The thirtieth year after his emigration found him a notable person in the place that he had chosen, with almost the same physical strength as in youth, stern, upright, thrifty, the owner of large mills, of a substantial wooden residence, and of many acres of land.  He was as rich as he had intended to be; his ideal of righteousness, being of the obtainable sort, had been realised and strictly adhered to.  The one disappointment of his life was the lack of those sturdy sons and daughters who, to his mind, should have surrounded the virtuous man in his old age.  They had not come into the world.  His wife, a good woman and energetic helpmeet, had brought him but the one studious son.

Ephraim was thirty-two years of age when a young girl, strong, beautiful, impetuous, entered under the sloping eaves of his father’s huge gray shingle roof.  The girl was a niece on the maternal side.  Her New England mother had, by freak of love, married a reckless young Englishman of gentle blood who was settled on a Canadian farm.  Pining for her puritan home, she died early.  The father made a toy of his daughter till he too died in the fortified town of Kingston, on the northern shore of Lake Ontario.  No other relatives coming forward to assume his debts or to claim his child, their duty in the matter was clear to the minds of the Croom household, and the girl was sent for.  Her name was Susannah, but she herself gave it the softer form that she had been accustomed to hear; when she first entered the sitting-room of the grave Croom family trio, like a sunbeam striking suddenly through the clouds on a dark day, she held out her hand and her lips to each in turn, saying, “I am Susianne.”

That first time Ephraim kissed her.  It was done in surprise and embarrassed formality.  He knew, when the moment was past that his parents had perceived that Susannah needed more decorous training.  He concurred in believing this to be desirable, for the manners that had surrounded him were very stiff.  Yet the memory of the greeting remained with him, a thing to be wondered at while he turned the whispering leaves of his great books.

Susannah had travelled from the Canadian fort in the care of the preacher Finney.  He was a revivalist of great renown, possessing a lawyer-like keenness of intellect, much rhetorical power, and Pauline singleness of purpose.  That night he ate and slept in the house.

The original Calvinism of the Croom household had already been modified by the waves of Methodist revival from the Eastern States.  Finney was an Independent, but Martha Croom had an abounding respect for him; his occasional visits were epochs in her life.  She had prepared many baked meats for his entertainment before the evening of his arrival with Susannah, but while he was present she devoted herself wholly to his conversation.

The feast was spread in the inner kitchen.  In the square brick fireplace burning pine sticks crackled, bidding the chill of the April evening retire to its own place beyond the dark window pane.  The paint upon the walls and floor glistened but faintly to the fire and the small flames of two candles that stood among the viands upon the table.