“Phrasie, one of your persistent fallacies is, that I’m still a boy.”

“You ain’t yourself,” said Euphrasia, ignoring this pleasantry, “and you ain’t been yourself for some months.  I’ve seen it.  I haven’t brought you up for nothing.  If he’s troubling you, don’t you worry a mite.  He ain’t worth it.  He eats better than you do.”

“I’m not worrying much about that,” Austen answered, smiling.  “The Judge and I will patch it up before long—­I’m sure.  He’s worried now over these people who are making trouble for his railroad.”

“I wish railroads had never been invented,” cried Euphrasia.  “It seems to me they bring nothing but trouble.  My mother used to get along pretty well in a stage-coach.”

One evening in September, when the summer days were rapidly growing shorter and the mists rose earlier in the valley of the Blue, Austen, who had stayed late at the office preparing a case, ate his supper at the Ripton House.  As he sat in the big dining room, which was almost empty, the sense of loneliness which he had experienced so often of late came over him, and he thought of Euphrasia.  His father, he knew, had gone to Kingston for the night, and so he drove up Hanover Street and hitched Pepper to the stone post before the door.  Euphrasia, according to an invariable custom, would be knitting in the kitchen at this hour; and at the sight of him in the window, she dropped her work with a little, joyful cry.

“I was just thinking of you!” she said, in a low voice of tenderness which many people would not have recognized as Euphrasia’s; as though her thoughts of him were the errant ones of odd moments!  “I’m so glad you come.  It’s lonesome here of evenings, Austen.”

He entered silently and sat down beside her, in a Windsor chair which had belonged to some remote Austen of bygone days.

“You don’t have as good things to eat up at Mis’ Jenney’s as I give you,” she remarked.  “Not that you appear to care much for eatables any more.  Austen, are you feeling poorly?”

“I can dig more potatoes in a day than any other man in Ripton,” he declared.

“You’d ought to get married,” said Euphrasia, abruptly.  “I’ve told you that before, but you never seem to pay any attention to what I say.”

“Why haven’t you tried it, Phrasie?” he retorted.

He was not prepared for what followed.  Euphrasia did not answer at once, but presently her knitting dropped to her lap, and she sat staring at the old clock on the kitchen shelf.

“He never asked me,” she said, simply.

Austen was silent.  The answer seemed to recall, with infinite pathos, Euphrasia’s long-lost youth, and he had not thought of youth as a quality which could ever have pertained to her.  She must have been young once, and fresh, and full of hope for herself; she must have known, long ago, something of what he now felt, something of the joy and pain, something of the inexpressible, never ceasing yearning for the fulfilment of a desire that dwarfed all others.  Euphrasia had been denied that fulfilment.  And he—­would he, too, be denied it?