“Well, I’ll buy her one if you say so,” said he, in a curious, slow, stern voice.  In his heart was a fierce rising of rebellion, that he, hard-working and frugal and self-denying all his life, should be denied the privilege of buying a present for his darling without resorting to deception, and even almost robbery.  He did not at that minute blame himself in the least for his misadventure with his mining stock.  Had not the same relentless Providence driven him to that also?  His weary spirit took for the first time a poise of utter self-righteousness in opposition to this Providence, and he blasphemed in his inner closet of self, before the face of the Lord, as he comprehended it.

“Well, I have a sort of set my heart on it,” said Fanny.

“She shall have the watch,” repeated Andrew, and his voice was fairly defiant.

After Fanny had gone into the house and lighted her lamp, and resumed work on her wrapper, Andrew still sat on the step in the cool evening.  There was a full moon, and great masses of shadows seemed to float and hover and alight on the earth with a gigantic brooding as of birds.  The trees seemed redoubled in size from the soft indetermination of the moonlight which confused shadow and light, and deceived the eye as with soft loomings out of false distances.  There was a tall pine, grown from a sapling since Ellen’s childhood, and that looked more like a column of mist than a tree, but the Norway spruces clove the air sharply like silhouettes in ink, and outlined their dark profiles clearly against the silver radiance.

To Andrew, looking at it all, came the feeling of a traveller who passes all scenes whether of joy or woe, being himself in his passing the one thing which remains, and somehow he got from it an enormous comfort.

“We’re all travellin’ along,” he said aloud, in a strained, solemn voice.

“What did you say, Andrew?” Fanny called from the open window.

“Nothin’,” replied Andrew.

Chapter XVII

Ellen had always had objective points, as it were, in her life, and she always would have, no matter how long she lived.  She came to places where she stopped mentally, for retrospection and forethought, wherefrom she could seem to obtain a view of that which lay behind, and of the path which was set for her feet in advance.  She saw the tracked and the trackless.  Once, going with Abby Atkins and Floretta in search of early spring flowers, Ellen had lingered and let them go out of sight, and had sat down on a springing mat of wintergreen leaves under the windy outstretch of a great pine, and had remained there quite deaf to shrill halloos.  She had sat there with eyes of inward scrutiny like an Eastern sage’s, motionless as on a rock of thought, while her daily life eddied around her.  Ellen, sitting there, had said to herself:  “This I will always remember.  No matter how long I live, where I am, and what happens to me, I will always remember how I was a child, and sat here this morning in spring under the pine-tree, looking backward and forward.  I will never forget.”