“We heard that they were dead, but that was long ago.”  There was no tone of reproach in his voice, only curiosity.  “You never wrote, and I—­I supposed that if you were alive you—­you preferred to remain, Susy.”

She did not enter into explanation then.  After a while, when he had raised her to her feet and embraced her again, she whispered, “Why are you in the meeting-house, Ephraim?”

“We have been having a prayer meeting,” he answered.  “And I keep the key because—­because my father used to.”  He gave the reason with an intonation half playful.  “I do many a thing now because he did.”

“I thought that you at least would never become like the others.  Are they less foolish” (she made a gesture toward the pews to denote their late inmates), “less unjust than they used to be?”

As they went toward the Croom homestead he answered her words in his manner of meditative good-humour which she knew so well.  “I don’t know that they are less unjust and less foolish than they used to be, or that I am either, Susy, but—­it is not good to worship God alone.”

She pressed close to his side and looked up through the honied blossom of the apple-boughs; the violet gulfs of heaven seemed to be made more homelike by his tones.

“The sun, they say, is ninety-three millions of miles away from the earth’s surface, Susy; and think you that if some of us climb the mountains we are much nearer light than those in the vales?”

She remembered sentences which she had conned from his letters which ran like this, and her thought on its way was arrested for a moment by the memory of the spot where she had lost those letters, the thought of the grave by the creek at Haun’s Mill and of her husband’s steadfast faith.  So they walked in silence, but as they stood by the garden gate under the quince tree, she detained him a moment with a child’s desire to hear a story that she knew by heart.

“Ephraim, you wrote once that you knew a man who loved—­”

When he had given the answer she wanted, they went up the little brick path, and Susannah noticed that the folded tulips and waxen hyacinths flanked it in orderly ranks.  Their light forms glimmered in the branch shadows of the budding quince.  It was true, what people said, that Ephraim had not let his father’s home decay.  The door stood open, as country doors are apt to do.

There was a lack of something in the dark appointments of the sitting-room.  The traces of busy domestic life were not there, and sadness filled the place of the parents whom she had unfeignedly longed to see again.  Through a door ajar she saw light in the large kitchens.  A candle was upon a table, and an old woman, unknown to her, sat sewing beside it.  Ephraim, holding a burning match in clumsy fingers, lit a student lamp—­the fire of a new hearth.

CHAPTER VII.

Two years after that, Ephraim, returning one day from the field, brought with him a poor wayfarer whom he had met upon the road.