o
the window, to watch him down the drive. His back looked poor and mean.
It emphasized the pettiness of her victory. Even at that moment, she
realized that it was the poorer part of her which had resented attack on
a citadel which should be impregnable as time itself. Just then Enoch
stepped into the kitchen behind her, and his voice jarred upon her
tingling nerves.

"Well," said he, more jovially than he was wont to speak, "I guess I've
made a good trade for ye. Company gone? Come here an' se' down while I
eat, an' I'll tell ye all about it."

Amelia turned about and walked slowly up to him, by no volition of her
conscious self. Again love, that august creature, veiled itself in an
unjust anger, because it was love and nothing else.

"You've made a good bargain, have you?" she repeated. "You've sold my
cows, an' had 'em drove off the place without if or but. That's what you
call a good bargain!" Her voice frightened her. It amazed the man who
heard. These two middle-aged people were waking up to passions neither
had felt in youth. Life was strong in them because love was there.

"Why, 'Melia!" said the man. "Why, 'Melia!"

Amelia was hurried on before the wind of her destiny. Her voice grew
sharper. Little white stripes, like the lashes from a whip, showed
themselves on her cheeks. She seemed to be speaking from a dream, which
left her no will save that of speaking.

"It's been so ever sence you set foot in this house. Have I had my say
once? Have I been mistress on my own farm? No! You took the head o'
things, an' you've kep' it. What's mine is yours."

Her triumph over Josiah seemed to be strangely repeated; the scene was
almost identical. The man before her stood with his hands hanging by his
sides, the fingers limp, in an attitude of the profoundest patience. He
was thinking things out. She knew that. Her hurrying mind anticipated
all he might have said, and would not. And because he had too abiding a
gentleness to say it, the insanity of her anger rose anew. "I'm the
laughin'-stock o' the town," she went on bitterly. "There ain't a man or
woman in it that don't say I've married a tramp."

Enoch winced, with a sharp, brief quiver of the lips; but before she
could dwell upon the sight, to the resurrection of her tenderness, he
turned away from her, and went over to the bench.

"I guess I'll move this back where't was," he said, in a very still
voice, and Amelia stood watching him, conscious of a new and b