David’s welcome home was quiet, cordial and heartfelt.  The Quaker life is calm; storms seldom appear on its surface, even though they must sometimes agitate its depths; mind and heart are brought under remarkable control; sympathy and charity are extended to the erring; hospitality is a duty and an instinct; domestic love is deep and powerful.

When David had frankly told his story, he was permitted to resume his place in the life of the old homestead as if nothing had happened.  He expressed to his brother and sister his love for Pepeeta, and his determination to make her his wife in lawful marriage.

They assented to his plans, and at the earliest possible moment the minister and elders of the little congregation of Friends were asked to meet, in accordance with their custom, to “confer with him about a concern which was on his mind.”

They came, and heard his story and his intention, told with straightforward simplicity.  They, too, touched with sympathy and moved to confidence, agreed that there was no obstacle to the union.  The date of the wedding was placed at the end of the month, which, by their ecclesiastical law, must elapse after this avowal, and an evening meeting was appointed for the ceremony.

In the meantime David remained quietly at home, and took up his old labors as nearly as possible where he had laid them down.  Such a life as he had been leading induces a distaste for manual labor, and sometimes he chafed against it.  Again and again he felt his spirit faint within him when he recalled the scenes of excitement through which he had passed, and looked forward to years of this unvaried drudgery; but he never permitted his soul to question his duty!  He had decided in the most solemn reflections of his life that he would conquer himself in the place where he had been defeated, perform the tasks which he had so ignominiously abandoned, and then, when he had demonstrated his power to live a true life himself, devote his strength to helping others.

The charms of this pastoral existence gradually came to his support in his heroic resolution.  The unbroken quiet of the happy valley which had irritated him at first, grew to be more and more a balm to his wounded spirit.  The society of the animal world lent its gracious consolation; the great horses, the ponderous oxen, the doves fluttering and cooing about the barnyard, the suckling calves, the playful colts, all came to him as to a friend, and in giving him their confidence and affection awakened his own.

Above all Pepeeta was ever near him.  It was no wonder that her beauty threw its spell over David’s spirit.  It had been enhanced by sorrow, for the human countenance, like the landscape, requires shadow as well as sunshine to perfect its charms.  But the burst of sunshine which had come with David’s return had brought it a final consummation which transfigured even the Quaker dress she had adopted.  Her bonnet would never stay over her face but fell back on her shoulders, her animated countenance emerging from this envelope like the bud of a rose from its sheath.  She was as a butterfly at that critical instant when it is ready to leave its chrysalis and take wing.  She was a soul enmeshed in an ethereal body, rather than a body which ensheathed a soul.