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“Wonder how much they cost?”

“What?” asked Eben, and Della turned, flushed scarlet, and replied:–

“Oh, nothin’!”

That night, she lay awake for one rapt hour, and then she slept the sleep of conquerors. In the morning, after Eben had gone safely off to work, and the children were still asleep, she began singing, in a monotonous, high voice, and took her way out of doors. She always sang at moments when she purposed leaping the bounds of domestic custom. Even Eben had learned that, dull as he was. If he heard that guilty crooning from the buttery, he knew she might be breaking extra eggs, or using more sugar than was conformable.

“What you doin’ of?” he was accustomed to call. But Delia never answered, and he did not interfere. The question was a necessary concession to marital authority; he had no wish to curb her ways.

Della scudded about the yard like a willful wind. She gathered withes from a waiting pile, and set them in that one level space for wickets. Then she took a handsaw, and, pale about the lips, returned to the house and to her bedroom. She had made her choice. She was sacrificing old associations to her present need; and, one after another, she sawed the ornamenting balls from her mother’s high-post bedstead. Perhaps the one element of tragedy lay in the fact that Della was no mechanician, and she had not foreseen that, having one flat side, her balls might decline to roll. But that dismay was brief. A weaker soul would have flinched; to Della it was a futile check, a pebble under the wave. She laid her balls calmly aside. Some day she would whittle them into shape; for there were always coming to Della days full of roomy leisure and large content. Meanwhile apples would serve her turn,–good alike to draw a weary mind out of its channel or teach the shape of spheres. And so, with two russets for balls and the clothes-slice for a mallet (the heavy sledge-hammer having failed), Della serenely, yet in triumph, played her first game against herself.

“Don’t you drive over them wickets!” she called imperiously, when Eben came up from the lot in his dingle cart.

“Them what?” returned he, and Della had to go out to explain. He looked at them gravely; hers had been a ragged piece of work.

“What under the sun’d you do that for?” he inquired. “The young ones wouldn’t turn their hand over for’t They ain’t big enough.”

“Well, I be,” said Della briefly. “Don’t you drive over ’em.”

Eben looked at her and then at his path to the barn, and he turned his horse aside.

Thereafter, until we got used to it, we found a vivid source of interest in seeing Della playing croquet, and always playing alone. That was a very busy summer, because the famous drought came then, and water had to be carried for weary rods from spring and river. Sometimes Della did not get her playtime till three in the afternoon, sometimes not till after dark; but she was faithful to her joy. The croquet ground suffered varying fortunes. It might happen that the balls were potatoes, when apples failed to be in season; often her wickets broke, and stood up in two ragged horns. Sometimes one fell away altogether, and Della, like the planets, kept an unseen track. Once or twice, the mistaken benevolence of others gave her real distress. The minister’s daughter, noting her solitary game, mistook it for forlornness, and, in the warmth of her maiden heart, came to ask if she might share. It was a timid though official benevolence; but Della’s bright eyes grew dark. She clung to her kitchen chair.

“I guess I won’t,” she said, and, in some dim way, everybody began to understand that this was but an intimate and solitary joy. She had grown so used to spreading her banquets for one alone that she was frightened at the sight of other cups upon the board; for although loneliness begins in pain, by and by, perhaps, it creates its own species of sad and shy content.