“Can you direct me to—­“.  She looked up; she had been sitting on the doorstep with her face in her hands.  Dick stood there with his cap off.  He forgot that he was to inquire the way to Newbury Street, when he saw the tears on her shrunken cheeks.  Dick could never bear to see a woman suffer.

“I wouldn’t cry,” he said simply, sitting down beside her.  Telling a girl not to cry is an infallible recipe for keeping her at it.  What could the child do, but sob as if her heart would break?  Of course he had the whole story in ten minutes, she his in another ten.  It was common and short enough:—­a “Down-East” boy, fresh from his father’s farm, hunting for work and board,—­a bit homesick here in the strange, unhomelike city, it might be, and glad of some one to say so to.

What more natural than that, when her father came out and was pleased with the lad, there should be no more talk of Newbury Street; that the little yellow house should become his home; that he should swing the fantastic gate, and plant the nasturtiums; that his life should grow to be one with hers and the old man’s, his future and theirs unite unconsciously?

She remembered—­it was not exactly pleasant, somehow, to remember it to-night—­just the look of his face when they came into the house that summer evening, and he for the first time saw what she was, her cape having fallen off, in the full lamplight.  His kindly blue eyes widened with shocked surprise, and fell; when he raised them, a pity like a mother’s had crept into them; it broadened and brightened as time slid by, but it never left them.

So you see, after that, life unfolded in a burst of little surprises for Asenath.  If she came home very tired, some one said, “I am sorry.”  If she wore a pink ribbon, she heard a whisper, “It suits you.”  If she sang a little song, she knew that somebody listened.

“I did not know the world was like this!” cried the girl.

After a time there came a night that he chanced to be out late,—­they had planned an arithmetic lesson together, which he had forgotten,—­and she sat grieving by the kitchen fire.

“You missed me so much then?” he said regretfully, standing with his hand upon her chair.  She was trying to shell some corn; she dropped the pan, and the yellow kernels rolled away on the floor.

“What should I have if I didn’t have you?” she said, and caught her breath.

The young man paced to the window and back again.  The firelight touched her shoulders, and the sad, white scar.

“You shall have me always, Asenath,” he made answer.  He took her face within his hands and kissed it; and so they shelled the corn together, and nothing more was said about it.

He had spoken this last spring of their marriage; but the girl, like all girls, was shyly silent, and he had not urged it.

Asenath started from her pleasant dreaming just as the oriflamme was furling into gray, suddenly conscious that she was not alone.  Below her, quite on the brink of the water, a girl was sitting,—­a girl with a bright plaid shawl, and a nodding red feather in her hat.  Her head was bent, and her hair fell against a profile cut in pink-and-white.