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“Yes.”

“And you have come for the things aunt is to send him?”

“Yes.”

“Aunt said you were to drive uncle’s horse and take the buggy,” said Ellen. “It is very kind of you. While you are harnessing, aunt and I will pack the basket.”

Stephen, harnessing the gray horse, had a sense of shock; whether pleasant or otherwise, he could not determine. He had never seen a girl in the least like Ellen. Girls had never impressed him. She did.

When he drove around to the kitchen door she and Myrtle were both there, and he drank a cup of coffee before starting, and Myrtle introduced him. “Only think, Mr. Wheaton,” said she, “Ellen says she knows a great deal about farming, and we are going to hire Jim Mason and go right ahead.” Myrtle looked adoringly at Ellen.

Stephen spoke eagerly. “Don’t hire anybody,” he said. “I used to work on a farm to pay my way through college. I need the exercise. Let me help.”

“You may do that,” said Ellen, “on shares. Neither aunt nor I can think of letting you work without any recompense.”

“Well, we will settle that,” Stephen replied. When he drove away, his usually calm mind was in a tumult.

“Your niece has come,” he told Christopher, when the two men were breakfasting together on Silver Mountain.

“I am glad of that,” said Christopher. “All that troubled me about being here was that Myrtle might wake up in the night and hear noises.”

Christopher had grown even more radiant. He was effulgent with pure happiness.

“You aren’t going to tap your sugar-maples?” said Stephen, looking up at the great symmetrical efflorescence of rose and green which towered about them.

Christopher laughed. “No, bless ’em,” said he, “the trees shall keep their sugar this season. This week is the first time I’ve had a chance to get acquainted with them and sort of enter into their feelings. Good Lord! I’ve seen how I can love those trees, Mr. Wheaton! See the pink on their young leaves! They know more than you and I. They know how to grow young every spring.”

Stephen did not tell Christopher how Ellen and Myrtle were to work the farm with his aid. The two women had bade him not. Christopher seemed to have no care whatever about it. He was simply happy. When Stephen left, he looked at him and said, with the smile of a child, “Do you think I am crazy?”

“Crazy? No,” replied Stephen.

“Well, I ain’t. I’m just getting fed. I was starving to death. Glad you don’t think I’m crazy, because I couldn’t help matters by saying I wasn’t. Myrtle don’t think I am, I know. As for Ellen, I haven’t seen her since she was a little girl. I don’t believe she can be much like Myrtle; but I guess if she is what she promised to turn out she wouldn’t think anybody ought to go just her way to have it the right way.”

“I rather think she is like that, although I saw her for the first time this morning,” said Stephen.

“I begin to feel that I may not need to stay here much longer,” Christopher called after him. “I begin to feel that I am getting what I came for so fast that I can go back pretty soon.”

But it was the last day of July before he came. He chose the cool of the evening after a burning day, and descended the mountain in the full light of the moon. He had gone up the mountain like an old man; he came down like a young one.

When he came at last in sight of his own home, he paused and stared. Across the grass-land a heavily laden wagon was moving toward his barn. Upon this wagon heaped with hay, full of silver lights from the moon, sat a tall figure all in white, which seemed to shine above all things. Christopher did not see the man on the other side of the wagon leading the horses; he saw only this wonderful white figure. He hurried forward and Myrtle came down the road to meet him. She had been watching for him, as she had watched every night.