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“Oh, my!” breathed Dilly. A quick look of trouble darkened her face, as a shadow sweeps across the field.

“What is it?” asked Jethro, in some alarm. “Don’t you like what I said?”

Dilly smiled, though her eyes were still apprehensive.

“It ain’t that,” she answered slowly, striving in her turn to be kind. “Only I guess I never happened to think before just how ‘t would be. I never spec’lated much on keepin’ house.”

“But somebody’d have to keep it,” said Jethro good-naturedly, smiling on her. “We can get good help. You’ll like to have a real home table, and you can invite company every day, if you say so. I never was close, Dilly,–you know that. I sha’n’t make you account for things.”

Dilly got up, and, still holding her papers in her apron, walked swiftly to the window. There she stood, a moment, looking out into the orchard, where the grass lay tangled under the neglected, happy trees. Her eyes traveled mechanically from one to another. She knew them all. That was the “sopsyvine,” its red fruitage fast coming on; there was the Porter she had seen her father graft; and down in the corner grew the August sweet. Life out there looked so still and sane and homely. She knew no city streets,–yet the thought of them sounded like a pursuit. She turned about, and came back to her chair.

“I guess I never dreamt how you lived, Jethro,” she said gently. “But it don’t make no matter. You’re contented with it.”

“I ain’t a rich man,” said Jethro, with some quiet pride; “but I’ve got enough. Yes, I like my business; and city life suits me. You’ll fall in with it, too.”

Then silence settled between them; but that never troubled Dilly. She was used to long musings on her walks to and from her patients, and in her watching beside their beds. Conversation seemed to her a very spurious thing when there is nothing to say.

“What you thinking about?” he asked suddenly.

Dilly looked up at him with her bright, truth-telling glance. “I was thinkin’,” she answered, with a clarity never ruthless, because it was so sweet,–“I was thinkin’ you make me homesick, somehow or another.”

Jethro looked at her doubtfully, and then, as she smiled at him, he smiled also.

“I don’t believe it’s me,” he said, confidently. “It’s because you’re going over things here. It’s the old house.”

“Maybe,” said Dilly, nodding and tying her last bundle of papers. “But I don’t know. I never had quite such feelin’s before. It’s the nearest to bein’ afraid of anything I’ve come acrost. I guess I shall have to run out into the lot an’ take my bearin’s.”

Jethro got up, put his hands in his pockets, and walked about the room. He was very gentle, but he did at heart cherish the masculine theory that the unusual in woman is never to be judged by rules.

“But it is a queer kind of a day,” owned Dilly, pushing in the last drawer. “Why, Jethro!” She faced him, and her voice broke in excitement. “You don’t know, I ain’t begun to tell you, how queer it seems to me. Why, I’ve dreaded this day for weeks! but when it come nigh, it begun to seem to me like a joyful thing. I felt as if they all knew of it: them that was gone. It seemed as if they stood ’round me, ready to uphold me in what I was doin’. I shouldn’t be surprised if they were all here now. I don’t feel a mite alone.”

Her voice shook with excitement; her eyes were big and black. Jethro came up to her, and laid a kindly hand on her shoulder. It was a fine hand, long and shapely, and Dilly, looking down at it, remembered, with a strange regretfulness, how she had once loved its lines.

“There, poor girl!” he said, “you’re tired thinking about it. No wonder you’ve got fancies. I guess the ghosts won’t trouble us. There’s nothing here worse than ourselves.” And again, in spite of the Joyces, Dilly felt homesick and alone.