the
coffee was over the flame, we stood at the window looking out on the
black kitchen gardens. There lay the yellow reflection of the room, with
that unreality of all window-mirrored rooms, so that if one might walk
within them one would almost certainly wear one's self with a
difference.

"Ain't it like somethin' bright was in the inside o' the garden,"
Calliope put it, "just the way I told you Abel feels about everything?
That they's something inside, hid, kind of secret an' holy--like the
dreams he said was in the sky. I guess mebbe he's believed that about
Delia all these years. An' now he's bringin' it out. Oh," she said, "the
kitchen is where you can tell about things best. Seems to me _you'd_
ought to know somethin' about Delia an' Abel."

And I wanted to hear.

"Abel see Delia first," Calliope told me then, "to the Rummage Sale that
the Cemetery Auxiliary, that the Sodality use' to be, give. That is to
say, they didn't _give_ it, as it turned out--they just _had_ it, you
might say. Abel was twenty-five or so, an' he'd just come here fresh
ordained a minister. We found he wa'n't the kind to stop short on, Be
good yourself an' then a crown. No, but he just went after the folks
that was livin' along, moral an' step-pickin', an' he says to us, 'What
you sittin' down here for, enjoyin' yourselves bein' moral? Get out an'
help the rest o' the world,' he says. But everybody liked him in spite
o' that, an' he was goin' to be installed minister in our church.

"Then the Rummage Sale come on an' he met Delia. Delia was eighteen an'
just back from visitin' in the City, with her veil a new way, an' I
never see prettier. She was goin' to take charge o' the odd waists
table, an' Abel was runnin' 'round helpin'--Abel wa'n't the white-cuff
kind, like some, but he always pitched in an' stirred up whatever was
a-stewin'. He come bringin' in an armful o' old shoes somebody'd fetched
down, an' just as she was beginnin' on the odd waists, sortin' 'em over,
he met Delia. I remember she looks up at him from under that veil an'
from over a red basque she'd picked off the pile, an', 'Mr. Halsey,' she
says, 'I've a notion to buy this myself an' be savin'.' That took
Abel--Delia was so pretty an' fluffy that hearin' her talk savin' was
about like seein' a butterfly washin' out its own wings. 'Do,' says he,
'the red is beautiful on you,' s'e, shovin' the blame off on to the red.
An' when he got done with the shoes he come over to help