But for Old Grannis all was different that evening.  There was nothing for him to do.  His hands lay idly in his lap.  His table, with its pile of pamphlets, was in a far corner of the room, and, from time to time, stirred with an uncertain trouble, he turned his head and looked at it sadly, reflecting that he would never use it again.  The absence of his accustomed work seemed to leave something out of his life.  It did not appear to him that he could be the same to Miss Baker now; their little habits were disarranged, their customs broken up.  He could no longer fancy himself so near to her.  They would drift apart now, and she would no longer make herself a cup of tea and “keep company” with him when she knew that he would never again sit before his table binding uncut pamphlets.  He had sold his happiness for money; he had bartered all his tardy romance for some miserable banknotes.  He had not foreseen that it would be like this.  A vast regret welled up within him.  What was that on the back of his hand?  He wiped it dry with his ancient silk handkerchief.

Old Grannis leant his face in his hands.  Not only did an inexplicable regret stir within him, but a certain great tenderness came upon him.  The tears that swam in his faded blue eyes were not altogether those of unhappiness.  No, this long-delayed affection that had come upon him in his later years filled him with a joy for which tears seemed to be the natural expression.  For thirty years his eyes had not been wet, but tonight he felt as if he were young again.  He had never loved before, and there was still a part of him that was only twenty years of age.  He could not tell whether he was profoundly sad or deeply happy; but he was not ashamed of the tears that brought the smart to his eyes and the ache to his throat.  He did not hear the timid rapping on his door, and it was not until the door itself opened that he looked up quickly and saw the little retired dressmaker standing on the threshold, carrying a cup of tea on a tiny Japanese tray.  She held it toward him.

“I was making some tea,” she said, “and I thought you would like to have a cup.”

Never after could the little dressmaker understand how she had brought herself to do this thing.  One moment she had been sitting quietly on her side of the partition, stirring her cup of tea with one of her Gorham spoons.  She was quiet, she was peaceful.  The evening was closing down tranquilly.  Her room was the picture of calmness and order.  The geraniums blooming in the starch boxes in the window, the aged goldfish occasionally turning his iridescent flank to catch a sudden glow of the setting sun.  The next moment she had been all trepidation.  It seemed to her the most natural thing in the world to make a steaming cup of tea and carry it in to Old Grannis next door.  It seemed to her that he was wanting her, that she ought to go to him.  With the brusque resolve and intrepidity that sometimes seizes upon very timid people—­the courage of the coward greater than all others—­she had presented herself at the old Englishman’s half-open door, and, when he had not heeded her knock, had pushed it open, and at last, after all these years, stood upon the threshold of his room.  She had found courage enough to explain her intrusion.