had entered. And as I
lingered, the outer door was pushed open to admit some late comer who
whisked down the passage and stood in the dining-room doorway. It was
Calliope.

"Delia More!" she cried; "didn't I tell you how it'd be if you'd only
let 'em know? An' Mis' Proudfit, you here? I been worried to death on
account o' forgettin' to take home your cream lace waist I mended."

Madame Proudfit's voice lowered the high key of the others talking in
chorus.

"We drove over to get it, Calliope," she said. "And here we found our
Delia More."

* * * * *

At eleven o'clock that night, as I sat writing a letter in which the
spirit of what had come to pass must have breathed--as a spirit will
breathe--Calliope Marsh tapped at my door; and she had a little basket.

"Here," she said, "I brought you this. It's some o' everything we hed.
An'--I'm obliged for my s'prise," she added, squeezing my hand in the
darkness. "I surmised first thing, most, when Delia described you. No;
land, no!--Delia don't suspicion you got it up. She don't think of it
bein' anybody but just God--an' I donno's 'twas. An' that's what Abel
thinks--wa'n't Abel splendid? You know 'bout Abel--an' Delia? You know
he use' to--he wanted to--that is, he was in--oh, well, no. Of course
you wouldn't know. Well, Delia don't suspicion you--but she said I
should tell you something. 'You tell her,' she says to me, 'you tell her
I say I guess I take stock now,' she says; 'tell her that: I guess I
take stock now.'"

At this my heart leaped up so that I hardly know what I said in answer.

"Delia's out here now," Calliope called from the dark steps. "The
Proudfits brought us. Delia's goin' home with 'em--to stay."

Thus I saw the eyes of the Proudfits' motor, with the threads of
streaming light, about to go skimming from my gate. And in that kindly
security was Delia More.

"Calliope," I cried after her because I could not help it, "tell Delia
More I take stock, too!"

VII

THE BIG WIND

Of Abel Halsey, that young itinerant preacher, I learned more on a
December day when Autumn seemed to have come back to find whether she
had left anything. Calliope and I were resting from a racing walk up the
hillside, where the squat brick Leading Church of Friendship overlooks
the valley pastures and the village. Calliope walks like a girl, and
with our haste and the keen air, her wrinkled cheeks were as rosy as
youth.

"Don't it