poor cast-out son in his lonely, half-furnished house, whose dark, shadowy walls she could see across the field, smote her as sorely as he smote him.  It seemed to her that she could hear that flute-like melody even as far as Charlotte’s door.  In spite of her stern resolution to be just, a great gust of wrath shook her.  “Lettin’ of him come courtin’ her when it ain’t six weeks since Barney went,” she said, quite out loud, and knitted fiercely.

But poor Thomas Payne, striding with his harmless swagger up the hill, whistling as loud as might be one of his college airs, need not, although she knew it not and he knew it not himself, have disturbed her peace of mind.

Charlotte, at the cherry party, had asked him, with a certain dignified shyness, if he could come up to her house that evening, and he had responded with alacrity.  “Why, of course I can,” he cried, blushing joyfully all over his handsome face—­“of course I can, Charlotte!” And he tried to catch one of her hands hanging in the folds of her purple dress, but she drew it away.

“I want to see you a few minutes about something,” she said, soberly; and then she pressed forward to speak to another girl, and he could not get another word with her about it.

Charlotte, after she got home from the party, had changed her pretty new gown for her every-day one of mottled brown calico set with a little green sprig, and had helped her mother get supper.

Cephas, however, was late, and did not come home until just before Thomas Payne arrived.  Sarah had begun to worry.  “I don’t see where your father is,” she kept saying to Charlotte.  When she heard his shuffling step on the door-stone she started as if he had been her lover.  When he came in she scrutinized him anxiously, to see if he looked ill or disturbed.  Sarah Barnard, during all absences of her family, dug busily at imaginary pitfalls for them; had they all existed the town would have been honey-combed.

“There ain’t nothin’ happened, has there, Cephas?” she said.

“I dunno of anythin’ that’s happened.”

“I got kind of worried.  I didn’t know where you was.”  Sarah had an air of apologizing for her worry.  Cephas made no reply; he did not say where he had been, nor account for his tardiness; he did not look at his wife, standing before him with her pathetically inquiring face.  He pulled a chair up to the table and sat down, and Charlotte set his supper before him.  It was a plate of greens, cold boiled dock, and some rye-and-Indian bread.  Cephas still adhered to his vegetarian diet, although he pined on it, and the longing for the flesh-pots was great in his soul.  However, he said no more about sorrel pies, for the hardness and the flavor of those which he had prepared had overcome even his zeal of invention.  He ate of them manfully twice; then he ate no more, and he did not inquire how Sarah disposed of them after they had vainly appeared on the table a week.  She, with no pig nor hens to eat them, was forced, with many misgivings as to the waste, to deposit them in the fireplace.