e; a pleasant one; one to smile over, and tell
'Zekiel and repeat to the neighbours; but not an unexpected, sacred,
beautiful explanation, such a one as the heart of a woman could imagine,
if she were young enough and happy enough to hope.

She washed her cup and plate; replaced the uneaten beans in the brown
pot, and put them away with the round loaf, folded the cloth (Lobelia
Brewster said Nancy always "set out her meals as if she was entertainin'
company from Portland"), closed the stove dampers, carried the lighted
lamp to a safe corner shelf, and lifted 'Zekiel to his cushion on the
high-backed rocker, doing all with the nice precision of long habit. Then
she wrapped herself warmly, and locking the lonely little house behind
her, set out to finish her work in the church.

CHAPTER V

At this precise moment Justin Peabody was eating his own beans and brown
bread (articles of diet of which his Detroit landlady was lamentably
ignorant) at the new tavern, not far from the meeting-house.

It would not be fair to him to say that Mrs. Burbank's letter had brought
him back to Edgewood, but it had certainly accelerated his steps.

For the first six years after Justin Peabody left home, he had drifted
about from place to place, saving every possible dollar of his uncertain
earnings in the conscious hope that he could go back to New England and
ask Nancy Wentworth to marry him. The West was prosperous and
progressive, but how he yearned, in idle moments, for the grimmer and
more sterile soil that had given him birth!

Then came what seemed to him a brilliant chance for a lucky turn of his
savings, and he invested them in an enterprise which, wonderfully as it
promised, failed within six months and left him penniless. At that
moment he definitely gave up all hope, and for the next few years he put
Nancy as far as possible out of his mind, in the full belief that he was
acting an honourable part in refusing to drag her into his tangled and
fruitless way of life. If she ever did care for him,--and he could not
be sure, she was always so shy,--she must have outgrown the feeling long
since, and be living happily, or at least contentedly, in her own way. He
was glad in spite of himself when he heard that she had never married;
but at least he hadn't it on his conscience that _he_ had kept her
single!

On the seventeenth of December, Justin, his business day over, was
walking toward the dreary house in which he at