we let 'em? An' Delia wa'n't the kind to know
how to do right by her own willin'. An' so all to once we woke up one
mornin', an' she'd done what she'd done, an' no help for it.

"It was only a month after Delia an' Abel had met that Delia went away,
an' Abel hadn't been installed yet. An' when Delia done that, Abel just
settled into bein' somebody else. He seemed to want to go off in the
hills an' be by himself, an' most o' the time he done so. But there was
grace for him even in that: Abel see the hill folks, how they didn't hev
any churches nor not anything else much, an' he just set to work on 'em,
quiet an' still. He'd wanted to go away an' travel, but the chance never
come. An' it seemed, then on, he didn't want even to hear o' the City,
an' when his chances there come, he never took 'em. An' Abel's been
'round here with the hill folks the fourteen years since, an' never
pastor of any church--but he got the blessedness, after all, an' I
guess the chance to do better service than any other way. You can see
how he's broad an' gentle an' tender an' strong, but you don't know
what he does for folks--an' that's the best. An' yet--his soul must be
sort o' packed away too, to what it would 'a' been if things had 'a'
gone differ'nt ... packed away an' tryin' to say somethin'. An' now
Delia's come back I b'lieve Abel knows that, an' I b'lieve he sees the
soul in her needin' him too, just like it did all that time--waitin' to
be loosened, gentle, before it can speak; an' meanin' things it can't
say, like Peleg's flute. Oh, don't it seem like the dreams Abel said he
found up in the sky had _ought_ to be let come true?"

It did seem as if, for the two up there in the drawing-room, this dream
might, just possibly, come back.

"But then you never can tell for sure about the sky, can you?" said
Calliope, sighing.

* * * * *

Coffee was served in the library where Madame Proudfit and Miss
Clementina had been in consultation with their lawyer. We were all
rather silent as Madame Proudfit sat at the urn and the lawyer handed
our cups down some long avenue of his abstraction. And now everything
seemed to me a kind of setting for Delia and Abel, and Calliope kept
looking at them as if, before her eyes, things might come right. So, I
own, did I, though in the Proudfit library it was usually difficult to
fix my attention on what passed; for it was in that room that Linda
Proudfit's portrait hung, and