Was the fearful expression it now wore a shadow, a forerunner of what he might expect?  He shook off, with an effort that was less painful than the sufferance of the thought, both fears and prognostics.  He turned his back and walked rapidly and uneasily up and down the path between the tree and the old well.

He had left Dorcas blooming, lovely, and twenty-two.  As blooming, as lovely, as lithe, and as sparkling, she was now.  His own eyes had seen the vision.

But would she remember and love him still?  For the first time it occurred to him that he must himself be somewhat changed,—­changed certainly, since old Taft did not recognize him, after all the hogsheads of rum he had sold him!  For the first time he felt a little thrill of fear, lest Dorcas should have been inconstant,—­or lest, seeing him now, she might not love him as she once did.  A faint blush passed over his face.

He raised his eyes, and Dorcas stood before him at the distance of a few feet:  the bloom on her delicate cheek the same,—­the dimpled chin, the serene forehead, the arch and laughing eyes!

Somehow, she seemed like a ghost, too; for, when he stepped towards her, she retreated, keeping the same distance between them.

“Dorcas!” said Swan, imploringly.

“What do you want of me?” answered a sweet voice, trembling and low.

“Are you really Dorcas? really, really my Dorcas?” said Swan, in an agony of uncertain emotion.

“To be sure I am Dorcas!” answered the girl, in a half-terrified, half-petulant tone.

In a moment she darted up the path out of sight, just as Dorcas had done on the last night he had seen her!

Had he kept the kiss on his lips with which he had parted from her,—­that kiss which, to him at least, had been one of betrothal?

The short day was nearly dead.  In the gloom of the darkening twilight, Swan stood leaning against the old tree and looking up the path where the figure had disappeared, doubting whether a vision had deluded his senses or not.

Was Dorcas indeed separated from him?  Was there no bringing back the sweet, olden time of love to her?  She had seemed to shrink from him and fade out of sight.  Could she never indeed love him again?

It was getting dark.  But for the great, broad moon, that just then shone out from behind the Ridge Hill, he would not have seen another figure coming down the path from the house.  Swan felt as if he had lived a long time in the last half-hour.

A woman walked cautiously towards him, apparently proceeding to the well.  She stooped a little, and a wooden hoop round her person supported a pail on each side, which she had evidently come to fill.  It was no angel that came to trouble the fountain to-night.  She pulled down the chained bucket with a strong, heavy sweep, and the beam rose high in the air, with the stone securely fastened to the end.  While she drew up and poured the water into the pails, she looked several times covertly at the stranger.  The stranger, on his part, scanned her as closely.  She belonged to the house, he thought.  Probably she had come to live on the Fox farm at the death of the old people,—­to take care of Dorcas, possibly.  Again he scanned her curiously.