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“Don’t cry, Marg’et Ann,” she said, “don’t cry. You’ll get on. It’s the Lord’s will.”

The evening after the funeral Lloyd Archer came over, and Marg’et Ann walked up the lane with him. She was glad to get away from the Sabbath hush of the house, which the neighbors had made so pathetically neat,–taking up the dead woman’s task where she had left it, and doing everything with scrupulous care, as if they feared some vision of neglected duty might disturb her rest.

The frost was out of the ground and the spring plowing had begun. There was a smell of fresh earth from the furrows, and a red-bud tree in the thicket was faintly pink.

Lloyd was silent and troubled, and Marg’et Ann could not trust her voice. They walked on without speaking, and the dusk was deepening before they turned to go back. Marg’et Ann had thrown a little homespun shawl over her head, for there was a memory of frost in the air, but it had fallen back and Lloyd could see her profile with its new lines of grief in the dim light.

“It don’t seem right, Marg’et Ann,” he began in a voice strained almost to coldness by intensity of feeling.

“But it is right,–we know that, Lloyd,” interrupted the girl; then she turned and threw both arms about his neck and buried her face on his shoulder. “Oh, Lloyd, I can’t bear it–I can’t bear it alone–you must help me to be–to be–reconciled!”

The young man laid his cheek upon her soft hair. There was nothing but hot, unspoken rebellion in his heart. They stood still an instant, and then Marg’et Ann raised her head and drew the little shawl up and caught it under her quivering chin.

“We must go in,” she said staidly, choking back her sobs.

Lloyd laid his hands on her shoulders and drew her toward him again.

“Is there no help, Marg’et Ann?” he said piteously, looking into her tear-stained face. In his heart he knew there was none. He had gone over the ground a thousand times since he had seen her standing beside her mother’s open grave with the group of frightened children clinging to her.

“God is our refuge and our strength,
In straits a present aid;
Therefore, although the earth remove
We will not be afraid,”

repeated the girl, her sweet voice breaking into a whispered sob at the end. They walked to the step and stood there for a moment in silence.

The minister opened the door.

“Is that you, Marg’et Ann,” he asked. “I think we’d better have worship now; the children are getting sleepy.”

* * * * *

Almost a year before patient, tireless Esther Morrison’s eternal holiday had come, a man, walking leisurely along an empty mill-race, had picked up a few shining yellow particles, holding in his hand for an instant the destiny of half the world. Every restless soul that could break its moorings was swept westward on the wave of excitement that followed. Blue Mound felt the magnetism of those bits of yellow metal along with the rest of the world, and wild stories were told at singing-school and in harvest fields of the fortunes that awaited those who crossed the plains.

Lloyd Archer, eager, restless, and discontented, caught the fever among the first. Marg’et Ann listened to his plans, heartsore and helpless. She had ceased to advise him. There was a tacit acknowledgment on her part that she had forfeited her right to influence his life in any way. As for him, unconsciously jealous of the devotion to duty that made her precious to him and unable to solve the problem himself, he yet felt injured that she could not be true to him and to his ideal of her as well. If she had left the plain path and gone with him into the byways, his heart would have remained forever with the woman he had loved, and not with the woman who had so loved him; and yet he sometimes urged her to do this thing, so strange a riddle is the “way of a man with a maid.”