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“Well,” said Laurie abruptly, turning upon her, “how am I goin’ to start out? Shall we hark back to old scores? I know what come between us. So do you. Have we got to talk it out, or can we begin now?”

“Begin now,” replied Amelia faintly. Her breath choked her. He stretched out his arms to her in sudden passion. His hands touched her sleeves and, with an answering rapidity of motion, she drew back. She shrank within herself, and her face gathered a look of fright. “No! no! no!” she cried strenuously.

His arms fell at his sides, and he looked at her in amazement.

“What’s the matter?” he demanded.

Amelia had retreated, until she stood now with one hand on the table. She could not look at him, and when she answered, her voice shook.

“There’s nothin’ the matter,” she answered. “Only you mustn’t–yet.”

A shade of relief passed over his face, and he smiled.

“There, there!” he said, “never you mind. I understand. But if I come over the last of the week, I guess it will be different. Won’t it be different, Milly?”

“Yes,” she owned, with a little sob in her throat, “it will be different.”

Thrown out of his niche of easy friendliness with circumstance, he stood there in irritated consciousness that here was some subtile barrier which he had not foreseen. Ever since John Porter’s death, there had been strengthening in him a joyous sense that Milly’s life and his own must have been running parallel all this time, and that it needed only a little widening of channels to make them join. His was no crass certainty of finding her ready to drop into his hand; it was rather a childlike, warmhearted faith in the permanence of her affection for him, and perhaps, too, a shrewd estimate of his own lingering youth compared with John Porter’s furrowed face and his fifty-five years. But now, with this new whiffling of the wind, he could only stand rebuffed and recognize his own perplexity.

“You do care, don’t you, Milly?” he asked, with a boy’s frank ardor. “You want me to come again?”

All her own delight in youth and the warm naturalness of life had rushed back upon her.

“Yes,” she answered eagerly. “I’ll tell you the truth. I always did tell you the truth. I do want you to come.”

“But you don’t want me to-night!” He lifted his brows, pursing his lips whimsically; and Amelia laughed.

“No,” said she, with a little defiant movement of her own crisp head, “I don’t know as I do want you to-night!”

Laurie shook himself into his coat. “Well,” he said, on his way to the door, “I’ll be round Saturday, whether or no. And Milly,” he added significantly, his hand on the latch, “you’ve got to like me then!”

Amelia laughed. “I guess there won’t be no trouble!” she called after him daringly.

She stood there in the biting wind, while he uncovered the horse and drove away. Then she went shaking back to her fire; but it was not altogether from cold. The sense of the consistency of love and youth, the fine justice with which nature was paying an old debt, had raised her to a stature above her own. She stood there under the mantel, and held by it while she trembled. For the first time, her husband had gone utterly out of her life. It was as though he had not been.

“Saturday!” she said to herself. “Saturday! Three days till then!”

Next morning, the spring asserted itself,–there came a whiff of wind from the south and a feeling of thaw. The sled-runners began to cut through to the frozen ground, and about the tree-trunks, where thin crusts of ice were sparkling, came a faint musical sound of trickling drops. The sun was regnant, and little brown birds flew cheerily over the snow and talked of nests.

Amelia finished her housework by nine o’clock, and then sat down in her low rocker by the south window, sewing in thrifty haste. The sun fell hotly through the panes, and when she looked up, the glare met her eyes. She seemed to be sitting in a golden shower, and she liked it. No sunlight ever made her blink, or screw her face into wrinkles. She throve in it like a rose-tree. At ten o’clock, one of the slow-moving sleds, out that day in premonition of a “spell o’ weather,” swung laboriously into her yard and ground its way up to the side-door. The sled was empty, save for a rocking-chair where sat an enormous woman enveloped in shawls, her broad face surrounded by a pumpkin hood. Her dark brown front came low over her forehead, and she wore spectacles with wide bows, which gave her an added expression of benevolence. She waved a mittened hand to Amelia when their eyes met, and her heavy face broke up into smiles.