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Laurie Morse had much swift understanding of the human heart. His own nature partook of the feminine, and he shared its intuitions and its fears.

“I never should lay that up against you, Milly,” he said kindly. “But we wouldn’t have these things. You’d come to Saltash with me, and we’d furnish all new.”

“Not have these things!” called Amelia, with a ringing note of dismay,–“not have these things he set by as he did his life! Why, what do you think I’m made of, after fifteen years? What did I think I was made of, even to guess I could? You don’t know what women are like, Laurie Morse,–you don’t know!”

She broke down in piteous weeping. Even then it seemed to her that it would be good to find herself comforted with warm human sympathy; but not a thought of its possibility remained in her mind. She saw the boundaries beyond which she must not pass. Though the desert were arid on this side, it was her desert, and there in her tent must she abide. She began speaking again between sobbing breaths:–

“I did have a dull life. I used up all my young days doin’ the same things over and over, when I wanted somethin’ different. It was dull; but if I could have it all over again, I’d work my fingers to the bone. I don’t know how it would have been if you and I’d come together then, and had it all as we planned; but now I’m a different woman. I can’t any more go back than you could turn Sudleigh River, and coax it to run uphill. I don’t know whether ‘t was meant my life should make me a different woman; but I am different, and such as I am, I’m his woman. Yes, till I die, till I’m laid in the ground ‘longside of him!” Her voice had an assured ring of triumph, as if she were taking again an indissoluble marriage oath.

Laurie had grown very pale. There were forlorn hollows under his eyes; now he looked twice his age.

“I didn’t suppose you kept a place for me,” he said, with an unconscious dignity. “That wouldn’t have been right, and him alive. And I didn’t wait for dead men’s shoes. But somehow I thought there was something between you and me that couldn’t be outlived.”

Amelia looked at him with a frank sweetness which transfigured her face into spiritual beauty.

“I thought so, too,” she answered, with that simplicity ever attending our approximation to the truth, “I never once said it to myself; but all this year, ‘way down in my heart, I knew you’d come back. And I wanted you to come. I guess I’d got it all planned out how we’d make up for what we’d lost, and build up a new life. But so far as I go, I guess I didn’t lose by what I’ve lived through. I guess I gained somethin’ I’d sooner give up my life than even lose the memory of.”

So absorbed was she in her own spiritual inheritance that she quite forgot his pain. She gazed past him with an unseeing look; and striving to meet and recall it, he faced the vision of their divided lives. To-morrow Amelia would remember his loss and mourn over it with maternal pangs; to-night she was oblivious of all but her own. Great human experiences are costly things; they demand sacrifice, not only of ourselves, but of those who are near us. The room was intolerable to Laurie. He took his hat and coat, and hurried out. Amelia heard the dragging door closed behind him. She realized, with the numbness born of supreme emotion, that he was putting on his coat outside in the cold; and she did not mind. The bells stirred, and went clanging away. Then she drew a long breath, and bowed her head on her hands in an acquiescence that was like prayer.

It seemed a long time to Amelia before she awoke again to temporal things. She rose, smiling, to her feet, and looked about her as if her eyes caressed every corner of the homely room. She picked up puss in a round, comfortable ball, and carried her back to the hearth-side chair; there she stroked her until her touchy ladyship had settled down again to purring content. Then Amelia, still smiling, and with an absent look, as if her mind wandered through lovely possibilities of a sort which can never be undone, drew forth the spinning-wheel, and fitted a roll to the spindle. She began stepping back and forth as if she moved to the measure of an unheard song, and the pleasant hum of her spinning broke delicately upon the ear. It seemed to waken all the room into new vibrations of life. The clock ticked with an assured peace, as if knowing it marked eternal hours. The flames waved softly upward without their former crackle and sheen; and the moving shadows were gentle and rhythmic ones come to keep the soul company. Amelia felt her thread lovingly.

“I guess I’ll dye it blue,” she said, with a tenderness great enough to compass inanimate things. “He always set by blue, didn’t he, puss?”