t the
counter, her arms and her little basket were filled with bundles. Joshua
Marden was glad to take them.

"No, I won't ride," said Lucy Ann. "Much obliged to _you_. Jest leave
the things inside the fence. I'd ruther walk. I don't git out any too
often."

She took her way home along the brown road, stepping lightly and
swiftly, and full of busy thoughts. Flocks of birds went whirring by
over the yellowed fields. Lucy Ann could have called out to them, in
joyous understanding, they looked so free. She, too, seemed to be flying
on the wings of a fortunate wind.

All that week she scrubbed and regulated, and took a thousand capable
steps as briskly as those who work for the home-coming of those they
love. The neighbors dropped in, one after another, to ask where she was
going to spend Thanksgiving. Some of them said, "Won't you pass the day
with us?" but Lucy Ann replied blithely:--

"Oh, John's invited me there!"

All that week, too, she answered letters, in her cramped and careful
hand; for cousins had bidden her to the feast. Over the letters she had
many a troubled pause, for one cousin lived near Ezra, and had to be
told that John had invited her; and to three others, dangerously within
hail of each, she made her excuse a turncoat, to fit the time. Duplicity
in black and white did hurt her a good deal, and she sometimes stopped,
in the midst of her slow transcription, to look up piteously and say
aloud:--

"I hope I shall be forgiven!" But by the time the stamp was on, and the
pencil ruling erased, her heart was light again. If she had sinned, she
was finding the path intoxicatingly pleasant.

Through all the days before the festival, no house exhaled a sweeter
savor than this little one on the green. Lucy Ann did her miniature
cooking with great seriousness and care. She seemed to be dwelling in a
sacred isolation, yet not altogether alone, but with her mother and all
their bygone years. Standing at her table, mixing and tasting, she
recalled stories her mother had told her, until, at moments, it seemed
as if she not only lived her own life, but some previous one, through
that being whose blood ran with hers. She was realizing that ineffable
sense of possession born out of knowledge that the enduring part of a
personality is ours forever, and that love is an unquenched fire, fed by
memory as well as hope.

On Thanksgiving morning, Lucy Ann lay in bed a little later, because
that had been the family cust