der control
and confessed nothing; nor did his hand ever clasp hers, to show by a
tell-tale touch the truth he dared not utter; nevertheless she felt that
she was beloved. She hid the knowledge deep in her heart and covered it
softly from every eye but her own; taking it out in the safe darkness
sometimes to wonder over and adore in secret. Did her love for Ivory
rest partly on a sense of vocation?--a profound, inarticulate divining
of his vast need of her? He was so strong, yet so weak because of the
yoke he bore, so bitterly alone in his desperate struggle with life,
that her heart melted like wax whenever she thought of him. When she
contemplated the hidden mutiny in her own heart, she was awestruck
sometimes at the almost divine patience of Ivory's conduct as a son.

"How is your mother this summer, Ivory?" she asked as they sat down on
the meeting-house steps waiting for Jed Morrill to open the door. "There
is little change in her from year to year, Waitstill.--By the way, why
don't we get out of this afternoon sun and sit in the old graveyard
under the trees? We are early and the choir won't get here for half an
hour.--Dr. Perry says that he does not understand mother's case in the
least, and that no one but some great Boston physician could give a
proper opinion on it; of course, that is impossible at present."

They sat down on the grass underneath one of the elms and Waitstill took
off her hat and leaned back against the tree-trunk.

"Tell me more," she said; "it is so long since we talked together
quietly and we have never really spoken of your mother."

"Of course," Ivory continued, "the people of the village all think and
speak of mother's illness as religious insanity, but to me it seems
nothing of the sort. I was only a child when father first fell ill with
Jacob Cochrane, but I was twelve when father went away from home on
his 'mission,' and if there was any one suffering from delusions in our
family it was he, not mother. She had altogether given up going to the
Cochrane meetings, and I well remember the scene when my father told her
of the revelation he had received about going through the state and into
New Hampshire in order to convert others and extend the movement. She
had no sympathy with his self-imposed mission, you may be sure, though
now she goes back in her memory to the earlier days of her married life,
when she tried hard, poor soul, to tread the same path that father was
treading, so as