the door and summoned him.

"Dinner's ready, Jared!"

It sounded as if she had said it every day, and she knew why; the words
and others like them, sweet and commonplace, were inwoven with the
texture of her dreams.

Jared came in, an eager look upon his face, as if he also were in a
maze, and they sat down at the table, where the viands were arranged in
a beautiful order. Jared laid down his knife and fork.

"Well," said he, "old Ann ain't lost her faculty. This tastes for all
the world just as old lady Knowles's things used to when I come over
here to weed the garden an' stayed to dinner."

Amelia lifted a thankful look.

"I'm proper glad you've come back, Jared," she said simply. "I never had
any expectation of seein' you again, leastways not in this world."

Jared spoke irrelevantly:--

"There's a good many things I've wanted to talk over with you, 'Melia,
from time to time. Now there's Arthur."

Amelia nodded.

"He ain't done very well, has he?" she inquired. "I never knew much
about him after he moved away; but seems if I heard he'd took to drink."

"That's it. Arthur was as good a boy as ever stepped, but he got led
away when he wa'n't old enough to know t'other from which. Well, I've
always stood by him, 'Melia. Folks say he's only an adopted brother.
'What you want to hang on to him for, an' send good money after bad?'
That's what they say. Well, what if he is an adopted brother? Father
an' mother set by him, an' I set by him, too."

He had a worried look, and his tone rang fretfully, as if it continued a
line of dreary argument.

"Of course you set by him, Jared," said Amelia, almost indignantly. "I
shouldn't feel the same towards you if you didn't."

Jared was deep in the relief of his pathetic confidences.

"Arthur married young, an' folks said he'd no business to, nothin' to
live on, an' his habits bein' what they were. Well, I couldn't dispute
that. But when he got that fall, so 't he laid there paralyzed, I wanted
to take the cars an' go right on to York State an' see him. I didn't. I
couldn't get away; but I sent him all I could afford to, an' I'm goin'
to keep on sendin' jest as long as I'm above ground. An' I've made my
will an' provided for him."

His voice had a fractious tone, as if he combated an unseen tyrant.
Amelia dared not speak. At a word, she felt, he might say too much. Now
Jared was looking at her in a bright appeal, as if, sure as he was of
her sympathy, he besought th