with the uniformity of nature.  Elmira, bending over the bed of herbs, with the sweet breath of them in her nostrils, gained a certain quiet in her unrest of youth and passion.  It was as if she kept step with a mightier movement which tended towards eternity.  She had persisted, in spite of Lawrence’s entreaties, in her determination that he should cease all attention to her.  He had gone away, scarcely understanding, almost angry, with her, but she was firm, with a firmness which she herself had not known to be within her capacity.

She looked older that summer, and there was a staidness in her manner.  She always worked over the herb-beds with her back to the road, lest by any chance she should see Lawrence riding by with Lucina.

“I know what you’re working so extra hard for,” she told Jerome one day, with wistful, keen eyes upon his face.

“I’ve always worked hard, haven’t I?” he said, evasively.

“Yes, you’ve worked hard, but this is extra hard.  Jerome Edwards, you think, maybe, if you can earn enough, you can marry her by-and-by.”

Jerome colored, but he met his sister’s gaze freely.  “Well, suppose I do,” said he.

“Oh, Jerome, do you suppose it’s any use—­do you suppose she will?” Elmira cried out, in a kind of incredulous pity.

“I know she will.”

“Did she say so—­did she say she would wait?  Oh, Jerome!”

“Do you think I would bind her to wait?”

“But she must have owned she liked you.  Did she?”

“That’s between her and me.”

“Don’t you feel afraid that she may turn to somebody else?  Don’t you, Jerome?” Elmira questioned him with a feverish eagerness which puzzled him.

“Not with her,” he answered.

Elmira felt comforted by his faith in a way which he did not suspect.  It strengthened her own.  Perhaps, after all, Lawrence would not care for Lucina; perhaps he would work and wait for her, as, indeed, he had vowed to do.  After that Elmira worked over the herb-beds with her face to the road.  When Belinda Lamb reported that Lawrence and Lucina had been out riding, and Ann said, with a bitter screw of her nervous little face, “Fish in shallow waters bites easy, especially when there’s gold on the hook,” she was not much disturbed.

Ann fully abetted her daughter in her resolution to dismiss her suitor, after his father’s manifestation.  “I guess there’s as good fish in the sea as ever was caught,” said she, “and I guess Doctor Seth Prescott ’ll find out that.  If there’s them he don’t think fit to tie his son’s shoestrings, there’s them that feels above tyin’ ’em.”

In September Jerome began work on his mill.  He had never been so hopeful in his life.  It cost him more self-denial not to go to Lucina and speak out his hope than ever before.  He queried with himself if he could not go, then shut his heart, opening like a mouth of hunger for happiness, hard against it.  “The mill may burn down; they may not buy the logs.  I’ve got to wait,” he told himself.