“I’m afraid you are sick, Jerome.”

“I tell you I am not.  You’ll be late.”

Finally Elmira went on, though with many backward glances.  Jerome sat down on the stone wall, behind a huge growth of lilac.  He could see through a leafy screen the people in the main road wending their way to meeting.  He had suddenly resolved not to go, lest he see Lucina Merritt again.

Presently there was out in the main road a graceful swing of light skirts and a gliding of shoulders and head which made his heart leap.  Lucina was going to meeting with her mother.  The moment she stirred the distance with dim advances of motion, Jerome knew her.  It seemed to him that he would have known her shadow among a nightful, her step among a thousand.  It was as if he had developed ultimate senses for her recognition.

Jerome, when he had once glimpsed her, looked away until he was sure that she had passed.  When the bell had stopped ringing, he arose and climbed over the stone wall, then went across a field to the path skirting the poor-house which he had used to follow to school.

When he came opposite the poor-house in the hollow, he looked down at it.  The day was so mild that the paupers were swarming into evidence like insects.  Many of the house windows were wide open, and old heads with palsied nods, like Chinese toys, appeared in them; some children were tumbling about before the door.

Old Peter Thomas—­who seemed to have become crystallized, as it were, in age and decrepitude, and advanced no further in either—­was pottering around the garden, eying askant, like an old robin, the new plough furrows.  Pauper women humped their calico backs over the green slopes of the fields, searching for dandelion greens, but not digging, because it was Sunday.

Their shrill, plaintive voices, calling to one another, came plainly to Jerome.  When he reached the barn, there sat Mindy Toggs, as of old, chanting his accusatory refrain, “Simon Basset, Simon Basset.”

Hitherto Jerome had viewed all this humiliation of poverty from a slight but no less real eminence of benefaction; to-day he had a miserable sense of community with it.  “It is not having what we want that makes us all paupers,” he told himself, bitterly; “I’m as much a pauper as any of them.  I’m in a worse poor-house than the town of Upham’s.  I’m in the poor-house of life where the paupers are all fed on stones.”

Then suddenly, as he went on, a brave spirit of revolt seized him.  “It is wanting what we have not that makes us paupers,” he said, “and I will not be one, if I tear my heart out.”

Jerome climbed another stone wall into a shrubby pasture, and went across that to a pine wood, and thence, by devious windings and turnings, through field and forest, to his old woodland.  It was his now; he had purchased it back from the Squire.  Then he sat himself down and looked about him out of his silence and self-absorption, and it was as if he had come into a very workshop of nature.  The hummings of her wheels and wings were loud in his ear, the fanning of them cool on his cheek.  The wood here was very light and young, and the spring sun struck the roots of the trees.