Draxy heard him go.  Draxy had passed in that moment into a new world.  She divined all.

“He hasn’t eaten any supper,” thought she; and she listened intently to hear him come in again.  The clock struck ten, he had not returned!  Draxy went to bed, but she could not sleep.  The little house was still; the warm white moonlight lay like summer snow all over it; Draxy looked out of her window; the Elder was slowly coming up the hill; Draxy knelt down like a little child and said, “God bless him,” and crept back to bed.  When she heard him shut his bedroom door she went to sleep.

The next day Draxy’s eyes did not look as they had looked the day before.  When Elder Kinney first saw her, she was coming down stairs.  He was standing at the foot of the staircase and waited to say “Good morning.”  As he looked up at her, he started back and exclaimed:  “Why, Draxy, what’s the matter?”

“Nothing is the matter, sir,” said Draxy, as she stepped from the last stair, and standing close in front of him, lifted the new, sweet, softened eyes up to his.  Draxy was as simple and sincere in this as in all other emotions and acts of her life.  She had no coquetry in her nature.  She had no distinct thought either of a new relation between herself and the Elder.  She simply felt a new oneness with him; and she could not have understood the suggestion of concealment.  If Elder Kinney had been a man of the world, he would have folded Draxy to his heart that instant.  If he had been even a shade less humble and self-disrustful, he would have done it, as it was.  But he never dreamed that he might.  He folded his empty arms very tight over his faithful, aching, foolish heart, and tried to say calmly and naturally, “Are you sure?  Seems to me you don’t look quite well.”

But after that morning he never felt wholly without hope.  He could not tell precisely why.  Draxy did not seek him, did not avoid him.  She was perhaps a little less merry; said fewer words; but she looked glad, and more than glad.  “I think it’s the eyes,” he said to himself again and again, as he tried to analyze the new look on Draxy’s face which gave him hope.  These were sweet days.  There are subtle joys for lovers who dwell side by side in one house, together and yet apart.  The very air is loaded with significance to them—­the door, the window, the stairway.  Always there is hope of meeting; always there is consciousness of presence; everywhere a mysterious sense that the loved one has passed by.  More than once Seth Kinney knelt and laid his cheek on the stairs which Draxy’s feet had just ascended!  Often sweet, guileless Draxy thought, as she went up and down, “Ah, the dear feet that go over these stairs.”  One day the Elder, as he passed by the wall of the room where he knew Draxy was sitting, brushed his great hand and arm against it so heavily that she started, thinking he had stumbled.  But as the firm step went on, without pausing, she smiled, she