Petrus stood still and looked round, and his grave eyes were full of
grateful tenderness as they met those of his wife. Dorothea knew the
soft and loving heart within the stern exterior, and nodded to him with
sympathetic understanding: but before she could speak, he said, "Come
in, come nearer to me; there is a heavy matter in hand, and you cannot
escape your share of the burden."

"Give me my share!" cried she eagerly. "The slim girl of former years
has grown a broad-shouldered old woman, so that it may be easier to her
to help her lord to bear the many burdens of life. But I am seriously
anxious--even before we went to church something unsatisfactory had
happened to you, and not merely in the council-meeting. There must be
something not right with one of the children."

"What eyes you have!" exclaimed Petrus.

"Dim, grey eyes," said Dorothea, "and not even particularly keen. But
when anything concerns you and the children I could see it in the dark.
You are dissatisfied with Polykarp; yesterday, before he set out for
Raithu, you looked at him so--so--what shall I say? I can quite imagine
what it is all about, but I believe you are giving yourself groundless
anxiety. He is young, and so lovely a woman as Sirona--"

Up to this point Petrus had listened to his wife in silence. Now he
clasped his hands, and interrupted her, "Things certainly are not going
on quite right--but I ought to be used to it. What I meant to have
confided to you in a quiet hour, you tell me as if you knew all about
it!"

"And why not?" asked Dorothea. "When you graft a scion on to a tree, and
they have grown well together, the grafted branch feels the bite of the
saw that divides the stock, or the blessing of the spring that feeds
the roots, just as if the pain or the boon were its own. And you are
the tree and I am the graft, and the magic power of marriage has made us
one. Your pulses are my pulses, your thoughts have become mine, and so I
always know before you tell me what it is that stirs your soul."

Dorothea's kind eyes moistened as she spoke, and Petrus warmly clasped
her hands in his as he said, "And if the gnarled old trunk bears from
time to time some sweet fruit, he may thank the graft for it. I cannot
believe that the anchorites up yonder are peculiarly pleasing to the
Lord because they live in solitude. Man comes to his perfect humanity
only through his wife and child, and he who has them not, can never
learn the most glor