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After the boats, silently, softly, floated the battalions of lanterns, so close to the water that they seemed flaming water-lilies, while the dusky mirror repeated and inverted their splendor.

“They’re shingles, you know,” explained Nelson’s companion, “with lanterns on them; but aren’t they pretty?”

“Yes, they are! I wish you had not told me. It is like a fairy story!”

“Ain’t it? But we aren’t through; there’s more to come. Beautiful fireworks!”

The fireworks, however, were slow of coming. They could see the barge from which they were to be sent; they could watch the movements of the men in white oil-cloth who moved in a ghostly fashion about the barge; they could hear the tap of hammers; but nothing came of it all.

They sat in the darkness, waiting; and there came to Nelson a strange sensation of being alone and apart from all the breathing world with this woman. He did not perceive that Tim had quietly returned with a box which did very well for a seat, and was sitting with his knees against the chair-rungs. He seemed to be somehow outside of all the tumult and the spectacle. It was the vainglorying triumph of this world. He was the soul outside, the soul that had missed its triumph. In his perplexity and loneliness he felt an overwhelming longing for sympathy; neither did it strike Nelson, who believed in all sorts of occult influences, that his confidence in a stranger was unwarranted. He would have told you that his “psychic instincts” never played him false, although really they were traitors from their astral cradles to their astral graves.

He said in a hesitating way: “You must excuse me being kinder dull; I’ve got some serious business on my mind and I can’t help thinking of it.”

“Is that so? Well, I know how that is; I have often stayed awake nights worrying about things. Lest I shouldn’t suit and all that–especially after mother took sick.”

“I s’pose you had to give up and nurse her then?”

“That was what Ebenezer and Ralph were for having me do; but mother–my mother always had so much sense–mother says, ‘No, Alma, you’ve got a good place and a chance in life, you sha’n’t give it up. We’ll hire a girl. I ain’t never lonesome except evenings, and then you will be home. I should jest want to die,’ she says, ‘if I thought I kept you in a kind of prison like by my being sick–now, just when you are getting on so well.’ There never WAS a woman like my mother!” Her voice shook a little, and Nelson asked gently:

“Ain’t your mother living now?”

“No, she died last year.” She added, after a little silence, “I somehow can’t get used to being lonesome.”

“It IS hard,” said Nelson. “I lost my wife three years ago.”

“That’s hard, too.”

“My goodness! I guess it is. And it’s hardest when trouble comes on a man and he can’t go nowhere for advice.”

“Yes, that’s so, too. But–have you any children?”

“Yes, ma’am; that is, they ain’t my own children. Lizzie and I never had any; but these two we took and they are most like my own. The girl is eighteen and the boy rising of fourteen.”

“They must be a comfort to you; but they are considerable of a responsibility, too.”

“Yes, ma’am,” he sighed softly to himself. “Sometimes I feel I haven’t done the right way by them, though I’ve tried. Not that they ain’t good children, for they are–no better anywhere. Tim, he will work from morning till night, and never need to urge him; and he never gives me a promise he don’t keep it, no ma’am, never did since he was a little mite of a lad. And he is a kind boy, too, always good to the beasts; and while he may speak up a little short to his sister, he saves her many a step. He doesn’t take to his studies quite as I would like to have him, but he has a wonderful head for business. There is splendid stuff in Tim if it could only be worked right.”