I might have saved myself the trouble, though, for the next moment David himself appeared, walking slowly home from the Square, with something in a basket he was bringing for Emily.  David was a good brother.

“Perfect!” exclaimed Warren, as he completed his tableau.  “Just like the picture, only”—­And here he dropped his voice.

“David, come here,” he called out, “and see which picture is the prettiest.”

Poor David!  I saw that it was all he could do, to walk straight past without speaking.

“Take them off,” said Mary Ellen.  “They are heavy.”

And she pulled the wreath from her head.

That evening, coming home late, I saw a bright light in her room, and glanced up, as I came near.  She stood at the looking-glass between the windows, holding a light in her hand.  Upon her head, trailing down upon her left shoulder, was a wreath of hop-blossoms.  She wanted to know how she looked in them.  At least, this was my interpretation of the vision.  And while she held the light, first in one hand, then in the other, turning this way and that, I stood debating whether there was any harm in a girl’s knowing she was pretty, or in her wishing to inform herself whether any adornments rather out of the common course—­hop-blossoms, for instance—­were becoming.  That question, and the other, about all women being coquettes, remain in my mind undecided to this day.

Emily must have noticed something peculiar in David’s manner, when he brought her the basket.  For it was the next day, I think, that she said to me, in her quiet way,—­

“Mr. Turner, a new feeling is taking hold of me.  I’m afraid I—­hate!”

She made this announcement in her usual calm voice, as if she had been speaking of some new manifestation of her disease.  Then she told what she had been observing in David’s manner, and in Mary Ellen’s.  Said she,—­

“The girl has no heart.  She trifles with David, and he is so wretched.  Better the stone had never been rolled away than his love be so thrown back upon him.  I pity him so much, and can do nothing.”

I hardly knew what to say in reply, for I was just as troubled as she about David.  He wandered off by himself, in the chill autumn evenings, returned late, and stole off to his bed in silence.  Stories of suicides came to me.  A man who never spoke might do anything.  And this, I thought, was the point.  If I could only make him speak!

He had always been more open with me than anybody,—­had expressed himself freely about the homestead, and his plans for redeeming it, and about his anxiety for Emily.  I could certainly, I thought, bring him to speak of his trouble, if I only had for him a sure word of encouragement.  But this I had not, because Mary Ellen was such a puzzle.  Her openness served better for hiding the truth than did David’s reserve.  At the bottom of my heart, though, was full faith in her love for him.  I paid her the compliment of believing she was too good to care seriously for such a man as Warren Luce.  But, then, I couldn’t give my faith to David.