your house.”  The dreadful recollection that the deputy had the power to detail him and the constable to scour the plain while he remained behind in company with Sue stopped Ira’s further objections.  Yet, if he could only get rid of her while the deputy was in the house,—­but then his nearest neighbor was five miles away!  There was nothing left for him to do but to return with the men and watch his wife keenly.  Strange to say, there was a certain stimulus in this which stirred his monotonous pulses and was not without a vague pleasure.  There is a revelation to some natures in newly awakened jealousy that is a reincarnation of love.

As they came into the house a slight circumstance, which an hour ago would have scarcely touched his sluggish sensibilities, now appeared to corroborate his fear.  His wife had changed her cuffs and collar, taken off her rough apron, and evidently redressed her hair.  This, with the enhanced brightness of her eyes, which he had before noticed, convinced him that it was due to the visit of the deputy.  There was no doubt that the official was equally attracted and fascinated by her prettiness, and although her acceptance of his return was certainly not a cordial one, there was a kind of demure restraint and over-consciousness in her manner that might be coquetry.  Ira had vaguely observed this quality in other young women, but had never experienced it in his brief courtship.  There had been no rivalry, no sexual diplomacy nor insincerity in his capture of the motherless girl who had leaped from the tail-board of her father’s wagon almost into his arms, and no man had since come between them.  The idea that Sue should care for any other than himself had been simply inconceivable to his placid, matter-of-fact nature.  That their sacrament was final he had never doubted.  If his two cows, bought with his own money or reared by him, should suddenly have developed an inclination to give milk to a neighbor, he would not have been more astonished.  But they could have been brought back with a rope, and without a heart throb.

Passion of this kind, which in a less sincere society restricts its expression to innuendo or forced politeness, left the rustic Ira only dumb and lethargic.  He moved slowly and abstractedly around the room, accenting his slight lameness more than ever, or dropped helplessly into a chair, where he sat, inanely conscious of the contiguity of his wife and the deputy, and stupidly expectant of—­he knew not what.  The atmosphere of the little house seemed to him charged with some unwholesome electricity.  It kindled his wife’s eyes, stimulating the deputy and his follower to coarse playfulness, enthralled his own limbs to the convulsive tightening of his fingers around the rungs of his chair.  Yet he managed to cling to his idea of keeping his wife occupied, and of preventing any eyeshot between her and her guests, or the indulgence of dangerously flippant conversation, by ordering her to bring some refreshment.  “What’s gone o’ the whiskey bottle?” he said, after fumbling in the cupboard.