s
over. There was cold tongue for her dinner, Ann had told her, and a
clear soup, if she liked to heat it. She might cook vegetables if she
chose. And there was the best of tea to be made out of the china caddy,
and rich cake in the parlor crock. After one such glad deliberation, she
caught her sewing guiltily up from her lap and began to set compensating
stitches. But even then her conscience slept unstirred. Old lady Knowles
was in no hurry for the work, she knew, and she would make up for her
dreaming in the account of her day.

There was a sound without. The gate swung softly shut and a man came up
the path. Amelia, at the glance, rose quickly, dropped her sewing, and
hurried out and down the stairs. The front door was open, she knew, and
though there was never anything to be afraid of, still the house was in
her charge. At the door she met him, just lifting his hand to touch the
knocker. He was a tall, weedy fellow of something more than her own age,
with light hair and blue eyes and a strangely arrested look, as if he
obstinately, and against his own advantage, continued to keep young.

Amelia knew him at once, as he did her, though it was twenty years since
they had met.

"Why, Jared Beale!" she faltered.

He was much moved. The flush came quickly to his face in a way she had
known, and his eyes softened.

"I should ha' recognized ye anywheres, Milly," he asserted.

She still stood looking at him, unable to ask him in or to make apology
for the lack.

"I went straight to your house from the train," he said. "'Twas all shut
up. Don't anybody live there now?"

"Yes," answered Amelia, "somebody lives there." The red had come into
her cheeks, and her eyes burned brightly. Then as he looked at her
hesitatingly, in the way he used to look, she trembled a little.

"Come in, Jared," she said, retreating a hospitable space. "Come right
in."

She stood aside, and then, when he stepped over the sill, led the way
into the dining-room, where there was a cool green light from the
darkened blinds, and the only window open to the sun disclosed a
trembling grapevine and a vista down the garden path. Amelia drew
forward a chair, with a decided motion.

"Sit down," she said, and busied herself with opening a blind.

When she took her own chair opposite him, she found that he had laid his
hat beside him on the floor, and, with the tips of his fingers together,
was bending forward in an attitude belonging to his youth.