In these dim, shadowy hours, when Nature seemed to stand still, breathless, waiting for the coming darkness, if I longed for anything, it was for a voice to sing.  Speech seemed harsh.  Yet we often repeated hymns and ballads.  Emily knew a great many, and, after saying them over, would dwell upon them, drawing the most beautiful meanings from passages which to me had seemed obscure, and sometimes talked like one inspired.

I felt that these seasons were my salvation,—­were saving me from my worldliness.  Still, I sometimes had a guilty feeling, as if I were drawing from Emily her beautiful life,—­as if I were getting something to which I had no right, something too good for me,—­as if she might exclaim, at any moment, “Virtue is gone out from me!”

But Mary Ellen could sing.  That was good.  She knew hymns by dozens, and tunes to them all, both old and new.  Besides these, she could sing love-songs and quaint old ballads, that nobody ever heard before.

After she came, we had music to our twilights.

David, of course, was a listener.  He said he was always fond of music.  I used sometimes to wonder if the pretty singer of love-songs had any special designs upon him.  For I had been curiously watching this innocent little country-girl.

In talking with a friend of mine, he had laid it down as a law of Nature, that all women, wild or cultivated, delight to worry and torment all men; that they play with and prey upon their hearts; and that this is done instinctively, as a cat worries a mouse.

“A ministering angel thou,” quoted I, rather abstractedly, as if comparing views.

“Angels?  Yes,—­and so they are,” he answered, rather smartly.  “And every man’s heart is a pool, into which they must descend and trouble the waters!”

I knew my friend had reason for his bitterness.  Still, I resolved to watch Mary Ellen.

David’s bashful attentions were by no means displeasing to her:  that I saw.  She had not been accustomed to your glib, off-handed, smartly dressed youths.  Here was a good-looking young man, of blameless life, who helped her draw up the bucket, took her to sail, taught her to row, brought her home bushes of huckleberries and branches of swamp-pinks from the pasture, and shells from the beach.

That few words accompanied his offerings was matter of little moment, since what he would have said was easily enough read in his face.  It was sufficient that his eyes spoke, that they followed her motions, that he seemed never ready to go so long as she remained, that when she went he could not long stay behind.

Poor David!  It wasn’t his fault.  He didn’t mean to.  Everybody knew ’t wasn’t a bit like him.  He was charmed.  And that reminds me of what Miss Joey said to Mr. Lane, the old man.

It was just about sundown, and they two were sitting in the front-room, looking out of the windows.  It had been a sultry day.  I was trying to keep comfortable, and had found a nice little seat just outside the door, underneath the lilacs.