So she sat in the deepening dusk and knitted, and heard the laughter and shouts of the boys at play a little way down the road with a deeper pang than Ephraim had ever felt over his own deprivation.

She was glad when the gay hubbub ceased and the boys were haled into bed. Shortly afterwards she heard out in the road a quick, manly tread and a merry whistle. She did not know the tune, but only one young man in Pembroke could whistle like that. "It's Thomas Payne goin' up to see Charlotte Barnard," she said to herself, with a bitter purse of her lips in the dark. That merry whistler, passing her poor cast-out son in his lonely, half-furnished house, whose dark, shadowy walls she could see across the field, smote her as sorely as he smote him. It seemed to her that she could hear that flute-like melody even as far as Charlotte's door. In spite of her stern resolution to be just, a great gust of wrath shook her.

"Lettin' of him come courtin' her when it ain't six weeks since Barney went," she said, quite out loud, and knitted fiercely.

But poor Thomas Payne, striding with his harmless swagger up the hill, whistling as loud as might be one of his college airs, need not, although she knew it not and he knew it not himself, have disturbed her peace of mind.

Charlotte, at the cherry party, had asked him, with a certain dignified shyness, if he could come up to her house that evening, and he had responded with alacrity. "Why, of course I can," he cried, blushing joyfully all over his handsome face--"of course I can, Charlotte!" And he tried to catch one of her hands hanging in the folds of her purple dress, but she drew it away.

"I want to see you a few minutes about something," she said, soberly; and then she pressed forward to speak to another girl, and he could not get another word with her about it.

Charlotte, after she got home from the party, had changed her pretty new gown for her every-day one of mottled brown calico set with a little green sprig, and had helped her mother get supper.

Cephas, however, was late, and did not come home until just before Thomas Payne arrived. Sarah had begun to worry. "I don't see where your father is," she kept saying to Charlotte. When she heard his shuffling step on the door-stone she started as if he had been her lover. When he came in she scrutinized him anxiously, to see if he looked ill or disturbed. Sarah Barnard, during all absences of her family, dug busily at imaginary pitfalls for them; had they all existed the town would have been honey-combed.

"There ain't nothin' happened, has there, Cephas?" she said.

"I dunno of anythin' that's happened."

"I got kind of worried. I didn't know where you was." Sarah had an air of apologizing for her worry. Cephas made no reply; he did not say where he had been, nor account for his tardiness; he did not look at his wife, standing before him with her pathetically inquiring face. He pulled a chair up to the table and sat down, and Charlotte set his supper before him. It was a plate of greens, cold boiled dock, and some rye-and-Indian bread. Cephas still adhered to his vegetarian diet, although he pined on it, and the longing for the flesh-pots was great in his soul. However, he said no more about sorrel pies, for the hardness and the flavor of those which he had prepared had overcome even his zeal of invention. He ate of them manfully twice; then he ate no more, and he did not inquire how Sarah disposed of them after they had vainly appeared on the table a week.

She, with no pig nor hens to eat them, was forced, with many misgivings as to the waste, to deposit them in the fireplace.

"They actually made good kindlin' wood," she told her sister Sylvia.

"Poor Cephas, he didn't have no more idea than a baby about makin'

pies." All Sarah's ire had died away; to-night she set a large plump apple-pie slyly on the table--an apple-pie with ample allowance of lard in the crust thereof; and she felt not the slightest exultation, only honest pleasure, when she saw, without seeming to, Cephas cut off a goodly wedge, after disposing of his dock greens.

"Poor father, I'm real glad he's tastin' of the pie," she whispered to Charlotte in the pantry; "greens ain't very fillin'."

Charlotte smiled, absently. Presently she slipped into the best room and lighted the candles. "You expectin' of anybody to-night?" her mother asked, when she came out.

"I didn't know but somebody might come," Charlotte replied, evasively. She blushed a little before her mother's significantly smiling face, but there was none of the shamed delight which should have accompanied the blush. She looked very sober--almost stern.

"Hadn't you better put on your other dress again, then?" asked her mother."

"No, I guess this 'll do."

Cephas ate his pie in silence--he had helped himself to another piece--but he heard every word. After he had finished, he fumbled in his pocket for his old leather purse, and counted over a little store of money on his knee.

Charlotte was setting away the dishes in the pantry when her father came up behind her and crammed something into her hand. She started.

"What is it?" said she.

"Look and see," said Cephas.

Charlotte opened her hand, and saw a great silver dollar. "I thought mebbe you'd like to buy somethin' with it," said Cephas. He cleared his throat, and went out through the kitchen into the shed. Charlotte was too amazed to thank him; her mother came into the pantry. "What did he give you?" she whispered.

Charlotte held up the money. "Poor father," said Sarah Barnard, "he's doin' of it to make up. He was dreadful sorry about that other, an'

he's tickled 'most to death now he thinks you've got somebody else, and are contented. Poor father, he ain't got much money, either."

"I don't want it," Charlotte said, her steady mouth quivering downward at the corners.

"You keep it. He'd feel all upset if you didn't. You'll find it come handy. I know you've got a good many things now, but you had ought to have a new cape come fall; you can't come out bride in a muslin one when snow flies." Sarah cast a half-timid, half-shrewd glance at Charlotte, who put the dollar in her pocket.

"A green satin cape, lined and wadded, would be handsome," pursued her mother.

"I sha'n't ever come out bride," said Charlotte.

"How you talk. There, he's comin' now!"

And, indeed, at that the clang of the knocker sounded through the house. Charlotte took off her apron and started to answer it, but her mother caught her and pinned up a stray lock of hair. "I 'most wish you had put on your other dress again," she whispered.

Sarah listened with her ear close to the crack of the kitchen door when her daughter opened the outside one. She heard Thomas Payne's hearty greeting and Charlotte's decorous reply. The door of the front room shut, then she set the kitchen door ajar softly, but she could hear nothing but a vague hum of voices across the entry; she could not distinguish a word. However, it was as well that she could not, for her heart would have sunk, as did poor Thomas Payne's.

Thomas, with his thick hair brushed into a shining roll above his fair high forehead, in his best flowered waistcoat and blue coat with brass buttons, sat opposite Charlotte, his two nicely booted feet toeing out squarely on the floor, his two hands on his knees, and listened to what she had to say, while his boyish face changed and whitened. Thomas was older than Charlotte, but he looked younger.

It seemed, too, as if he looked younger when with her than at other times, although he was always anxiously steady and respectful, and lost much of that youthful dash which made him questioningly admired by the young people of Pembroke.

Charlotte began at once after they were seated. Her fair, grave face colored, her voice had in it a solemn embarrassment. "I don't know but you thought I was doing a strange thing to ask you to come here to-night," she said.

"No, I didn't; I didn't think so, Charlotte," Thomas declared, warmly.

"I felt as if I ought to. I felt as if it was my duty to," said she.

She cast her eyes down. Thomas waited, looking at her with vague alarm. Somehow some college scrapes of his flashed into his head, and he had a bewildered idea the she had found them out and that her sweet rigid innocence was shocked, and she was about to call him to account.

But Charlotte continued, raising her eyes, and meeting his gravely and fairly:

"You've been coming here three Sabbath evenings running, now," said she.

"Yes, I know I have, Charlotte."

"And you mean to keep on coming, if I don't say anything to hinder it?"

"You know I do, Charlotte," replied Thomas, with ardent eyes upon her face.

"Then," said Charlotte, "I feel as if it was my duty to say this to you, Thomas. If you come in any other way than as a friend, if you come on any other errand than friendship, you must not come here any more. It isn't right for me to encourage you, and let you come here and get your feelings enlisted. If you come here occasionally as a friend in friendship I shall be happy to have you, but you must not come here with any other hopes or feelings."

Charlotte's solemnly stilted words, and earnest, severe face chilled the young man opposite. His face sobered. "You mean that you can't ever think of me in any other way than as a friend," he said.

Charlotte nodded. "You know it is not because there's one thing against you, Thomas."

"Then it is Barney, after all."

"I was all ready to marry him a few weeks ago," Charlotte said, with a kind of dignified reproach.

Thomas colored. "I know it, Charlotte; I ought not to have expected--I suppose you couldn't get over it so soon. I couldn't if I had been in your place, and been ready to marry anybody. But I didn't know about girls; I didn't know but they were different; I always heard they got over things quicker. I ought not to have thought-- But, oh, Charlotte, if I wait, if you have a little more time, don't you think you will feel different about it?"

Charlotte shook her head.

"But he is such a good-for-nothing dog to treat you the way he does, Charlotte!" Thomas cried out, in a great burst of wrath and jealous love.

"I don't want to hear another word like that, Thomas Payne,"