Then Amanda went into the house, and sat down by the window in the
gathering dusk, surveying the wreckage of her dream. The dream was even
more precious in that it had grown so old. Caleb was a part of her
every-day life, and for fifteen years Saturday had brought a little
festival, wherein the commonplace man with brown eyes had been
high-priest. He would not come to-night. Perhaps he never would come
again. She knew what it was to feel widowed.

Sunday passed; and though Caleb fed the pigs and did the barn-work as
usual, he spoke but briefly. Even in his customary salutation of "How
dee?" Amanda detected a change of tone, and thereafter took flight
whenever she heard his step at the kitchen door. So Monday forenoon
passed; Caleb brought water for her tubs and put out her clothes-line,
but they had hardly spoken. The intangible monster of a
misunderstanding had crept between them. But when at noon he asked as
usual, though without looking at her, "Goin' to Sudleigh with the
butter to-day?" Amanda had reached the limit of her endurance. It
seemed to her that she could no longer bear this formal travesty of
their old relations, and she answered in haste,--

"No, I guess not."

"Then you don't want I should set with your mother?"

"No!" And again Caleb turned away, and plodded soberly off to young
Nat's.

"I guess I must be crazy," groaned poor Amanda, as she changed her
washing-dress for her brown cashmere. "The butter's got to go, an' now