“ Naturally there was the fact of Ida that had to be faced. That was tremendously hard at first. He constantly felt her grieving for him, for the failure of all his hopes, the wreck of all a man holds so precious. And there were all the details of Ida’s sickness and death to be gone over with her mother—the things she had done just before. How she looked; the quantity of flowers; even what she wore for her burial. Instinctively Haldane knew how dear these matters were to her, and he went over them faithfully, effacing his own bitterness of memory as best he might. ”

“ Now as they sat there a silence came upon them like that of their wedding-day. Elizabeth broke it first.
“Davie,” she whispered, “if I’d say I’d jest like to run through the house a minute by myself, you won’t think it queer?”
“No, no,” answered Davie, something gripping his chest.
She went slowly, her slippers flapping back and forth on her heels. She sought first the tidy kitchen with its scoured tins, then the living-room with the old loom still in the corner, then the parlor. Here she drew a long, shaken breath. Every Ridge woman loved her parlor with an inherited devotion. ”

“ Norah, indeed, was the only person who did not look at the two quiet gentlemen before the blackboard, curiously, and wonder the same, since the voting-booth had become a firebrand menacing the peace of the parish. Norah was too busy with her own thoughts even to see them; she only wanted to get past her wellwishers and be alone with her perplexities. If she did not see her spiritual guides, they saw her, and Father Kelly’s tired face brightened. “You really can’t blame the boys,” he said, smiling; “and she’s as good a daughter and sister, and as good a girl, too, as ever stepped.” ”

“ It seems to me like this: when it comes to piecing out a life that has been broken, as yours was—as mine was, my dear, as mine was—there are two ways of doing it. Either you keep your ideal of perfect love, and lead your poor every-day life of odds and ends, like mine, filling your days with the best scraps of pleasure or usefulness you may, or you give up your ideal of perfect love and marry, and have your home and your children and your rounded outward life. There is, maybe, no question of higher or lower. Each one of us does what her nature bids her. ”

“ Dinsmore’s chief pride, now a glory of matched and patterned color and a dazzle of spray from marble basins. Beyond all the careful, exotic beauty of the place, the wide valley dipped away, alternate meadow and grove, until it met the silvery shiver of willows marking the course of the river. Beyond that again, the hills, solemn in unbroken green, rose to cloud-touched heights.
Before the house Brockton’s new automobile waited. He himself leaned against a stone pillar of the piazza, facing his hostess, who sat on the edge of a chair in the tense attitude of protest against delay. ”

“ The morning after the wedding Blake was in his drug-store playing chess as languidly as ever, but Charlotte spent her whole day planting a vegetable-garden, in a mood of unreckoning exaltation such as rarely comes to a woman of her nature, and never comes to her but once. She had felt no such blissful security when Blake and she were first engaged. Blake was weak. She had felt it intensely even when her infatuation for him was too fresh to permit her to reason, and a weak man while unmarried is peculiarly liable to changes of affection. ”

“ It was Pilchard’s voice. He was talking to another man. They were leaning heavily against the rough wall of Swan’s shanty. A horrible sensation came over the sick man, that sensation experienced by men who emerge from some unnatural mental condition, who are recalled by one sentence, often by one word, which acts like a key and opens again to their terrified vision the horrible realities of actual life. Swan raised his arms to bring that woman’s face close to his, but he could not find it. He opened his eyes, and tears of weakness watered his cheeks. ”

“ Cattle left in the open crowded in the lee of the straw-stacks, their rough flanks crawling, and in the folds the ewes, yet frail from their travail, stood stung and still, mothering their weak-kneed lambs. Beside the thud of the horse’s hoofs toward town there was no sound on the road save a little, dry cracking of the frost. The doctor, as he started in his carriage for Davie’s house, drew his robes closely about him and scowled at the fierceness of the blast; but Davie, riding far ahead, his elbows flying wildly up and down, did not know that he had forgotten to fasten his shabby overcoat. ”

“ Swan, in a greasy black shirt, was in the engine-room, hard at work, and he was just about to reprimand one of the men when Pilchard came in. Although it was early in May, a spell of precocious heat had taken New York by the throat, and what with the whir of rapidly turning wheels, and the smell of hot machine-oil and perspiring men, there was something filthy and degraded about the atmosphere. ”

“ And all day long, one by one, more men came forth, like ghosts, from the dead-land. But the twilight had come and the wind had died away before teamster Slivers limped from the desert. He came afoot. He had ridden his horse to death, in his desperate quest. He could barely see—and his hair was white, even below the coating of the dust.
Moody ran to meet him.
“Barney?—Sally?—the kid?” the teamster demanded, raucously. ”

“ The affinity between physician and artist is one of the most curious and suggestive. Every one will recall the famous surgeon-etcher, and the distinguished specialist in nerves and novels. The Doctor’s artistic passion was for music. Unfortunately, it was not materially portable, like a writing-pad, and there would have been something unseemly in the spectacle of a physician fiddling in his carriage, so he nursed this love in seclusion. His violin was his one indulgence, and when he permitted himself to dream, it was of a life with music in it. ”

“ A little, dried-up, frightened woman in a black bonnet—that was she. Like a tiny, stray cloud, very nervous and out of place. Her face was white with fatigue, the excitement of the journey, and the thought of how she should meet—ought she to call him Leonard? And when Haldane saw her he suddenly smiled boyishly—as if there could be such a thing as a problem over this scared, half-tearful, ridiculously pathetic, white-haired old woman with a black-bordered handkerchief in her shaking left hand. ”

“ Presently her baby woke, and she rose and went to it.
As she lifted it from its cradle, Nettie started up and came towards her. Hope hid her face against her mother’s neck, but after an instant turned shyly to steal a glance at the stranger.
Nettie sat down again, trembling. “Your baby is like him,” she said.
“Very like him,” Charlotte answered, and as the baby nestled up to her again, she dropped her cheek against it and tears came into her eyes—scalding tears that seemed to sear their way up from the depths of her heart. ”

“ Swan looked curiously at the workman and saw that he too was really somebody else. The man smiled and, leaning over, gently raised him up, and for the first time in his life Swan felt himself encircled by a woman’s arms, and he tasted a strange, delicious joy awakening deep within him that knowledge of reciprocal love which slumbers in the heart of every man. ”

“ Mrs. O’Brien, who had slipped away from the kitchen to be sure the lamps were not smoking, stopped a moment beside her. Mrs. O’Brien looked tired and worried when she let her own smile of greeting slip from her face. A tinge of the same expression was on Father Kelly’s kind old countenance, but the Vicar-General’s features were as inscrutable as a doctor’s. He had made a genial procession through the room, distributing the merited praise at each booth, and appreciably softening the atmosphere by his presence. He halted opposite Norah’s party. Father Kelly’s gaze grew anxious. ”

“ And Pilchard was overwhelmed with terror. Some spectre had seized him, and he could not shake it off. He looked once more at the dying man, at his closed eyes and his still body, momentarily convulsed by the final signs of life, like a great piece of machinery when the steam power is gradually running down. Then he turned and broke away, to take a bath and to take a drink and then go to meet the steamer from San Francisco....
“Eleven? You don’t say. Fever, I suppose?” ”

“ And for the rest, she let him go his way and went hers.
Life is a perfect equation: if something is added or subtracted, something is subtracted or added, so long as there is life. Judith got her poise again in time, as strong natures do after any death; with some fibres weakened past mending, gray, but calm. If his side of her nature was stunted, she seemed to blossom all the more richly in other ways. ”

“ It would have been such a relief to Haldane to be, for an hour, obliviously selfish in his estimate of his two years of marriage with Ida.
There had been nothing, after all, remarkable in Haldane’s experience—save for him; nothing very far removed from the commonplace. His father—a simple-hearted musician—had trained his son in music since the days when the lad could first hold a violin under his little chin. He had died when the boy was twenty, and Haldane had gone on, contentedly enough and absorbed, to take his father’s place among the violins of an orchestra, and to teach music. ”

“ That love had no question of reciprocity or merit. She had always been willing for them. Only it seemed to her all the rest of love should come first. It occurred to her ironically how happy her marriage would have been without her husband.
What was his love worth? It was only taxation—taxation without representation. Had either of them any real love left?
Suddenly she stood on the brink of black emptiness. To live without love; her whole nature, every life-habit, changed! Oh, no, no, no! So the cold water sets the suicide struggling for shore.
Dear, dear! ”

“ Her own nickering complaints of Norah’s “glumness” sank into dumb anxiety. She stole timid glances at the bowed black head and the frowning black brows; after a glance she would sigh, a prolonged, patient sigh. There are times when a sigh is to strained nerves like a blast of hot air on a burn. Norah jumped up and ran away from her own irritation before it exploded. She made a pretext of looking at her skirt (which was new) in the parlor cheval-glass; but in the parlor, behind the door, she did not give a glance to the picture in the mirror. ”

“ Sometimes even her love for Blake seemed to lose itself in this obstinacy, and her tenderness towards her child seemed the only womanly sentiment left in her; but more often her love for her husband mounted high and unmixed above the other feelings as the tremendous, inexplicable passion of her life. ”

“ And there followed the honor-roll of Warren’s fallen.
Millicent’s sensitive lips quivered a little. Her ready imagination pictured them coming to this very square, perhaps,—the men of Warren. Boys from the hill farms, men from the village shops, the blacksmith who had worked in the light of yonder old forge, the carpenter who was father to the one now leisurely hammering a yellow L upon that weather-stained house,—she saw them all. What had led them? What call had sounded in their ears that they should leave their ploughshares in the furrows, their tills, their anvils, and their benches? ”

“ When Lizzie Graham came to see him, she found him sitting in his twilight, his elbows on his knees, his head in his long, thin hands. On one hollow cheek there was a glistening wet streak. He put up a forlornly trembling hand and wiped it away when he heard her voice.
“Yes; yes, I do recognize it, ma’am,” he said; “I can tell voices better than I used to be able to tell faces. You are Jim Graham’s wife? Yes; yes, Lizzie Graham. Have you heard about me, Lizzie? I am not going to finish my machine. I am to be sent to the Farm.” ”

“ She was thinking how strange it was that this other woman, who was a frail, poor-spirited thing, should be ready to support herself and child out of love for Blake. In Charlotte’s mind, which was pitilessly clear and active, there was room for a passing wonder at the mysterious power which so weak a man could exert over women, even without his will. ”

“ The church has got enough.”
“Is it true about papa?” said Freda, in German.
“Ach Himmel! Yes, my child. Dost thou not know thy father yet? For all he seems still and stern, thou art more than all the world to him.” Mrs. Orendorf spoke in the same tongue; her other listeners could not understand it, but they marvelled over the soft change in her voice.
“It’s true enough, Miss Freda,” said Mrs. O’Brien, gently. “And maybe you’re in the right of it, Norah darling, though ’tis a bit hard to give in; but, yes, I’m sure you’re right.” ”

“ Pilchard put on his hat and smiled. He had been waiting for this. “If you say you will, I bet you will!” he told Swan. “That’s why you’ll always come out ahead.” As he said this he looked intently at Swan, who was still sitting on the pile of dirt. He noticed for the first time the peculiar look in his eyes and the trembling of his whole body.
Swan sat silent. He saw the dark perspiring bodies of the Indians who were laying ties, and his lifelong ambition to be a great engineer suddenly presented itself to him in the old strong unemotional way.
“For science is a cruel mistress. ”