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They sat down together in the dark, and mused over old memories. John had always understood Lucy Ann better than the rest.

When she gave up Simeon Bascom to stay at home with her mother, he never pitied her much; he knew she had chosen the path she loved. The other day, even, some one had wondered that she could have heard the funeral service so unmoved; but he, seeing how her face had seemed to fade and wither at every word, guessed what pain was at her heart. So, though his wife had sent him over to ask how Lucy Ann was getting on, he really found out very little, and felt how painfully dumb he must be when he got home. Lucy Ann was pretty well, he thought he might say. She’d got to looking a good deal like mother.

They took their “blindman’s holiday,” Lucy Ann once in a while putting a stick on the leaping blaze, and, when John questioned her, giving a low-toned reply. Even her voice had changed. It might have come from that bedroom, in one of the pauses between hours of pain, and neither would have been surprised.

“What makes you burn beech?” asked John, when a shower of sparks came crackling at them.

“I don’t know,” she answered. “Seems kind o’ nat’ral. Some of it got into the last cord we bought, an’ one night it snapped out, an’ most burnt up mother’s nightgown an’ cap while I was warmin’ ’em. We had a real time of it. She scolded me, an’ then she laughed, an’ I laughed–an’ so, when I see a stick or two o’ beech, to-day, I kind o’ picked it out a-purpose.”

John’s horse stamped impatiently from the gate, and John, too, knew it was time to go. His errand was not done, and he balked at it.

“Lucy Ann,” said he, with the bluntness of resolve, “what you goin’ to do?”

Lucy Ann looked sweetly at him through the dark. She had expected that. She smoothed her mother’s dress with one hand, and it gave her courage.

“Do?” said she; “why, I ain’t goin’ to do nothin’. I’ve got enough to pull through on.”

“Yes, but where you goin’ to live?”

“Here.”

“Alone?”

“I don’t feel so very much alone,” said she, smiling to herself. At that moment she did not. All sorts of sweet possibilities had made themselves real. They comforted her, like the presence of love.

John felt himself a messenger. He was speaking for others that with which his soul did not accord.

“The fact is,” said he, “they’re all terrible set ag’inst it. They say you’re gittin’ along in years. So you be. So are we all. But they will have it, it ain’t right for you to live on here alone. Mary says she should be scairt to death. She wants you should come an’ make it your home with us.”

“Yes, I dunno but Mary would be scairt,” said Lucy Ann placidly. “But I ain’t. She’s real good to ask me; but I can’t do it, no more’n she could leave you an’ the children an’ come over here to stay with me. Why, John, this is my home!”

Her voice sank upon a note of passion It trembled with memories of dewy mornings and golden eves. She had not grown here, through all her youth and middle life, like moss upon a rock, without fitting into the hollows and softening the angles of her poor habitation. She had drunk the sunlight and the rains of one small spot, and she knew how both would fall. The place, its sky and clouds and breezes, belonged to her: but she belonged to it as well.

John stood between two wills, his own and that of those who had sent him. Left to himself, he would not have harassed her. To him, also, wedded to a hearth where he found warmth and peace, it would have been sweet to live there always, though alone, and die by the light of its dying fire. But Mary thought otherwise, and in matters of worldly judgment he could only yield.