plum, and gourd; With jellies soother than the creamy curd, And lucid syrops, tinct with cinnamon; Manna and dates, in argosy transferr'd From Fez; and spiced dainties, every one, From silken Samarcand to cedar'd Lebanon.'"

"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."

Solon looked at her and at them, in slow surprise. He put out both hands and took them awkwardly.

"Well!" he said. "Well!"

Susan was smiling at him. It seemed to her at that moment that the world was a very rich place, because you may take all you want and give all you choose, while nobody is the wiser.

"Well," remarked Solon again, "I guess I'll put 'em into water." He laid them down on a chair. "Susan, do you remember that time I walked over to Pine Hill to pick you some mayflowers, when you was gittin' over the lung fever?"

She nodded.

"Susan," said he desperately, "what if I should ask you to forgit old scores an' begin all over?"

"I ain't laid up anything," answered Susan, looking him full in the face with her brilliant smile.

"There's suthin' I've wanted to tell ye, this two year. I never s'posed you knew, but that night I kissed your sister in the entry an' asked her, I thought 'twas you."

"Yes, I knew that well enough. I was in the buttery and heard it all. There, le's not talk about it."

Solon came a step nearer.

"But will you, Susan?" he persisted. "Will you? I know Jenny'd like it."

"I guess she would, too," said Susan. "There! we don't need to talk no further! You come over to breakfast, won't you? I'm goin' to fry chicken. It's Christmas mornin'." She nodded at him and went out, walking perhaps more proudly than usual down the shining path. Solon, regardless of his cooling kitchen, stood at the door and watched her. Solon never said very much, but he felt as if life were beginning all over again, just as he had wished to make it at the very start. He forgot his gray hair and furrowed face, just as he forgot the cold and snow. It was the spring of the year.

When Miss Susan entered her kitchen, the schoolmaster had come down and was putting a stick of wood into the stove.

"Merry Christmas!" he called, "and here's something for you."

A long white package lay on the table at the end where her plate was always set. She opened it with delicate touches, it seemed so precious.

"My sake!" said she. "It's a fan!" She lifted it out, and the fragrance of an Eastern wood filled all the room. She swept open the feathers. They were white and wonderful.

"It was never used except by one very beautiful woman," said the schoolmaster, without looking at her. "She was a good deal older than I; but somehow she seemed to belong to me. She died, and I thought I should like to have you keep this."

Susan was waving it back and forth before her face, stirring the air to fragrance. Her eyes were full of dreams. "My! ain't it rich!" she murmured. "The Queen o' Sheba never had no better. An' Solon's comin' over to breakfast."



A SECOND MARRIAGE

Amelia Porter sat by her great open fireplace, where the round, consequential black kettle hung from the crane, and breathed out a steamy cloud to be at once licked up and absorbed by the heat from a snatching flame below. It was exactly a year and a day since her husband's death, and she had packed herself away in his own corner of the settle, her hands clasped across her knees, and her red-brown eyes brooding on the nearer embers. She was not definitely speculating on her future, nor had she any heart for retracing the dull and gentle past. She had simply relaxed hold on her mind; and so, escaping her, it had gone wandering off into shadowy prophecies of the immediate years. For, as Amelia had been telling herself for the last three months, since she had begun to outgrow the habit of a dual life, she was not old. Whenever she looked in the glass, she could not help noting how free from wrinkles her swarthy face had been kept, and that the line of her mouth was still scarlet over white, even teeth. Her crisp black hair, curling in those tight fine rolls which a bashful admirer had once commended as "full of little jerks," showed not a trace of gray. All this evidence of her senses read her a fair tale of the possibilities of the morrow; and without once saying, "I will take up a new life," she did tacitly acknowledge that life was not over.

It was a "snapping cold" night of early spring, so misplaced as to bring with it a certain dramatic excitement. The roads were frozen hard, and shone like silver in the ruts. All day sleds had gone creaking past, set to that fine groaning which belongs to the music of the year. The drivers' breath ascended in steam, the while they stamped down the probability of freezing, and yelled to Buck and Broad until that inner fervor raised them one degree in warmth. The smoking cattle held their noses low, and swayed beneath the yoke.

Amelia, shut snugly in her winter-tight house, had felt the power of the day without sharing its discomforts; and her eyes deepened and burned with a sense of the movement and warmth of living. To-night, under the spell of some vague expectancy, she had sat still for a long time, her sewing laid aside and her room scrupulously in order. She was waiting for what was not to be acknowledged even to her own intimate self. But as the clock struck nine, she roused herself, and shook off her mood in impatience and a disappointment which she would not own. She looked about the room, as she often had of late, and began to enumerate its possibilities in case she should desire to have it changed. Amelia never went so far as to say that change should be; she only felt that she had still a right to speculate upon it, as she had done for many years, as a form of harmless enjoyment. While every other house in the neighborhood had gone from the consistently good to the prosperously bad in the matter of refurnishing, John Porter had kept his precisely as his grandfather had left it to him. Amelia had never once complained; she had observed toward her husband an unfailing deference, due, she felt, to his twenty years' seniority; perhaps, also, it stood in her own mind as the only amends she could offer him for having married him without love. It was her father who made the match; and Amelia had succumbed, not through the obedience claimed by parents of an elder day, but from hot jealousy and the pique inevitably born of it. Laurie Morse had kept the singing-school that winter. He had loved Amelia; he had bound himself to her by all the most holy vows sworn from aforetime, and then, in some wanton exhibit of power—gone home with another girl. And for Amelia's responsive throb of feminine anger, she had spent fifteen years of sober country living with a man who had wrapped her about with the quiet tenderness of a strong nature, but who was not of her own generation either in mind or in habit; and Laurie had kept a music-store in Saltash, seven miles away, and remained unmarried.

Now Amelia looked about the room, and mentally displaced the furniture, as she had done so many times while she and her husband sat there together. The settle could be taken to the attic. She had not the heart to carry out one secret resolve indulged in moments of impatient bitterness,—to split it up for firewood. But it could at least be exiled. She would have a good cook-stove, and the great fireplace should be walled up. The tin kitchen, sitting now beside the hearth in shining quaintness, should also go into the attic. The old clock—But at that instant the clash of bells shivered the frosty air, and Amelia threw her vain imaginings aside like a garment, and sprang to her feet. She clasped her hands in a spontaneous gesture of rapt attention; and when the sound paused at her gate, with one or two sweet, lingering clingles, "I knew it!" she said aloud. Yet she did not go to the window to look into the moonlit night. Standing there in the middle of the room, she awaited the knock which was not long in coming. It was imperative, insistent. Amelia, who had a spirit responsive to the dramatic exigencies of life, felt a little flush spring into her face, so hot that, on the way to the door, she involuntarily put her hand to her cheek and held it there. The door came open grumblingly. It sagged upon the hinges, but, well-used to its vagaries, she overcame it with a regardless haste.

"Come in," she said, at once, to the man on the step. "It's cold. Oh, come in!"

He stepped inside the entry, removing his fur cap, and disclosing a youthful face charged with that radiance which made him, at thirty-five, almost the counterpart of his former self. It may have come only from the combination of curly brown hair, blue eyes, and an aspiring lift of the chin, but it always seemed to mean a great deal more. In the kitchen, he threw off his heavy coat, while Amelia, bright-eyed and breathing quickly, stood by, quite silent. Then he looked at her.

"You expected me, didn't you?" he asked.

A warmer color surged into her cheeks. "I didn't know," she said perversely.

"I guess you did. It's one day over a year. You knew I'd wait a year."

"It ain't a year over the services," said Amelia, trying to keep the note of vital expectancy out of her voice. "It won't be that till Friday."

"Well, Saturday I'll come again." He went over to the fire and stretched out his hands to the blaze. "Come here," he said imperatively, "while I talk to you."

Amelia stepped forward obediently, like a good little child. The old fascination was still as dominant as at its birth, sixteen years ago. She realized, with a strong, splendid sense of the eternity of things, that always, even while it would have been treason to recognize it, she had known how ready it was to rise and live again. All through her married years, she had sternly drugged it and kept it sleeping. Now it had a right to breathe, and she gloried in it.

"I said to myself I wouldn't come to-day," went on Laurie, without looking at her. A new and excited note had come into his voice, responsive to her own. He gazed down at the fire, musing the while he spoke. "Then I found I couldn't help it. That's why I'm so late. I stayed in the shop till seven, and some fellows come in and wanted me to play. I took up the fiddle, and begun. But I hadn't more'n drew a note before I laid it down and put for the door. 'Dick, you keep shop,' says I. And I harnessed up, and drove like the devil."

Amelia felt warm with life and hope; she was taking up her youth just where the story ended.

"You ain't stopped swearin' yet!" she remarked, with a little excited laugh. Then, from an undercurrent of exhilaration, it occurred to her that she had never laughed so in all these years.

"Well," said Laurie abruptly, turning upon her, "how am I goin' to start out? Shall we hark back to old scores? I know what come between us. So do you. Have we got to talk it out, or can we begin now?"

"Begin now," replied Amelia faintly. Her breath choked her. He stretched out his arms to her in sudden passion. His hands touched her sleeves and, with an answering rapidity of motion, she drew back. She shrank within herself, and her face gathered a look of fright. "No! no! no!" she cried strenuously.

His arms fell at his sides, and he looked at her in amazement.

"What's the matter?" he demanded.

Amelia had retreated, until she stood now with one hand on the table. She could not look at him, and when she answered, her voice shook.

"There's nothin' the matter," she answered. "Only you mustn't—yet."

A shade of relief passed over his face, and he smiled.

"There, there!" he said, "never you mind. I understand. But if I come over the last of the week, I guess it will be different. Won't it be different, Milly?"

"Yes," she owned, with a little sob in her throat, "it will be different."

Thrown out of his niche of easy friendliness with circumstance, he stood there in irritated consciousness that here was some subtile barrier which he had not foreseen. Ever since John Porter's death, there had been strengthening in him a joyous sense that Milly's life and his own must have been running parallel all this time, and that it needed only a little widening of channels to make them join. His was no crass certainty of finding her ready to drop into his hand; it was rather a childlike, warm-hearted faith in the permanence of her affection for him, and perhaps, too, a shrewd estimate of his own lingering youth compared with John Porter's furrowed face and his fifty-five years. But now, with this new whiffling of the wind, he could only stand rebuffed and recognize his own perplexity.

"You do care, don't you, Milly?" he asked, with a boy's frank ardor. "You want me to come again?"

All her own delight in youth and the warm naturalness of life had rushed back upon her.

"Yes," she answered eagerly. "I'll tell you the truth. I always did tell you the truth. I do want you to come."

"But you don't want me to-night!" He lifted his brows, pursing his lips whimsically; and Amelia laughed.

"No," said she, with a little defiant movement of her own crisp head, "I don't know as I do want you to-night!"

Laurie shook himself into his coat. "Well," he said, on his way to the door, "I'll be round Saturday, whether or no. And Milly," he added significantly, his hand on the latch, "you've got to like me then!"

Amelia laughed. "I guess there won't be no trouble!" she called after him daringly.

She stood there in the biting wind, while he uncovered the horse and drove away. Then she went shaking back to her fire; but it was not altogether from cold. The sense of the consistency of love and youth, the fine justice with which nature was paying an old debt, had raised her to a stature above her own. She stood there under the mantel, and held by it while she trembled. For the first time, her husband had gone utterly out of her life. It was as though he had not been.

"Saturday!" she said to herself. "Saturday! Three days till then!"

Next morning, the spring asserted itself,—there came a whiff of wind from the south and a feeling of thaw. The sled-runners began to cut through to the frozen ground, and about the tree-trunks, where thin crusts of ice were sparkling, came a faint musical sound of trickling drops. The sun was regnant, and little brown birds flew cheerily over the snow and talked of nests.

Amelia finished her housework by nine o'clock, and then sat down in her low rocker by the south window, sewing in thrifty haste. The sun fell hotly through the panes, and when she looked up, the glare met her eyes. She seemed to be sitting in a golden shower, and she liked it. No sunlight ever made her blink, or screw her face into wrinkles. She throve in it like a rose-tree. At ten o'clock, one of the slow-moving sleds, out that day in premonition of a "spell o' weather," swung laboriously into her yard and ground its way up to the side-door. The sled was empty, save for a rocking-chair where sat an enormous woman enveloped in shawls, her broad face surrounded by a pumpkin hood. Her dark brown front came low over her forehead, and she wore spectacles with wide bows, which gave her an added expression of benevolence. She waved a mittened hand to Amelia when their eyes met, and her heavy face broke up into smiles.

"Here I be!" she called in a thick, gurgling voice, as Amelia hastened out, her apron thrown over her head. "Didn't expect me, did ye? Nobody looks for an old rheumatic creatur'. She's more out o' the runnin' 'n a last year's bird's-nest."

"Why, aunt Ann!" cried Amelia, in unmistakable joy. "I'm tickled to death to see you. Here, Amos, I'll help get her out."

The driver, a short, thick-set man of neutral, ashy tints and a sprinkling of hair and beard, trudged round the oxen and drew the rocking-chair forward without a word. He never once looked in Amelia's direction, and she seemed not to expect it; but he had scarcely laid hold of the chair when aunt Ann broke forth:—

"Now, Amos, ain't you goin' to take no notice of 'Melia, no more'n if she wa'n't here? She ain't a bump on a log, nor you a born fool."

Amos at once relinquished his sway over the chair, and stood looking abstractedly at the oxen, who, with their heads low, had already fallen into that species of day-dream whereby they compensate themselves for human tyranny. They were waiting for Amos, and Amos, in obedience to some inward resolve, waited for commotion to cease.

"If ever I was ashamed, I be now!" continued aunt Ann, still with an expression of settled good-nature, and in a voice all jollity though raised conscientiously to a scolding pitch. "To think I should bring such a creatur' into the world, an' set by to see him treat his own relations like the dirt under his feet!"

Amelia laughed. She was exhilarated by the prospect of company, and this domestic whirlpool had amused her from of old.

"Law, aunt Ann," she said, "you let Amos alone. He and I are old cronies. We understand one another. Here, Amos, catch hold! We shall all get our deaths out here, if we don't do nothin' but stand still and squabble."

The immovable Amos had only been awaiting his cue. He lifted the laden chair with perfect ease to one of the piazza steps, and then to another; when it had reached the topmost level, he dragged it over the sill into the kitchen, and, leaving his mother sitting in colossal triumph by the fire, turned about and took his silent way to the outer world.

"Amos," called aunt Ann, "do you mean to say you're goin' to walk out o' this house without speakin' a civil word to anybody? Do you mean to say that?"

"I don't mean to say nothin'," confided Amos to his worsted muffler, as he took up his goad, and began backing the oxen round.

Undisturbed and not at all daunted by a reply for which she had not even listened, aunt Ann raised her voice in cheerful response: "Well, you be along 'tween three an' four, an' you'll find me ready."

"Mercy, aunt Ann!" said Amelia, beginning to unwind the visitor's wraps, "what makes you keep houndin' Amos that way? If he hasn't spoke for thirty-five years, it ain't likely he's goin' to begin now."

Aunt Ann was looking about her with an expression of beaming delight in unfamiliar surroundings. She laughed a rich, unctuous laugh, and stretched her hands to the blaze.

"Law," she said contentedly, "of course it ain't goin' to do no good. Who ever thought 't would? But I've been at that boy all these years to make him like other folks, an' I ain't goin' to stop now. He never shall say his own mother didn't know her duty towards him. Well, 'Melia, you air kind o' snug here, arter all! Here, you hand me my bag, an' I'll knit a stitch. I ain't a mite cold."

Amelia was bustling about the fire, her mind full of the possibilities of a company dinner.

"How's your limbs?" she asked, while aunt Ann drew out a long stocking, and began to knit with an amazing rapidity of which her fat fingers gave no promise.

"Well, I ain't allowed to forgit 'em very often," she replied comfortably. "Rheumatiz is my cross, an' I've got to bear it. Sometimes I wish 't had gone into my hands ruther 'n my feet, an' I could ha' got round. But there! if 't ain't one thing, it's another. Mis' Eben Smith's got eight young ones down with the whoopin'-cough. Amos dragged me over there yisterday; an' when I heerd 'em tryin' to see which could bark the loudest, I says, 'Give me the peace o' Jerusalem in my own house, even if I don't stir a step for the next five year no more'n I have for the last.' I dunno what 't would be if I hadn't a darter. I've been greatly blessed."

The talk went on in pleasant ripples, while Amelia moved back and forth from pantry to table. She brought out the mixing-board, and began to put her bread in the pans, while the tin kitchen stood in readiness by the hearth. The sunshine flooded all the room, and lay insolently on the paling fire; the Maltese cat sat in the broadest shaft of all, and, having lunched from her full saucer in the corner, made her second toilet for the day.

"'Melia," said aunt Ann suddenly, looking down over her glasses at the tin kitchen, "ain't it a real cross to bake in that thing?"

"I always had it in mind to buy me a range," answered Amelia reservedly, "but somehow we never got to it."

"That's the only thing I ever had ag'inst John. He was as grand a man as ever was, but he did set everything by such truck. Don't turn out the old things, I say, no more'n the old folks; but when it comes to makin' a woman stan' quiddlin' round doin' work back side foremost, that beats me."

"He'd have got me a stove in a minute," burst forth Amelia in haste, "only he never knew I wanted it!"

"More fool you not to ha' said so!" commented aunt Ann, unwinding her ball. "Well, I s'pose he would. John wa'n't like the common run o' men. Great strong creatur' he was, but there was suthin' about him as soft as a woman. His mother used to say his eyes 'd fill full o' tears when he broke up a settin' hen. He was a good husband to you,—a good provider an' a good friend."

Amelia was putting down her bread for its last rising, and her face flushed.

"Yes," she said gently, "he was good."

"But there!" continued aunt Ann, dismissing all lighter considerations, "I dunno's that's any reason why you should bake in a tin kitchen, nor why you should need to heat up the brick oven every week, when 't was only done to please him, an' he ain't here to know. Now, 'Melia, le's see what you could do. When you got the range in, 't would alter this kitchen all over. Why don't you tear down that old-fashioned mantelpiece in the fore-room?"

"I could have a marble one," responded Amelia in a low voice. She had taken her sewing again, and she bent her head over it as if she were ashamed. A flush had risen in her cheeks, and her hand trembled.

"Wide marble! real low down!" confirmed aunt Ann, in a tone of triumph. "So fur as that goes, you could have a marble-top table." She laid down her knitting, and looked about her, a spark of excited anticipation in her eyes. All the habits of a lifetime urged her on to arrange and rearrange, in pursuit of domestic perfection. People used to say, in her first married days, that Ann Doby wasted more time in planning conveniences about her house than she ever saved by them "arter she got 'em." In her active years, she was, in local phrase, "a driver." Up and about early and late, she directed and managed until her house seemed to be a humming hive of industry and thrift. Yet there was never anything too urgent in that sway. Her beaming good-humor acted as a buffer between her and the doers of her will; and though she might scold, she never rasped and irritated. Nor had she really succumbed in the least to the disease which had practically disabled her. It might confine her to a chair and render her dependent upon the service of others, but over it, also, was she spiritual victor. She could sit in her kitchen and issue orders; and her daughter, with no initiative genius of her own, had all aunt Ann's love of "springin' to it." She cherished, besides, a worshipful admiration for her mother; so that she asked no more than to act as the humble hand under that directing head. It was Amos who tacitly rebelled. When a boy in school, he virtually gave up talking, and thereafter opened his lips only when some practical exigency was to be filled. But once did he vouchsafe a reason for that eccentricity. It was in his fifteenth year, as aunt Ann remembered well, when the minister had called; and Amos, in response to some remark about his hope of salvation, had looked abstractedly out of the window.

"I'd be ashamed," announced aunt Ann, after the minister had gone,—"Amos, I would be ashamed, if I couldn't open my head to a minister o' the gospel!"

"If one head's open permanent in a house, I guess that fills the bill," said Amos, getting up to seek the woodpile. "I ain't goin' to interfere with nobody else's contract."

His mother looked after him with gaping lips, and, for the space of half an hour, spoke no word.

To-day she saw before her an alluring field of action; the prospect roused within her energies never incapable of responding to a spur.

"My soul, 'Melia!" she exclaimed, looking about the kitchen with a dominating eye, "how I should like to git hold o' this house! I al'ays did have a hankerin' that way, an' I don't mind tellin' ye. You could change it all round complete."

"It's a good house," said Amelia evasively, taking quick, even stitches, but listening hungrily to the voice of outside temptation. It seemed to confirm all the long-suppressed ambitions of her own heart.

"You're left well on 't," continued aunt Ann, her shrewd blue eyes taking on a speculative look. "I'm glad you sold the stock. A woman never undertakes man's work but she comes out the little eend o' the horn. The house is enough, if you keep it nice. Now, you've got that money laid away, an' all he left you besides. You could live in the village, if you was a mind to."

A deep flush struck suddenly into Amelia's cheek. She thought of Saltash and Laurie Morse.

"I don't want to live in the village," she said sharply, thus reproving her own errant mind. "I like my home."

"Law, yes, of course ye do," replied aunt Ann easily, returning to her knitting. "I was only spec'latin'. The land, 'Melia, what you doin' of? Repairin' an old coat?"

Amelia bent lower over her sewing. "'T was his," she answered in a voice almost inaudible. "I put a patch on it last night by lamplight, and when daytime come, I found it was purple. So I'm takin' it off, and puttin' on a black one to match the stuff."

"Goin' to give it away?"

"No, I ain't," returned Amelia, again with that sharp, remonstrant note in her voice. "What makes you think I'd do such a thing as that?"

"Law, I didn't mean no harm. You said you was repairin' on 't,—that's all."

Amelia was ashamed of her momentary outbreak. She looked up and smiled sunnily.

"Well, I suppose it is foolish," she owned,—"too foolish to tell. But I've been settin' all his clothes in order to lay 'em aside at last. I kind o' like to do it."

Aunt Ann wagged her head, and ran a knitting-needle up under her cap on a voyage of discovery.

"You think so now," she said wisely, "but you'll see some time it's better by fur to give 'em away while ye can. The time never'll come when it's any easier. My soul, 'Melia, how I should like to git up into your chambers! It's six year now sence I've seen 'em."

Amelia laid down her work and considered the possibility.

"I don't know how in the world I could h'ist you up there," she remarked, from an evident background of hospitable good-will.

"H'ist me up? I guess you couldn't! You'd need a tackle an' falls. Amos has had to come to draggin' me round by degrees, an' I don't go off the lower floor. Be them chambers jest the same, 'Melia?"

"Oh, yes, they're just the same. Everything is. You know he didn't like changes."

"Blue spread on the west room bed?"

"Yes."

"Spinnin'-wheels out in the shed chamber, where his gran'mother Hooper kep' 'em?"

"Yes."

"Say, 'Melia, do you s'pose that little still's up attic he used to have such a royal good time with, makin' essences?"

Amelia's eyes filled suddenly with hot, unmanageable tears.

"Yes," she said; "we used it only two summers ago. I come across it yesterday. Seemed as if I could smell the peppermint I brought in for him to pick over. He was too sick to go out much then."

Aunt Ann had laid down her work again, and was gazing into vistas of rich enjoyment.

"I'll be whipped if I shouldn't like to see that little still!"

"I'll go up and bring it down after dinner," said Amelia soberly, folding her work and taking off her thimble. "I'd just as soon as not."

All through the dinner hour aunt Ann kept up an inspiring stream of question and reminiscence.

"You be a good cook, 'Melia, an' no mistake," she remarked, breaking her brown hot biscuit. "This your same kind o' bread, made without yeast?"

"Yes," answered Amelia, pouring the tea. "I save a mite over from the last risin'."

Aunt Ann smelled the biscuit critically. "Well, it makes proper nice bread," she said, "but seems to me that's a terrible shif'less way to go about it. However 'd you happen to git hold on 't? You wa'n't never brought up to 't."

"His mother used to make it so. 'T was no great trouble, and 't would have worried him if I'd changed."

When the lavender-sprigged china had been washed and the hearth swept up, the room fell into its aspect of afternoon repose. The cat, after another serious ablution, sprang up into a chair drawn close to the fireplace, and coiled herself symmetrically on the faded patchwork cushion. Amelia stroked her in passing. She liked to see puss appropriate that chair; her purr from it renewed the message of domestic content.

"Now," said Amelia, "I'll get the still."

"Bring down anything else that's ancient!" called aunt Ann. "We've pretty much got red o' such things over t' our house, but I kind o' like to see 'em."

When Amelia returned, she staggered under a miscellaneous burden: the still, some old swifts for winding yarn, and a pair of wool-cards.

"I don't believe you know so much about cardin' wool as I do," she said, in some triumph, regarding the cards with the saddened gaze of one who recalls an occupation never to be resumed. "You see, you dropped all such work when new things come in. I kept right on because he wanted me to."

Aunt Ann was abundantly interested and amused.

"Well, now, if ever!" she repeated over and over again. "If this don't carry me back! Seems if I could hear the wheel hummin' an' gramma Balch steppin' back an' forth as stiddy as a clock. It's been a good while sence I've thought o' such old days."

"If it's old days you want"—began Amelia, and she sped upstairs with a fresh light of resolution in her eyes.

It was a long time before she returned,—so long that aunt Ann exhausted the still, and turned again to her thrifty knitting. Then there came a bumping noise on the stairs, and Amelia's shuffling tread.

"What under the sun be you doin' of?" called her aunt, listening, with her head on one side. "Don't you fall, 'Melia! Whatever 't is, I can't help ye."

But the stairway door yielded to pressure from within: and first a rim of wood appeared, and then Amelia, scarlet and breathless, staggering under a spinning-wheel.

"Forever!" ejaculated aunt Ann, making one futile effort to rise, like some cumbersome fowl whose wings are clipped. "My land alive! you'll break a blood-vessel, an' then where'll ye be?"

Amelia triumphantly drew the wheel to the middle of the floor, and then blew upon her dusty hands and smoothed her tumbled hair. She took off her apron and wiped the wheel with it rather tenderly, as if an ordinary duster would not do.

"There!" she said. "Here's some rolls right here in the bedroom. I carded them myself, but I never expected to spin any more."

She adjusted a roll to the spindle, and, quite forgetting aunt Ann, began stepping back and forth in a rhythmical march of feminine service. The low hum of her spinning filled the air, and she seemed to be wrapped about by an atmosphere of remoteness and memory. Even aunt Ann was impressed by it; and once, beginning to speak, she looked at Amelia's face, and stopped. The purring silence continued, lulling all lesser energies to sleep, until Amelia, pausing to adjust her thread, found her mood broken by actual stillness, and gazed about her like one awakened from dreams.

"There!" she said, recalling herself. "Ain't that a good smooth thread? I've sold lots of yarn. They ask for it in Sudleigh."

"'Tis so!" confirmed aunt Ann cordially. "An' you've al'ays dyed it yourself, too!"

"Yes, a good blue; sometimes tea-color. There, now, you can't say you ain't heard a spinnin'-wheel once more!"

Amelia moved the wheel to the side of the room, and went gravely back to her chair. Her energy had fled, leaving her hushed and tremulous. But not for that did aunt Ann relinquish her quest for the betterment of the domestic world. Her tongue clicked the faster as Amelia's halted. She put away her work altogether, and sat, with wagging head and eloquent hands, still holding forth on the changes which might be wrought in the house: a bay window here, a sofa there, new chairs, tables, and furnishings. Amelia's mind swam in a sea of green rep, and she found herself looking up from time to time at her mellowed four walls, to see if they sparkled in desirable yet somewhat terrifying gilt paper.

At four o'clock, when Amos swung into the yard with the oxen, she was remorsefully conscious of heaving a sigh of relief; and she bade him in to the cup of tea ready for him by the fire with a sympathetic sense that too little was made of Amos, and that perhaps only she, at that moment, understood his habitual frame of mind. He drank his tea in silence, the while aunt Ann, with much relish, consumed doughnuts and cheese, having spread a wide handkerchief in her lap to catch the crumbs. Amos never varied in his role of automaton; and Amelia talked rapidly, in the hope of protecting him from verbal avalanches. But she was not to succeed. At the very moment of parting, aunt Ann, enthroned in her chair, with a clogging stick under the rockers, called a halt, just as the oxen gave their tremulous preparatory heave.

"Amos!" cried she, "I'll be whipped if you've spoke one word to 'Melia this livelong day! If you ain't ashamed, I be! If you can't speak, I can!"

Amos paused, with his habitual resignation to circumstances, but Amelia sped forward and clapped him cordially on the arm; with the other hand, she dealt one of the oxen a futile blow.

"Huddup, Bright!" she called, with a swift, smiling look at Amos. Even in kindness she would not do him the wrong of an unnecessary word. "Good-by, aunt Ann! Come again!"

Amos turned half about, the goad over his shoulder. His dull-seeming eyes had opened to a gleam of human feeling, betraying how bright and keen they were. Some hidden spring had been touched, though only they would tell its story. Amelia thought it was gratitude. And then aunt Ann, nodding her farewells in assured contentment with herself and all the world, was drawn slowly out of the yard.

When Amelia went indoors and warmed her chilled hands at the fire, the silence seemed to her benignant. What was loneliness before had miraculously translated itself into peace. That worldly voice, strangely clothing her own longings with form and substance, had been stilled; only the clock, rich in the tranquillity of age, ticked on, and the cat stretched herself and curled up again. Amelia sat down in the waning light and took a last stitch in her work; she looked the coat over critically with an artistic satisfaction, and then hung it behind the door in its accustomed place, where it had remained undisturbed now for many months. She ate soberly and sparingly of her early supper, and then, leaving the lamp on a side-table, where it brought out great shadows in the room, she took a little cricket and sat down by the fire. There she had mused many an evening which seemed to her less dull than the general course of her former life, while her husband occupied the hearthside chair and told her stories of the war. He had a childlike clearness and simplicity of speech, and a self-forgetful habit of reminiscence. The war was the war to him, not a theatre for boastful individual action; but Amelia remembered now that he had seemed to hold heroic proportions in relation to that immortal past. One could hardly bring heroism into the potato-field and the cow-house; but after this lapse of time, it began to dawn upon her that the man who had fought at Gettysburg and the man who marked out for her the narrow rut of an unchanging existence were one and the same. And as if the moment had come for an expected event, she heard again the jangling of bells without, and the old vivid color rushed into her cheeks, reddened before by the fire-shine. It was as though the other night had been a rehearsal, and as if now she knew what was coming. Yet she only clasped her hands more tightly about her knees and waited, the while her heart hurried its time. The knocker fell twice, with a resonant clang. She did not move. It beat again, the more insistently. Then the heavy outer door was pushed open, and Laurie Morse came in, looking exactly as she knew he would look—half angry, wholly excited, and dowered with the beauty of youth recalled. He took off his cap and stood before her.

"Why didn't you come?" he asked imperatively. "Why didn't you let me in?"

The old wave of irresponsible joy rose in her at his presence; yet it was now not so much a part of her real self as a delight in some influence which might prove foreign to her. She answered him, as she was always impelled to do, dramatically, as if he gave her the cue, calling for words which might be her sincere expression, and might not.

"If you wanted it enough, you could get in," she said perversely, with an alluring coquetry in her mien. "The door was unfastened."

"I did want to enough," he responded. A new light came into his eyes. He held out his hands toward her. "Get up off that cricket!" he commanded. "Come here!"

Amelia rose with a swift, feminine motion, but she stepped backward, one hand upon her heart. She thought its beating could be heard.

"It ain't Saturday," she whispered.

"No, it ain't. But I couldn't wait. You knew I couldn't. You knew I'd come to-night."

The added years had had their effect on him; possibly, too, there had been growing up in him the strength of a long patience. He was not an heroic type of man; but noting the sudden wrinkles in his face and the firmness of his mouth, Amelia conceived a swift respect for him which she had never felt in the days of their youth.

"Am I goin' to stay," he asked sternly, "or shall I go home?"

As if in dramatic accord with his words, the bells jangled loudly at the gate. Should he go or stay?

"I suppose," said Amelia faintly, "you're goin' to stay."

Laurie laid down his cap, and pulled off his coat. He looked about impatiently, and then, moving toward the nail by the door, he lifted the coat to place it over that other one hanging there. Amelia had watched him absently, thinking only, with a hungry anticipation, how much she had needed him; but as the garment touched her husband's, the real woman burst through the husk of her outer self, and came to life with an intensity that was pain. She sprang forward.

"No! no!" she cried, the words ringing wildly in her own ears. "No! no! don't you hang it there! Don't you! don't you!" She swept him aside, and laid her hands upon the old patched garment on the nail. It was as if they blessed it, and as if they defended it also. Her eyes burned with the horror of witnessing some irrevocable deed.

Laurie stepped back in pure surprise. "No, of course not," said he. "I'll put it on a chair. Why, what's the matter, Milly? I guess you're nervous. Come back to the fire. Here, sit down where you were, and let's talk."

The cat, roused by a commotion which was insulting to her egotism, jumped down from the cushion, stretched into a fine curve, and made a silhouette of herself in a corner of the hearth. Amelia, a little ashamed, and not very well understanding what it was all about, came back, with shaking limbs, and dropped upon the settle, striving now to remember the conventionalities of saner living. Laurie was a kind man. At this moment, he thought only of reassuring her. He drew forward the chair left vacant by the cat, and beat up the cushion.

"There," said he, "I'll take this, and we'll talk."

Amelia recovered herself with a spring. She came up straight and tall, a concluded resolution in every muscle. She laid a hand upon his arm.

"Don't you sit there!" said she. "Don't you!"

"Why, Amelia!" he ejaculated, in a vain perplexity. "Why, Milly!"

She moved the chair back out of his grasp, and turned to him again.

"I understand it now," she went on rapidly. "I know just what I feel and think, and I thank my God it ain't too late. Don't you see I can't bear to have your clothes hang where his belong? Don't you see 't would kill me to have you sit in his chair? When I find puss there, it's a comfort. If 't was you—I don't know but I might do you a mischief!" Her voice sank, in awe of herself and her own capacity for passionate emotion.

Laurie Morse had much swift understanding of the human heart. His own nature partook of the feminine, and he shared its intuitions and its fears.

"I never should lay that up against you, Milly," he said kindly. "But we wouldn't have these things. You'd come to Saltash with me, and we'd furnish all new."

"Not have these things!" called Amelia, with a ringing note of dismay,—"not have these things he set by as he did his life! Why, what do you think I'm made of, after fifteen years? What did I think I was made of, even to guess I could? You don't know what women are like, Laurie Morse,—you don't know!"

She broke down in piteous weeping. Even then it seemed to her that it would be good to find herself comforted with warm human sympathy; but not a thought of its possibility remained in her mind. She saw the boundaries beyond which she must not pass. Though the desert were arid on this side, it was her desert, and there in her tent must she abide. She began speaking again between sobbing breaths:—

"I did have a dull life. I used up all my young days doin' the same things over and over, when I wanted somethin' different. It was dull; but if I could have it all over again, I'd work my fingers to the bone. I don't know how it would have been if you and I'd come together then, and had it all as we planned; but now I'm a different woman. I can't any more go back than you could turn Sudleigh River, and coax it to run up-hill. I don't know whether 't was meant my life should make me a different woman; but I am different, and such as I am, I'm his woman. Yes, till I die, till I'm laid in the ground 'longside of him!" Her voice had an assured ring of triumph, as if she were taking again an indissoluble marriage oath.

Laurie had grown very pale. There were forlorn hollows under his eyes; now he looked twice his age.

"I didn't suppose you kept a place for me," he said, with an unconscious dignity. "That wouldn't have been right, and him alive. And I didn't wait for dead men's shoes. But somehow I thought there was something between you and me that couldn't be outlived."

Amelia looked at him with a frank sweetness which transfigured her face into spiritual beauty.

"I thought so, too," she answered, with that simplicity ever attending our approximation to the truth. "I never once said it to myself; but all this year, 'way down in my heart, I knew you'd come back. And I wanted you to come. I guess I'd got it all planned out how we'd make up for what we'd lost, and build up a new life. But so far as I go, I guess I didn't lose by what I've lived through. I guess I gained somethin' I'd sooner give up my life than even lose the memory of."

So absorbed was she in her own spiritual inheritance that she quite forgot his pain. She gazed past him with an unseeing look; and striving to meet and recall it, he faced the vision of their divided lives. To-morrow Amelia would remember his loss and mourn over it with maternal pangs; to-night she was oblivious of all but her own. Great human experiences are costly things; they demand sacrifice, not only of ourselves, but of those who are near us. The room was intolerable to Laurie. He took his hat and coat, and hurried out. Amelia heard the dragging door closed behind him. She realized, with the numbness born of supreme emotion, that he was putting on his coat outside in the cold; and she did not mind. The bells stirred, and went clanging away. Then she drew a long breath, and bowed her head on her hands in an acquiescence that was like prayer.

It seemed a long time to Amelia before she awoke again to temporal things. She rose, smiling, to her feet, and looked about her as if her eyes caressed every corner of the homely room. She picked up puss in a round, comfortable ball, and carried her back to the hearthside chair; there she stroked her until her touchy ladyship had settled down again to purring content. Then Amelia, still smiling, and with an absent look, as if her mind wandered through lovely possibilities of a sort which can never be undone, drew forth the spinning-wheel, and fitted a roll to the spindle. She began stepping back and forth as if she moved to the measure of an unheard song, and the pleasant hum of her spinning broke delicately upon the ear. It seemed to waken all the room into new vibrations of life. The clock ticked with an assured peace, as if knowing it marked eternal hours. The flames waved softly upward without their former crackle and sheen; and the moving shadows were gentle and rhythmic ones come to keep the soul company. Amelia felt her thread lovingly.

"I guess I'll dye it blue," she said, with a tenderness great enough to compass inanimate things. "He always set by blue, didn't he, puss?"



THE FLAT-IRON LOT

The fields were turning brown, and in the dusty gray of the roadside, closed gentians gloomed, and the aster burned like a purple star. It was the finest autumn for many years. People said, with every clear day, "Now this must be a weather-breeder;" but still the storm delayed. Then they anxiously scanned the heavens, as if, weeks beforehand, the signs of the time might be written there; for this was the fall of all others when wind and sky should be kind to Tiverton. She was going to celebrate her two hundred and fiftieth anniversary, and she was big with the importance of it.

On a still afternoon, over three weeks before that happy day, a slender old man walked erectly along the country road. He carried a cane over his shoulder, and, slung upon it, a small black leather bag, bearing the words, painted in careful letters, "Clocks repaired by N. Oldfield." As he went on, he cast a glance, now and then, to either side, from challenging blue eyes, strong yet in the indomitable quality of youth. He knew every varying step of the road, and could have numbered, from memory, the trees and bushes that fringed its length; and now, after a week's absence, he swept the landscape with the air of a manorial lord, to see what changes might have slipped in unawares. At one point, a flat triangular stone had been tilted up on edge, and an unpracticed hand had scrawled on it, in chalk, "4 M to Sudleigh." The old man stopped, took the bag from his shoulder, and laid it tenderly on a stone of the wall. Then, with straining hands, he pulled the rock down into the worn spot where it had lain, and gave a sigh of relief when it settled into its accustomed place, and the tall grass received it tremulously. Now he opened his bag, took from it a cloth, carefully folded, and rubbed the rock until those defiling chalk marks were partially effaced.

"Little varmints!" he said, apostrophizing the absent school children who had wrought the deed. "Can't they let nothin' alone?" He took up his bag, and went on.

Nicholas Oldfield, as he walked the road that day, was a familiar figure to all the county round. He had a smooth, carefully shaven face, with a fine outline of nose and chin, and his straight gray hair shone from faithful brushing. He was almost aggressively clean. Even his blue eyes had the appearance of having just been washed, like a spring day after a shower. It was a frequent remark that he looked as if he had come out of a bandbox; and one critic even went so far as to assert that on Sundays he sandpapered his eyes and gave a little extra polish to his bones. But these were calumnies; though to-day his suit of home-made blue was quite speckless, and the checked gingham neckerchief, which made his ordinary wear, still kept its stiff, starched creases.

"Dirt don't stick to you, Mr. Oldfield," once said a seeking widow. "Your washing can't be much. I guess anybody 'd be glad to undertake it for you." Mr. Oldfield nodded gravely, as one receiving the tribute which was justly his, and continued to do his washing himself.

As he walked the dusty road, bearing his little bag, so he had walked it for years, sometimes within a few miles of home, and again at the extreme limit of the county edge. The clocks of the region were all his clients, some regarded with compassion ("ramshackle things" that needed perpetual tinkering) and others with a holy awe. "The only thing Nicholas Oldfield bows the knee before is a double-back-action clock a thousand years old," said Brad Freeman, the regardless. "That's how he reads Ancient of Days." The justice of the remark was acknowledged, though, as touching Mr. Oldfield, it was felt to be striking rather too keenly at the root of things. For Nicholas Oldfield was looked upon with a respect not so much inspired by his outward circumstances as by his method of taking them. There are, indeed, ways and ways among us who serve the public. When Tom O'Neil went round peddling essences, children saw him from afar, ran to meet him, and, falling on his pack, besought him for "two-three-drops-o'-c'logne" with such fervor that the mothers had to haul them off by main force, in order themselves to approach his redolence; but when the clock-mender appeared, with his little bag, propriety walked before him, and the naughtiest scion of the flock would come soberly in, to announce:—

"Mother, here's Mr. Oldfield."

It is true that this little old man did exemplify the dignity and restraint of life to such a degree that, had it not been for his one colossal weakness, the town might have condemned him, in good old Athenian fashion. Clock-mending was a legitimate industry; but there were those who felt it to be, in his case, a mere pretext for nosing round and identifying ridiculous old things which nobody prized until Nicholas Oldfield told them it was conformable so to do. Some believed him and some did not; but it was known that a MacDonough's Victory tea-set drove him to an almost outspoken rapture, and that the mere mention of the Bay Psalm Book (a copy of which he sought with the haggard fervor of one who worships but has ceased to hope) was enough to make him "wild as a hawk." Old papers, too, drew him by their very mildew; and when his townsfolk were in danger of respecting him too tediously, they recalled these amiable puerilities, drew a breath of relief, and marked his value down.

Many facts in his life were not in the least understood, because he never saw the possibility of talking about them. For example, when at the marriage of his son, Young Nick, he made over the farm, and kept his own residence in the little gambrel-roofed house where he had been born, and his father and grandfather before him, the act was, for a time, regarded somewhat gloomily by the public at large. There were Young Nick and his Hattie, living in the big new house, with its spacious piazza and cool green blinds; there the two daughters were born and bred, and the elder of them was married. The new house had its hired girl and man; and meantime the other Nicholas (nobody ever dreamed of calling him Old Nick) was cooking his own meals, and even, of a Saturday, scouring his kitchen floor. It was easy to see in him the pathetic symbol of a bygone generation relegated to the past. A little wave of sympathy crept to his very feet, and then, finding itself unnoted, ebbed away again. Only one village censor dared speak, saying slyly to Young Nick's Hattie:—

"Ain't no room for grandpa in the new house, is there?"

Hattie opened her eyes wide at this discovery, though now she realized that echoes of a like benevolence had reached her ears before. She went home very early from the quilting, and that night she said to her husband, as they sat on the doorstone, waiting for the milk to cool:—

"Nicholas, little things I've got hold of, first an' last, make me conclude folks pity father. Do you s'pose they do?"

Young Nick selected a fat plantain spike, and began stripping the seeds.

"Well, I dunno what for," said he, after consideration. "Father seems to be pretty rugged."

Hattie was one of those who find no quicker remedy than that of plentiful speech; and later in the evening, she sped over to the little house, across the dewy orchard. Mr. Oldfield had come home only that afternoon, and now he had drawn up at his kitchen table, which was covered by a hand-woven cloth, beautifully ironed, and set with old-fashioned dishes. He had hot biscuits and apple-pie, and the odor of them rose soothingly to Hattie's nostrils, dissipating, for a moment, her consciousness of tragedy and wrong. A man could not be quite forlorn who cooked such "victuals," and sat before them so serenely.

"See here, father," said she, with the desperation of speaking her mind for the first time to one from whom she had hitherto kept awesomely remote; "when we moved into the new house, I dunno's there was any talk about your comin', too. I guess it never entered into our heads you'd do anything but to stick to the old place. An' now, after it's all past an' gone, the neighbors say"—

Nicholas Oldfield had been smiling his slight, dry smile. At this point, he took up a knife, and cut a careful triangle of pie. He did all these things as if each one were very important.

"Here, Hattie," said he, "you taste o' this dried apple. I put a mite o' lemon in."

Hattie, somehow abashed by the mental impact of the little man, ate her pie meekly, and thenceforth waived the larger issue. All the same, she knew the neighbors "pitied father," and that they would continue to pity him so long as he lived alone in the little peaceful house, doing his own washing and making his own pie.

To-night was a duplication of many another when Nicholas Oldfield had turned the corner and come in sight of his own home; but often as it had been repeated, the experience was never the same. Some would have named his springing emotion delight; but it neither quickened his pace nor made him draw his breath the faster. Perhaps he even walked a little more slowly, to enjoy the taste, for he was a saving man. There was the little house, white as paint could make it, and snug in bowering foliage. He noted, with an approving eye, that the dahlias in the front yard, set in stiff nodding rows, were holding their own bravely against the dry fall weather, and that the asters were blooming profusely, purple and pink. A rare softness came over his features when he stepped into the yard; and though he examined the roof critically in passing, it was with the eye of love. He fitted the key in the lock; the sound of its turning made music in his ears, and, setting his foot upon the sill, he was a man for whom that little was enough. Nicholas Oldfield was at home.

He laid down his bag, and went, without an instant's pause, straight through to the sitting-room, and stood before the tall eight-day clock. He put his hand on the woodwork, as if it might have been the shoulder of a friend, and looked up understandingly in its face.

"Well, here we be," said he. "You'd ha' hil' out till mornin', though."

For wherever he might travel, he always made it a point to be home in time to wind the clocks; and however early he might hurry away again, under stress of some antiquarian impulse, they were left alive and pulsing behind him. There was one in each room, besides the tall eight-day in the parlor, and they were all soft-voiced and leisurely, reminiscent of another age than ours. Though three of them had been inherited, it almost seemed as if Nicholas must have selected the entire company, so harmonious were they, so serenely fitted to the calm decorum of his own desires.

In half an hour he had accomplished many things, and his fire sent a spiral breath toward heaven. The dark old kitchen lay open, door and window, to the still opulent sun, and from the pantry and a corner cupboard came gleams of color, to delight the eye. Here were riches, indeed: old India china, an unbroken set of Sheltered Peasant, and, on the top shelf, little mugs and cups of a pink lustre, soft and sweet as flowers. Many a collector had wooed Nicholas Oldfield to part with his china (for the fame of it had spread afar,) but his only response to solicitation was to open the doors more widely on his treasures, remarking, without emphasis:—

"I guess they might as well stay where they be."

So passive was he, that many among merchants judged they had impressed him, and returned again and again to the charge; but when they found always the same imperturbable front, the same mild neutrality of demeanor, they melted sadly away, and were seen no more, leaving their places to be taken by others equally hopeful and as sure to be betrayed.

One creature only was capable of rousing Nicholas Oldfield from that calm wherein he went ticking on through life. She it was who, by some natal likeness, understood him wholly; and to-night, just as he was sitting down to his supper of "cream o' tartar" biscuits and smoking tea, her clear voice broke upon his solitude.

"Gran'ther," called Mary Oldfield from the door, "mother says, 'Won't you come over to supper?' She saw your smoke."

Nicholas pushed back his chair a little; he felt himself completed.

"You had yours?" he asked, in his usual even tones.

"No. I waited for you."

"Then you come right in an' git it. Take your mug—here, I'll reach it down for ye—an' there's the Good-Girl plate."

Mary Oldfield was a tall, pleasant looking maid of sixteen, and standing quietly by, while her grandfather got out her own plate and mug, she was an amazingly faithful copy of him. They smiled a little at each other, in sitting down, but there was no closer greeting between them. They were exceedingly well content to be together again, and this was so simple and natural a state that there was nothing to say about it. Only Nicholas looked at her from time to time—her capable brown hands and careful braids of hair,—and nodded briefly, as he had a way of nodding at his clocks.

"You know what I told you, Mary, about the Flat-Iron Lot?" he asked, while Mary buttered her biscuit.

She looked at him in assent.

"Well, I've proved it."

"You don't say!"

Mary had certain antique methods of speech, which the new-fangled school teacher, not liking to pronounce them vulgar, had tactfully dubbed "obsolete." "If we used 'em all the time they wouldn't get obsolete, would they?" asked Mary; and the school teacher, being a logical person, made no answer. So Mary went on plying them with a conscientious calmness like one determined to keep a precious and misprized metal in circulation. She even called Nicholas gran'ther, because he liked it, and because he had called his own grandfather so.

"Ye see," said Nicholas, "the fust rec'ids were missin'. 'Burnt up!' says that town clerk over to Sudleigh. 'Burnt when the old meetin'-house ketched fire, arter the Injun raid.' 'Burnt up!' thinks I. 'The cat's foot! I guess so, when the communion service was carried over fifteen mile an' left in a potato sullar.' So I says to myself, 'What become o' that fust communion set?' Why, before the meetin'-house was repaired, they all rode over to what's now Saltash, to worship in Square Billin's's kitchen. Now, when Square Billin's died of a fever, that same winter, they hove all his books into that old lumber-room over Sudleigh court-house. So, when I was fixin' up the court-house clock, t' other day, I clim' up to that room, an' shet myself in there. An', Mary, I found them rec'ids!" He looked at her with that complete and awe-stricken triumph which nobody else had ever seen upon his face. Her own reflected it.

"Where are they, gran'ther?" asked Mary. But she was the more excited; she could only whisper.

"They're loose sheets o' paper," returned Nicholas, "an' they're in my bag!"

Mary made an involuntary movement toward the bag, which lay, innocently secretive, on a neighboring chair. Even its advertising legend had a knowing look. Nicholas followed her glance.

"No," said he firmly, "not now. We'll read 'em all over this evenin', when I've done the dishes. But, Mary, I'll tell ye this much: it's got the whole story of the settlers comin' into town, an' which way they come, an' all about it, writ down by Simeon Gerry, the fust minister, the one that killed five Injuns, stoppin' to load an' fire, an' then opened on the rest with bilin' fat. An', Mary, the fust settler of all was Nicholas Oldfield, haulin' his wife on a kind of a drag made o' withes; an' the path they took led straight over our Flat-Iron Lot. An', Mary, 't was there they rested, an' offered up prayer to God."

"O my soul, gran'ther!" breathed Mary, clasping her little brown hands. "O my soul!" Her face grew curiously mature. It seemed to mirror his. She leaned forward, in a deadly earnestness. "Gran'ther," said she, "did they settle here first? Or—or was it Sudleigh?"

Now, indeed, was Nicholas Oldfield the herald of news good both to tell and hear.

"The fust settlement," said he, as if he read it from the book of fate, "was made in Tiverton, on the sixteenth day of the month; the second in Sudleigh, on the twenty-fifth."

"So, when you guessed at the date, and told parson to have the celebration then, you got it right?"

"I got it right," replied Nicholas quietly. "But pa'son shall see the rec'ids, an' I'll recommend him to put 'em under lock an' key."

The two sat there and looked at each other, with an outwelling of great content. Then Mary passed her mug, and while Nicholas filled it, he gave her an oft-repeated charge:—

"Don't you open your head now, Mary. All this is between you an' me. I'll just mention it to pa'son, an' make up my mind whether he sees the meanin' on 't. But don't you say one word to your father an' mother. To them it don't signify."

Mary nodded wisely. She knew, with the philosophy of a much older experience, that she and gran'ther lived alone in a nest of kindly aliens. As if their mention evoked a foreign presence, her mother's voice sounded that instant from the door:—

"Mary, why under the sun didn't you come back? I sent word for you to run over with her, father, an' have some supper. Well, if you two ain't thick!"

"We're havin' a dish o' discourse," returned Nicholas quietly.

Young Nick's Hattie was forty-five, but she looked much younger. Extreme plumpness had insured her against wrinkles, and her light brown hair was banded smoothly back. Hattie's originality lay in a desire for color, and therein she overstepped the bounds of all decorum. It was customary to see her barred across with enormous plaids, or stripes going the broad way; and so long had she lived under such insignia that no one would have known her without them. She came in with soft, heavy footfalls, and sat down in the little rocking-chair at Mr. Oldfield's right hand. She smiled at him, somewhat nervously.

"Well, father," said she, "you got home!"

Nicholas helped himself to another half cup of tea, after holding the teapot tentatively across to Mary's mug.

"Yes," he answered, in his dry and gentle fashion, "I've got home."

Hattie began rocking, in a rapid staccato, to punctuate her speech.

"Well," she began, "I'll say my say an' done with it. There's goin' to be a town-meetin' to-night, an' Nicholas sent me over to mention it. 'Father'll want to be on hand,' says he."

Mr. Oldfield pushed back his cup, and then his chair. He bent his keen blue eyes upon her.

"Town meetin' this time o' year?" said he. "What for?"

"Oh, it's about the celebration. Old Mr. Eaton"—

"What Eaton?"

"William W."

"He that went away in war time, an' made money in wool? Old War-Wool Eaton?"

Nicholas nodded, at her assent, and his look blackened. He knew what was coming.

"Well, he sent word he meant to give us a clock, same as he had other towns, an' he wanted we should have it up before the celebration."

"Yes," said Nicholas Oldfield, "he'll give us a clock, will he? I knew he would. I've said 'twas comin'. He give one to Saltash; he's gi'n 'em all over the county. Do you know what them clocks be? They've got letters round the dial, in place o' figgers; an' the letters spell out, 'In Memory of Me.' An' down to Saltash they've gi'n up sayin' it's quarter arter twelve, or the like o' that. They say it's O minutes past I."

He glared at her. Young Nick's Hattie thought she had never heard father speak with such bitterness; and indeed it was true. Never before had he been assailed on his own ground; it seemed as if the whole township now conspired to bait him.

"Well" she remarked weakly, "I dunno's it does any hurt, so long as they can tell what they mean by it."

Nicholas threw her a pitying glance. He scorned to waste eternal truth on one so dull.

"Well," she went on, in desperation, "that ain't all, neither. I might as well say the whole, an' done with it. He wants 'em to set up the clock on the meetin'-house; an' seeing the tower mightn't be firm enough, he'll build it up higher, an' give 'em a new bell."

Now, indeed, Nicholas Oldfield was in the case of Shylock, when he learned his daughter's limit of larceny. "The curse never fell upon our nation till now," so he might have quoted. "I never felt it till now."

He rose from his chair.

"In the name of God Almighty," he asked solemnly, "what do they want of a new bell?"

Young Nick's Hattie gave an involuntary cry.

"O father!" she entreated, "don't say such words. I never see you take on so. What under the sun has got into you?"

Nicholas made no reply. Slowly and methodically he was putting the dishes into the wooden sink. When he touched Mary's pink mug, his fingers trembled a little; but he did not look at her. He knew she understood. Young Nick's Hattie rolled her hands nervously in her apron, and then unrolled them, and smoothed the apron down. She gathered herself desperately.

"Well, father," she said, "I've got another arrant. I said I'd do it, an' I will; but I dunno how you'll take it."

"O mother!" cried Mary, "don't!"

"What is it?" asked Nicholas, folding the tablecloth in careful creases. "Say your say an' git it over."

Hattie rocked faster and faster. Even in the stress of the moment Nicholas remembered that the old chair was well made, and true to its equilibrium.