as the one divine event
which would complete her life.

Eugene would have liked to linger in this atmosphere indefinitely. Old
Jotham, he found, liked to talk to him. He took an interest in national
and international affairs, was aware of distinguished and peculiar
personalities, seemed to follow world currents everywhere. Eugene began
to think of him as a distinguished personality in himself, but old
Jotham waved the suggestion blandly aside.

"I'm a farmer," he said. "I've seen my greatest success in raising good
children. My boys will do well, I know."

For the first time Eugene caught the sense of fatherhood, of what it
means to live again in your children, but only vaguely. He was too
young, too eager for a varied life, too lustful. So its true import was
lost for the time.

Sunday came and with it the necessity to leave. He had been here nine
days, really two days more than he had intended to stay. It was farewell
to Angela, who had come so close, so much in his grasp that she was like
a child in his hands. It was farewell, moreover, to an ideal scene, a
bit of bucolic poetry. When would he see again an old patriarch like
Jotham, clean, kindly, intelligent, standing upright amid his rows of
corn, proud to be a good father, not ashamed to be poor, not afraid to
be old or to die. Eugene had drawn so much from him. It was like sitting
at the feet of Isaiah. It was farewell to the lovely fields and the blue
hills, the long rows of trees down the lawn walk, the white and red and
blue flowers about the dooryard. He had slept so sweetly in his clean
room, he had listened so joyously to the voices of birds, the wood dove
and the poet thrush; he had heard the water in the Blue's branch
rippling over its clean pebbles. The pigs in the barnyard pen, the
horses, the cows, all had appealed to him. He thought of Gray's
"Elegy"--of Goldsmith's "Deserted Village" and "The Traveller." This was
something like the things those men had loved.

He walked down the lawn with Angela, when the time came, repeating how
sorry he was to go. David had hitched up a little brown mare and was
waiting at the extreme end of the lawn.

"Oh, Sweet," he sighed. "I shall never be happy until I have you."

"I will wait," sighed Angela, although she was wishing to exclaim: "Oh,
take me, take me!" When he was gone she went about her duties
mechanically, for it was as if all the fire and joy had gone out of her
life. Without this brilliant imagina