g down to supper. He had drawn up his
chair, taken his napkin from the side-board drawer, pulled it out of its
ring, and seated himself as unconcernedly as if he had come in from
his usual afternoon session at Carrick Fry's; and the long habit of the
household made it seem almost natural that Charity should not so much as
raise her eyes when he entered. She had simply let him understand that
her silence was not accidental by leaving the table while he was still
eating, and going up without a word to shut herself into her room.
After that he formed the habit of talking loudly and genially to Verena
whenever Charity was in the room; but otherwise there was no apparent
change in their relations.

She did not think connectedly of these things while she sat waiting for
Harney, but they remained in her mind as a sullen background against
which her short hours with him flamed out like forest fires. Nothing
else mattered, neither the good nor the bad, or what might have seemed
so before she knew him. He had caught her up and carried her away into
a new world, from which, at stated hours, the ghost of her came back to
perform certain customary acts, but all so thinly and insubstantially
that she sometimes wondered that the people she went about among could
see her....

Behind the swarthy Mountain the sun had gone down in waveless gold. From
a pasture up the slope a tinkle of cow-bells sounded; a puff of smoke
hung over the farm in the valley, trailed on the pure air and was gone.
For a few minutes, in the clear light that is all shadow, fields and
woods were outlined with an unreal precision; then the twilight blotted
them out, and the little house turned gray and spectral under its
wizened apple-branches.

Charity's heart contracted. The first fall of night after a day of
radiance often gave her a sense of hidden menace: it was like looking
out over the world as it would be when love had gone from it. She
wondered if some day she would sit in that same place and watch in vain
for her lover....

His bicycle-bell sounded down the lane, and in a minute she was at the
gate and his eyes were laughing in hers. They walked back through the
long grass, and pushed open the door behind the house. The room at
first seemed quite dark and they had to grope their way in hand in hand.
Through the window-frame the sky looked light by contrast, and above the
black mass of asters in the earthen jar one white star glimmered like a
moth.

"