Mrs. White was watching Thyra now, knitting furiously, as she watched, in order to lose no time.  Thyra’s hands were folded idly in her lap.  She had not moved a muscle since she sat down.  Mrs. White complained it gave her the weeps.

“It doesn’t seem natural to see a woman sit so still,” she said.  “Sometimes the thought comes to me, ’what if she’s had a stroke, like her old Uncle Horatio, and is sitting there stone dead!’ "

The evening was cold and autumnal.  There was a fiery red spot out at sea, where the sun had set, and, above it, over a chill, clear, saffron sky, were reefs of purple-black clouds.  The river, below the Carewe homestead, was livid.  Beyond it, the sea was dark and brooding.  It was an evening to make most people shiver and forebode an early winter; but Thyra loved it, as she loved all stern, harshly beautiful things.  She would not light a lamp because it would blot out the savage grandeur of sea and sky.  It was better to wait in the darkness until Chester came home.

He was late to-night.  She thought he had been detained over-time at the harbor, but she was not anxious.  He would come straight home to her as soon as his business was completed—­of that she felt sure.  Her thoughts went out along the bleak harbor road to meet him.  She could see him plainly, coming with his free stride through the sandy hollows and over the windy hills, in the harsh, cold light of that forbidding sunset, strong and handsome in his comely youth, with her own deeply cleft chin and his father’s dark gray, straightforward eyes.  No other woman in Avonlea had a son like hers—­her only one.  In his brief absences she yearned after him with a maternal passion that had in it something of physical pain, so intense was it.  She thought of Cynthia White, knitting across the road, with contemptuous pity.  That woman had no son—­nothing but pale-faced girls.  Thyra had never wanted a daughter, but she pitied and despised all sonless women.

Chester’s dog whined suddenly and piercingly on the doorstep outside.  He was tired of the cold stone and wanted his warm corner behind the stove.  Thyra smiled grimly when she heard him.  She had no intention of letting him in.  She said she had always disliked dogs, but the truth, although she would not glance at it, was that she hated the animal because Chester loved him.  She could not share his love with even a dumb brute.  She loved no living creature in the world but her son, and fiercely demanded a like concentrated affection from him.  Hence it pleased her to hear his dog whine.

It was now quite dark; the stars had begun to shine out over the shorn harvest fields, and Chester had not come.  Across the lane Cynthia White had pulled down her blind, in despair of out-watching Thyra, and had lighted a lamp.  Lively shadows of little girl-shapes passed and repassed on the pale oblong of light.  They made Thyra conscious of her exceeding loneliness.  She had just decided that she would walk down the lane and wait for Chester on the bridge, when a thunderous knock came at the east kitchen door.