t two hours in residing on his quarter-section.]

CHAPTER V.

THE WALK HOME.

You expect me to describe that walk. You have had enough of the Jack
Meanses and the Squire Hawkinses, and the Pete Joneses, and the rest.
You wish me to tell you now of this true-hearted girl and her lover; of
how the silvery moonbeams came down in a shower--to use Whittier's
favorite metaphor--through the maple boughs, flecking the frozen ground
with light and shadow. You would have me tell of the evening star, not
yet gone down, which shed its benediction on them. But I shall do no
such thing. For the moon was not shining, neither did the stars give
their light. The tall, black trunks of the maples swayed and shook in
the wind, which moaned through their leafless boughs. Novelists always
make lovers walk in the moonlight. But if love is not, as the cynics
believe, all moonshine, it can at least make its own light. Moonlight is
never so little needed or heeded, never so much of an impertinence, as
in a love-scene. It was at the bottom of the first hollow beyond the
school-house that Ralph overtook the timid girl walking swiftly through
the dark. He did not ask permission to walk with her. Love does not go
by words, and there are times when conventionality is impossible. There
are people who understand one another at once. When one soul meets
another, it is not by pass-word, nor by hailing sign, nor by mysterious
grip that they recognize. The subtlest freemasonry in the world is this
freemasonry of the spirit.

Ralph and Hannah knew and trusted. Ralph had admired and wondered at the
quiet drudge. But it was when, in the unaccustomed sunshine of praise,
she spread her wings a little, that he loved her. He had seen her awake.

You, Miss Amelia, wish me to repeat all their love-talk. I am afraid
you'd find it dull. Love can pipe through any kind of a reed. Ralph
talked love to Hannah when he spoke of the weather, of the crops, of the
spelling-school. Weather, crops, and spelling-school--these were what
his words would say if reported. But below all these commonplaces there
vibrated something else. One can make love a great deal better when one
doesn't speak of love. Words are so poor! Tones and modulations are
better. It is an old story that Whitefield could make an audience weep
by his way of pronouncing the word Mesopotamia. A lover can sound the
whole gamut of his affection in saying Good-morning. The solemnest
engagements ever m