A sentimental gentleness seems to have overspread little Eudore, who
is curled up in a sort of niche in the ground. He is lost in
meditation, pencil in hand, eyes on paper. Dreaming, he looks and
stares and sees. It is another sky that lends him light, another to
which his vision reaches. He has gone home.

In this time of letter-writing, the men reveal the most and the best
that they ever were. Several others surrender to the past, and its
first expression is to talk once more of fleshly comforts.

Through their outer crust of coarseness and concealment, other
hearts venture upon murmured memories, and the rekindling of bygone
brightness: the summer morning, when the green freshness of the
garden steals in upon the purity of the country bedroom; or when the
wind in the wheat of the level lands sets it slowly stirring or
deeply waving, and shakes the square of oats hard by into quick
little feminine tremors; or the winter evening, with women and their
gentleness around the shaded luster of the lamp.

But Papa Blaire resumes work upon the ring he has begun. He has
threaded the still formless disc of aluminium over a bit of rounded
wood, and rubs it with the file. As he applies himself to the job,
two wrinkles of mighty meditation deepen upon his forehead. Anon he
stops, straightens himself, and looks tenderly at the trifle, as
though she also were looking at it.

"You know," he said to me once, speaking of another ring, "it's not
a question of doing it well or not well. The point is that I've done
it for my wife, d'you see? When I had nothing to do but scratch