Next day, between dinner-time and tea-time, while she was giving final touches to the well-cleaned parlor, she heard her husband’s voice just outside the door.  He had come up-stairs very quietly and was speaking to Mary on the landing.

“Will, Will!” With a cry of delight, Mavis rushed out to welcome him.  “Oh, thank goodness, you’ve come home.”  She boldly took his arm, drew him into the parlor and shut the door again.  “Will—­aren’t you going to kiss me?”

“No.”  And he disengaged himself and moved away from her.  “No, I can not kiss you.”

“Oh, Will.  Do try to forget and forgive.”  She stood stretching out her hands toward him imploringly, with eyebrows raised, and lips quavering.

“I can never forget,” he said, after a moment’s pause.

Then she tried to make him say that things would eventually come all right, that if he could not pardon her and take her to his heart now, he would do so some time or another.  He listened to her pleadings impassively, stolidly; his attitude was stiffly dignified, and it seemed to her that, whatever his real frame of mind might be, he had determined to hide it by maintaining an impenetrably solemn tone and manner.

“Will, you’ve come home, and I’m grateful for it.  But—­but I do think you’re cruel to me.  Especially considering what’s happened, I did hope you’d begin to think kinder to me.”

“Mavis,” he said solemnly, “it is the finger of God.”  And he repeated the phrase slowly, with a solemnity that was almost pompous.  “It is the finger of God.  If that man had not chanced to die in this sudden and startling way, I could never have come home to you.  It was the decision I had arrived at before I read of his accident in the paper.  Otherwise you’d ‘a’ never set eyes on me.  Now all I can say is, you and I must trust to the future.  It will be my endeavor not to look back, and I ask you equally to look forward.”

She was certain that this was a set speech prepared beforehand.  She knew so well the faintly unnatural note in his voice when he was reciting sentences that he had learned by rote:  she who had helped in so many rehearsals before his public utterances could not be mistaken.  However, she had to be contented with it.  And, stilted and stiff as it was, it certainly seemed to imply that she need not relinquish hope.

He added something, in the same ponderous style, about the probability of its being advisable to put private inclinations on one side and attend the funeral of the deceased in his public capacity of postmaster.  This mark of respect would be expected from him, and people would wonder if he did not pay it.  Then he left the parlor, and again spoke to Mary.

Mavis, listening, heard him give orders that an unused camp bedstead should be brought down from the clerk’s room and made up in the kitchen.  He told Mary that he wished to sleep by himself because he felt twinges of rheumatism and was afraid of disturbing the mistress if the pain came on during the night.  And Mavis noticed that all the time that he was talking to Mary his voice sounded perfectly natural.