er, have you any idea what I am thinking about?"

"Not in the least, Ellen," which was not strictly the truth. He
supposed she must be thinking naturally of the news he had told her not
an hour since, of his engagement to Eunice Goodward. It lay so close to
the surface of his own mind at all times that the slightest stir of
conversation, like the wind above a secret rose, seemed always about to
disclose it. They were sitting on the porch at Bloombury and the pointed
swallows pitched and darted about the eaves.

"It was the smell of the dust that reminded me," said Ellen, "and the
wild rose at the turn of the road; you can smell it as plain as plain
when the air lifts a little. Do you remember a picnic that we were
invited to and couldn't go? It was on account of being poor ... and I
was just finding it out. I found out a good many things that summer;
about my always going to be lame and what it would mean to us. It was
dreadful to me that I couldn't be lame just by myself, but I had to mix
up you and mother in it."

"We were glad, Ellen, to be mixed up in it if it made things easier for
you."

"I know ... times I felt that way about it too, but that was when I was
older ... as if it sort of held us all together; like somebody who had
belonged to us all and had died. Only it was me that died, the me that
would have been if I hadn't been lame.... Well, I hadn't thought it out
so far that first summer; I just hated it because it kept us from doing
things like other people. You were fond of Ada Brown, I remember, and it
was because I was lame and we were so poor and all, that you couldn't go
with her and she got engaged to Jim Harvey. I hope you don't think I
have a bad heart, Peter, but I was always glad that Ada didn't turn out
very well. Every time I saw her getting homelier and kind of bedraggled
like, I said to myself, well, I've saved Peter from that at any rate. I
couldn't have borne it if she had turned out the kind of a person you
ought to have married."

"You shouldn't have worried, Ellen; very few men marry the first woman
they are interested in."

"There was a girl you used to write home about--at that boarding-house.
I used to get you to write. I daresay you thought I was just curious.
But I was trying to find out something that would make me perfectly sure
she wasn't good enough for you. She was a typewriter, wasn't she?"

"Something of that sort."

"Well!" Ellen took him up triumphantly, "you wouldn'