"Poor Lydy!" Brother Nathan murmured.
"And I had another letter," the Eldress proceeded, "from that young woman who came here in August--Athalia Hall; do you remember?--she asked two questions to the minute!
She wants to visit us."
Brother Nathan looked at her over his spectacles, and one of the sisters opened her eyes.
"I don't see why she should," Eldress Hannah added.
Two of the old brothers nodded agreement.
"The curiosity of the world's people does not help their souls," said one of the knitters.
"She thinks we walk in the Way to Peace," said the Eldress.
"Yee; we do," said Brother George.
"Shall I tell her 'nay'?" the Eldress questioned, calmly.
"Yee," said Brother George; and the dozing sisters murmured "Yee."
"Wait," said Brother Nathan; "her husband--HE has something to him.
Let her come."
"But if she visited us, how would that affect him?"
Eldress Hannah asked, surprised into faint animation.
"If she was moved to stay it would affect him," Brother Nathan said, dryly; "he would come, too, and there are very few of us left, Eldress.
He would be a great gain."
There was a long silence. Brother William's gray head sagged on his shoulder, and the hymn-book slipped from his gnarled old hands.
The knitting sisters began, one after another, to stab their needles into their balls of gray yarn and roll their work up in their aprons.
"It's getting late, Eldress," one of them said, and glanced at the clock.
"Then I'll tell her she may come?" said Eldress Hannah, reluctantly.
"He can make the wrath of man to praise Him," Brother Nathan encouraged her.
"Yee; but I never heard that He could make the foolishness of woman do it," the old woman said, grimly.
As the brothers and sisters parted at the door of the sitting-room Brother Nathan plucked at the Eldress's sleeve; "Is she very wretched--Lydia? Where is she now, Eldress? Poor Lydy! poor little Lydy!"
The fortnight of Athalia's absence wore greatly upon her husband. Apprehension lurked in the back of his mind.
In the mill, or out on the farm, or when he sat down among his shabby, old, calf-skin books, he was assailed by the memory of all her various fancies during their married life.
Some of them were no more remarkable or unexpected than this interest in Shakerism. He began to be slowly frightened.
Suppose she should take it into her head--?
When her fortnight was nearly up and he was already deciding whether, when he drove over to Depot Corners to meet her, he would take Ginny's colt or the new mare, a letter came to say she was going to stay a week longer.
"I believe," she wrote--her very pen, in the frantic down-hill slope of her lines, betraying the excitement of her thoughts--"I believe that for the first time in my life I have found my God!" The letter was full of dashes and underlining, and on the last page there was a blistered splash into which the ink had run a little on the edges.
Lewis Hall's heart contracted with an almost physical pang.
"I must go and get her right off," he said; "this thing is serious!"
And yet, after a wakeful night, he decided, with the extraordinary respect for her individuality so characteristic of the man-- a respect that may be called foolish or divine, as you happen to look at it--he decided not to go. If he dragged her away from the Shakers against her will, what would be gained?
"I must give her her head, and let her see for herself that it's all moonshine," he told himself, painfully, over and over;"my seeing it won't accomplish anything." But he counted the hours until she would come home.
When she came, as soon as he saw her walking along the platform looking for him while he stood with his hand on Ginny's colt's bridle, even before she had spoken a single word, even then he knew what had happened-- the uplifted radiance of her face announced it.
But she did not tell him at once. On the drive home, in the dark December afternoon, he was tense with apprehension; once or twice he ventured some questions about the Shakers, but she put them aside with a curious gentleness, her voice a little distant and monotonous; her words seemed to come only from the surface of her mind.
When he lifted her out of the sleigh at their own door he felt a subtle resistance in her whole body; and when, in the hall, he put his arms about her and tried to kiss her, she drew back sharply and said:
"No!--PLEASE!" Then, as they stood there in the chilly entry, she burst into a passionate explanation: she had been convicted and converted!
She had found her Saviour! She--"There, there, little Tay," he broke in, sadly; "supper is ready, dear."
He heard a smothered exclamation--that it was smothered showed how completely she was immersed in a new experience, one of the details of which was the practice of self-control.
But, of course, that night they had it out. . . . When they came into the sitting-room after supper she flung the news into his pale face:
