she had needed cautious help.  Into the thicket of lilacs, with the old scent of the spring blossoms yet hanging on their boughs; along the bank, where her foot had sunk deep into plushy moss, where he had gathered a cluster of fern and put it into her hand.  Its pale feathery green was not more quaint or pure than the delicate love in the uncouth man beside her,—­not nearer kin to Nature.  Did she know that?  Had it been like the breath of God coming into her nostrils to be so loved, appreciated, called home, as she had been to-night?  Was she going back to feel that breath again?  Neither pain nor pleasure was on her face:  her breath came heavy and short, her eyes shone, that was all.  Out now into the open road, stopping and glancing around with every broken twig, being a cowardly creature, yet never leaving the track of the footsteps in the dust, where she had gone before.  Coming at last to the old-fashioned gabled house, where she had gone when site was a child, set in among stiff rows of evergreens.  A breathless quiet always hung about the place:  a pure, wholesome atmosphere, because pure and earnest people had acted out their souls there, and gone home to God.  He had led her through the gate here, given her to drink of the well at the side of the house.  “My mother never would taste any water but this, do you remember, Lizzy?” They had gone through the rooms, whispering, if they spoke, as though it were a church.  Here was the pure dead sister’s face looking down from the wall; there his mother’s worn wicker work-stand.  Her work was in it still.  “The needle just where she placed it, Lizzy.”  The strong man was weak as a little child with the memory of the old mother who had nursed and loved him as no other could love.  He stood beside her chair irresolute; forty years ago he had stood there, a little child bringing all his troubles to be healed:  since she died no hand had touched it.  “Will you sit there, Lizzy?  You are dearer to me than she.  When I come back, will you take their place here?  Only you are pure as they, and dearer, Lizzy.  We will go home to them hand in hand.”  She sat in the dead woman’s chair. She.  Looking in at her own heart as she did it.  Yet her love for him would make her fit to sit there:  she believed that.  He had not kissed her,—­she was too sacred to the simple-hearted man for that,—­had only taken her little hand in both his, saying, “God bless you, little Lizzy!” in an unsteady voice.

“He may never say it again,” the girl said, when she crept home from her midnight pilgrimage.  “I’ll come here every day and live it all over again.  It will keep me quiet until he comes.  Maybe he’ll never come,”—­catching her breast, and tearing it until it grew black.  She was so tired of herself, this child!  She would have torn that nerve in her heart out that sometimes made her sick, if she could.  Her life was so cramped, and selfish, too, and she knew it.  Passing by the door of Grey’s room, she saw her asleep with Pen in her arms,—­some other little nightcapped heads in the larger beds. She slept alone.  “They tire me so!” she said; “yet I think,” her eye growing fiercer, “if I had anything all my own, if I had a little baby to make pure and good, I’d be a better girl.  Maybe—­he will make me better.”