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Rosie got on her fat legs with difficulty. She held her pinafore full of buttons, but disaster lies in doing too many things at once; there came a slip, a despairing clutch, and the buttons fell over the floor. There were a great, many round ones, and they rolled very fast. Amelia washed the sand from her parboiled fingers, and drew a nervous breath. She had a presentiment of coming ill, painfully heightened by her consciousness that the kitchen was “riding out,” and that she and her family rode with it. Rosie came running back from her peephole, husky with importance. The errant buttons did not trouble her. She had an eternity of time wherein to pick them up; and, indeed, the chances were that some tall, benevolent being would do it for her.

“It’s a man,” she said. “He’s got on a light coat with bright buttons, and a fuzzy hat. He’s got a big nose.”

Now, indeed, despair entered into Amelia, and sat enthroned. She sank down on a straight-backed chair, and put her hands on her knees, while the knock came again, a little querulously.

“Enoch,” said she, “do you know what’s happened? That’s cousin Josiah Pease out there.” Her voice bore the tragedy of a thousand past encounters; but that Enoch could not know.

“Is it?” asked he, with but a mild appearance of interest. “Want me to go to the door?”

“Go to the door!” echoed Amelia, so stridently that he looked up at her again. “No; I don’t want anybody should go to the door till this room’s cleared up. If ‘t w’an’t so ever-lastin’ cold, I’d take him right into the clock-room, an’ blaze a fire; but he’d see right through that. You gether up them tools an’ things, an’ I’ll help carry out the bench.”

If Enoch had not just then been absorbed in a delicate combination of brass, he might have spoken more sympathetically. As it was, he seemed kindly, but remote.

“Look out!” said he, “you’ll joggle. No, I guess I won’t move. If he’s any kind of a man, he’ll know what ’tis to clean a clock.”

Amelia was not a crying woman, but the hot tears stood in her eyes. She was experiencing, for the first time, that helpless pang born from the wounding of pride in what we love.

“Don’t you see, Enoch?” she insisted. “This room looks like the Old Boy–an’ so do you–an’ he’ll go home an’ tell all the folks at the Ridge. Why, he’s heard we’re married, an’ come over here to spy out the land. He hates the cold. He never stirs till ‘way on into June; an’ now he’s come to find out.”

“Find out what?” inquired Enoch absorbedly. “Well, if you’re anyways put to ‘t, you send him to me.” That manly utterance enunciated from a “best-room” sofa, by an Enoch clad in his Sunday suit, would have filled Amelia with rapture; she could have leaned on it as on the Tables of the Law. But, alas! the scene-setting was meagre, and though Enoch was very clean, he had no good clothes. He had pointedly refused to buy them with his wife’s money until he should have worked on the farm to a corresponding amount. She had loved him for it; but every day his outer poverty hurt her pride. “I guess you better ask him in,” concluded Enoch. “Don’t you let him bother you.”

Amelia turned about with the grand air of a woman repulsed.

“He don’t bother me,” said she, “an’ I will let him in.” She walked to the door, stepping on buttons as she went, and conscious, when she broke them, of a bitter pleasure. It added to her martyrdom.

She flung open the door, and called herself a fool in the doing; for the little old man outside was in the act of turning away. In another instant, she might have escaped. But he was only too eager to come back again, and it seemed to Amelia as if he would run over her, in his desire to get in.