,
and a fuzzy hat. He's got a big nose."

Now, indeed, despair entered into Amelia, and sat enthroned. She sank
down on a straight-backed chair, and put her hands on her knees, while
the knock came again, a little querulously.

"Enoch," said she, "do you know what's happened? That's cousin Josiah
Pease out there." Her voice bore the tragedy of a thousand past
encounters; but that Enoch could not know.

"Is it?" asked he, with but a mild appearance of interest. "Want me to
go to the door?"

"Go to the door!" echoed Amelia, so stridently that he looked up at her
again. "No; I don't want anybody should go to the door till this room's
cleared up. If 't w'an't so everlastin' cold, I'd take him right into
the clock-room, an' blaze a fire; but he'd see right through that. You
gether up them tools an' things, an' I'll help carry out the bench."

If Enoch had not just then been absorbed in a delicate combination of
brass, he might have spoken more sympathetically. As it was, he seemed
kindly, but remote.

"Look out!" said he, "you'll joggle. No, I guess I won't move. If he's
any kind of a man, he'll know what 't is to clean a clock."

Amelia was not a crying woman, but the hot tears stood in her eyes. She
was experiencing, for the first time, that helpless pang born from the
wounding of pride in what we love.

"Don't you see, Enoch?" she insisted. "This room looks like the Old
Boy--an' so do you--an' he'll go home an' tell all the folks at the
Ridge. Why, he's heard we're married, an' come over here to spy out the
land. He hates the cold. He never stirs till 'way on into June; an' now
he's come to find out."

"Find out what?" inquired Enoch absorbedly. "Well, if you're anyways put
to 't, you send him to me." That manly utterance enunciated from a
"best-room" sofa, by an Enoch clad in his Sunday suit, would have
filled Amelia with rapture; she could have leaned on it as on the Tables
of the Law. But, alas! the scene-setting was meagre, and though Enoch
was very clean, he had no good clothes. He had pointedly refused to buy
them with his wife's money until he should have worked on the farm to a
corresponding amount. She had loved him for it; but every day his outer
poverty hurt her pride. "I guess you better ask him in," concluded
Enoch. "Don't you let him bother you."

Amelia turned about with the grand air of a woman repulsed.

"He _don't_ bother me," said she, "an' I _will_ let him in." She walked
to the door, ste