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The Way Of Peace
by
Next morning came brother Ezra, and Lucy Ann hurried to meet him with an exaggerated welcome. Life was never very friendly to Ezra, and those who belonged to him had to be doubly kind. They could not change his luck, but they might sweeten it. They said the world had not gone well with him; though sometimes it was hinted that Ezra, being out of gear, could not go with the world. All the rivers ran away from him, and went to turn some other mill. He was ungrudging of John’s prosperity, but still he looked at it in some disparagement, and shook his head. His cheeks were channeled long before youth was over; his feet were weary with honest serving, and his hands grown hard with toil. Yet he had not arrived, and John was at the goal before him.
“We heard you’d been stayin’ with John’s folks,” said he to Lucy Ann. “Leastways, Abby did, an’ she thinks mebbe you’ve got a little time for us now, though we ain’t nothin’ to offer compared to what you’re used to over there.”
“I’ll come,” said Lucy Ann promptly. “Yes, I’ll come, an’ be glad to.”
It was part of her allegiance to the one who had gone.
“Ezra needs bracing’,” she heard her mother say, in many a sick-room gossip. “He’s got to be flattered up, an’ have some grit put into him.”
It was many weeks before Lucy Ann came home again. Cousin Rebecca, in Saltash, sent her a cordial letter of invitation for just as long as she felt like staying; and the moneyed cousin at the Ridge wrote in like manner, following her note by a telegram, intimating that she would not take no for an answer. Lucy Ann frowned in alarm when the first letter came, and studied it by daylight and in her musings at night, as if some comfort might lurk between the lines. She was tempted to throw it in the fire, not answered at all. Still, there was a reason for going. This cousin had a broken hip, she needed company, and the flavor of old times. The other had married a “drinkin’ man,” and might feel hurt at being refused. So, fortifying herself with some inner resolution she never confessed, Lucy Ann set her teeth and started out on a visiting campaign. John was amazed. He drove over to see her while she was spending a few days with an aunt in Sudleigh.
“When you been home last, Lucy Ann?” asked he.
A little flush came into her face, and she winked bravely.
“I ain’t been home at all,” said she, in a low tone. “Not sence August.”
John groped vainly in mental depths for other experiences likely to illuminate this. He concluded that he had not quite understood Lucy Ann and her feeling about home; but that was neither here nor there.
“Well,” he remarked, rising to go, “you’re gittin’ to be quite a visitor.”
“I’m tryin’ to learn how,” said Lucy Ann, almost gayly. “I’ve been a-cousinin’ so long, I sha’n’t know how to do anything else.”
But now the middle of November had come, and she was again in her own house. Cousin Titcomb had brought her there and driven away, concerned that he must leave her in a cold kitchen, and only deterred by a looming horse-trade from staying to build a fire. Lucy Ann bade him good-by with a gratitude which was not for her visit, but all for getting home; and when he uttered that terrifying valedictory known as “coming again,” she could meet it cheerfully. She even stood in the door, watching him away; and not until the rattle of his wheels had ceased on the frozen road, did she return to her kitchen and stretch her shawled arms pathetically upward.
“I thank my heavenly Father!” said Lucy Ann, with the fervency of a great experience.
She built her fire, and then unpacked her little trunk, and hung up the things in the bedroom where her mother’s presence seemed still to cling.