Cephas had been afraid lest Barnabas should, all unperceived in the dusk, hold his daughter’s hand, or venture upon other loverlike familiarity.  That was the reason why he had ordered the candle lighted when it was scarcely dark enough to warrant it.

But Barnabas seemed scarcely to glance at his sweetheart as he sat there beside her, although in some subtle fashion, perhaps by some finer spiritual vision, not a turn of her head, nor a fleeting expression on her face, like a wind of the soul, escaped him.  He saw always Charlotte’s beloved features high and pure, almost severe, but softened with youthful bloom, her head with fair hair plaited in a smooth circle, with one long curl behind each ear.  Charlotte would scarcely have said he had noticed, but he knew well she had on a new gown of delaine in a mottled purple pattern, her worked-muslin collar, and her mother’s gold beads which she had given her.

Barnabas kept listening anxiously for the crackle of the hearth fire in the best room; he hoped Charlotte had lighted the fire, and they should soon go in there by themselves.  They usually did of a Sunday night, but sometimes Cephas forbade his daughter to light the fire and prohibited any solitary communion between the lovers.

“If Barnabas Thayer can’t set here with the rest of us, he can go home,” he proclaimed at times, and he had done so to-night.  Charlotte had acquiesced forlornly; there was nothing else for her to do.  Early in her childhood she had learned along with her primer her father’s character, and the obligations it imposed upon her.

“You must be a good girl, and mind; it’s your father’s way,” her mother used to tell her.  Mrs. Barnard herself had spelt out her husband like a hard and seemingly cruel text in the Bible.  She marvelled at its darkness in her light, but she believed in it reverently, and even pugnaciously.

The large, loosely built woman, with her heavy, sliding step, waxed fairly decisive, and her soft, meek-lidded eyes gleamed hard and prominent when her elder sister, Hannah, dared inveigh against Cephas.

“I tell you it is his way,” said Sarah Barnard.  And she said it as if “his way” was the way of the King.

“His way!” Hannah would sniff back.  “His way!  Keepin’ you all on rye meal one spell, an’ not lettin’ you eat a mite of Injun, an’ then keepin’ you on Injun without a mite of rye!  Makin’ you eat nothin’ but greens an’ garden stuff, an’ jest turnin’ you out to graze an’ chew your cuds like horned animals one spell, an’ then makin’ you live on meat!  Lettin’ you go abroad when he takes a notion, an’ then keepin’ you an’ Charlotte in the house a year!”

“It’s his way, an’ I ain’t goin’ to have anything said against it,” Sarah Barnard would retort stanchly, and her sister would sniff back again.  Charlotte was as loyal as her mother; she did not like it if even her lover intimated anything in disfavor of her father.