bright tin basin by the kitchen door he went to his room for a
presentable necktie and handkerchief--Lucy was very severe about the
latter--and then walked into the dining room.

The lamp was not yet lit, the light was elusive, tender, and his heart
contracted violently at the youthful yet mature back toward him. She
turned slowly, a hand resting on the table, and Calvin Stammark's
senses swam. An inner confusion invaded him, pierced by a sharp
unutterable longing.

"Hannah," he whispered.

She smiled and advanced; but, his heart pounding, Calvin retreated. He
must say something reasonable, tell her that they were glad to have her
back--mustn't leave them again. She kissed him, and, his eyes shut, the
touch of her lips re-created about him the parlor of the Braleys,--the
stiffly arranged furniture with its gay plush, the varnished fretwork
of the organ, the pink glow of the lamp.

She was Hannah! The resemblance was so perfect--her cheek's turn, her
voice, sweet with a trace of petulance, her fingers--that it was
sustained in a flooding illumination through the commonplace revealing
act of supper. It was as if the eighteen years since Hannah, his
Hannah, was a reality were but momentary, the passage of the valley.
His love for her was unchanged--no, here at least, was a difference; it
was greater, keener; exactly as if during the progress of their
intimacy he had been obliged to go away from her for a while.

She accompanied Ettie to the kitchen and Calvin sat on the porch in a
gathering darkness throbbing with frogs and perfumed with drifting