t have come from
that bedroom, in one of the pauses between hours of pain, and neither
would have been surprised.

"What makes you burn beech?" asked John, when a shower of sparks came
crackling at them.

"I don't know," she answered. "Seems kind o' nat'ral. Some of it got
into the last cord we bought, an' one night it snapped out, an' most
burnt up mother's nightgown an' cap while I was warmin' 'em. We had a
real time of it. She scolded me, an' then she laughed, an' I
laughed--an' so, when I see a stick or two o' beech to-day, I kind o'
picked it out a-purpose."

John's horse stamped impatiently from the gate, and John, too, knew it
was time to go. His errand was not done, and he balked at it.

"Lucy Ann," said he, with the bluntness of resolve, "what you goin' to
do?"

Lucy Ann looked sweetly at him through the dark. She had expected that.
She smoothed her mother's dress with one hand, and it gave her courage.

"Do?" said she; "why, I ain't goin' to do nothin'. I've got enough to
pull through on."

"Yes, but where you goin' to live?"

"Here."

"Alone?"

"I don't feel so very much alone," said she, smiling to herself. At that
moment she did not. All sorts of sweet possibilities had made themselves
real. They comforted her, like the presence of love.

John felt himself a messenger. He was speaking for others that with
which his soul did not accord.

"The fact is," said he, "they're all terrible set ag'inst it. They say
you're gittin' along in years. So you be. So are we all. But they will
have it, it ain't right for you to live on here alone. Mary says she
should be scairt to death. She wants you should come an' make it your
home with us."

"Yes, I dunno but Mary would be scairt," said Lucy Ann placidly. "But I
ain't. She's real good to ask me; but I can't do it, no more'n she could
leave you an' the children an' come over here to stay with me. Why,
John, this is my home!"

Her voice sank upon a note of passion. It trembled with memories of dewy
mornings and golden eves. She had not grown here, through all her youth
and middle life, like moss upon a rock, without fitting into the hollows
and softening the angles of her poor habitation. She had drunk the
sunlight and the rains of one small spot, and she knew how both would
fall. The place, its sky and clouds and breezes, belonged to her: but
she belonged to it as well.

John stood between two wills, his own and that of those who had sent
him. Left t