reverence for the woman he loved. He stooped over her, now stroking her
hair, how holding her hands close against his heart, now whispering
words that in their audible passion were new and strange to his
unaccustomed lips.

"I am all alone, Ephraim. I have no money, no clothes. I have walked
most of the way from Rochester to-day."

"Are you very tired?"--as if the fact that she had been walking that day
was all that needed his immediate attention.

"I was forced to come suddenly. I only escaped with my life. But I have
long been wearying to come to you, for since my husband and the child
died I have been quite alone."

"We heard that they were dead, but that was long ago." There was no tone
of reproach in his voice, only curiosity. "You never wrote, and I--I
supposed that if you were alive you--you preferred to remain, Susy."

She did not enter into explanation then. After a while, when he had
raised her to her feet and embraced her again, she whispered, "Why are
you in the meeting-house, Ephraim?"

"We have been having a prayer meeting," he answered. "And I keep the key
because--because my father used to." He gave the reason with an
intonation half playful. "I do many a thing now because he did."

"I thought that you at least would never become like the others. Are
they less foolish" (she made a gesture toward the pews to denote their
late inmates), "less unjust than they used to be?"

As they went toward the Croom homestead he answered her words in his
manner of meditative good-humour which she knew so well. "I don't know
that they are less unjust and less foolish than they used to be, or that
I am either, Susy, but--it is not good to worship God alone."

She pressed close to his side and looked up through the honied blossom
of the apple-boughs; the violet gulfs of heaven seemed to be made more
homelike by his tones.

"The sun, they say, is ninety-three millions of miles away from the
earth's surface, Susy; and think you that if some of us climb the
mountains we are much nearer light than those in the vales?"

She remembered sentences which she had conned from his letters which ran
like this, and her thought on its way was arrested for a moment by the
memory of the spot where she had lost those letters, the thought of the
grave by the creek at Haun's Mill and of her husband's steadfast faith.
So they walked in silence, but as they stood by the garden gate under
the quince tree, she detained him a moment wi