Ellen sent to Harrisburg no notification of her coming. She was now convinced that she had thorough control of herself, and that she could meet Stephen safely. He might be away—the possibility brought a painful moment of mixed misery and relief. Shifting her heavy bag from hand to hand, she walked up the sunny street, past the jewelry shop of Mr. Goldstein, past small hotels in whose windows idle men sat drowsily, to Front Street. The river seemed to have no current, but lay a burnished sheet under the low and glaring sun. In the park a few sprawled figures occupied the benches.

She rang the bell, and when no one answered, she opened the door with a key which she had hesitated to use, and putting down her bag walked through the hall and passageway to the offices. It was long after working hours, but Miss Knowlton and Miss MacVane would be putting desks and files in order and closing the day's records. She believed that they would be glad to see her, and she longed for the refuge of their homely femininity. She now allied herself in spirit with them and their kind.

But neither Miss MacVane nor Miss Knowlton was at work. The office had an unused appearance; shades had not been lifted, and even in the dim light she could see on all the furniture a film of dust. The air was not merely cool, it was damp, and her final impression of strangeness deepened to a fear of calamity. The house seemed to be empty.

She returned with a quickly beating heart to the front hall. In the library shades were irregularly drawn and here also dust covered the polished surfaces of tables and chairs. One small article of furniture had been moved and at it she stared while a deeper chill smote her heart. It was Hilda's little tabourette, upon which now, as formerly, lay matches and boxes of cigarettes. She leaned helplessly against the door. Had Hilda come back?

When she heard steps approaching she turned slowly and in unreasonable terror. But they were heavier and slower steps than Hilda's. Still her step might have changed! She looked toward the stairway and beheld Professor Mayne, large, elegant, cigarette in hand. Her heart leaped to a more terrible conclusion—Stephen was dead!

Mayne regarded her with his bland smile. He had lived recently through two harrowing experiences, but one was on the whole a relief, and the other, while it shocked him, did not touch his own person or habits.

"What is it you wish?" he asked kindly.

"I'm looking for Miss MacVane."

"You mean Dr. Lanfair's secretary?"

"Yes."

"She has unfortunately been somewhat indisposed. She is absent."

"Is Miss Knowlton here?"

"She is in the hospital attending Dr. Lanfair."

"Is he ill?"

"He has had an infected hand, a severe case of septicÆmia, but we have saved him. He is improving."

Ellen forgot all her resolutions.

"Can he be seen?"

Mayne shook his head, then looked at her curiously. Was she an employee of Stephen's, like the middle-aged women who were so concerned about him?

"Oh, I remember you!" he said. "You are the young woman who assisted with my niece. Are you still employed here?"

A foolish red appeared in Ellen's cheeks.

"No."

"Did you know that my niece had—had passed away?" Mayne almost said "expired."

"No," answered Ellen. She felt that she was not expected to make any comment and she made none. She stood awkwardly looking about. "Is there anything I can do?"

"I believe not, thank you," answered Mayne in his booming voice. He passed into the library and sat down in Hilda's corner of the sofa and lifted a newspaper.

Thus dismissed, Ellen lifted her heavy bag and carried it across the street to a bench. The air was intensely hot and she was hungry, but she did not connect weakness or hunger with her despair. He was ill, he had been very ill or he would not be in a hospital. And he had sent her no word! Moreover, she had been in a sense turned out! Certainly Fate was helping her to conquer herself!

Then, suddenly, a desperate longing came into her heart, a longing for childhood, for innocence, for ignorance, for freedom from this consuming passion. She wanted her father's sheltering arm, the sound of his voice. Lacking him, she thought of those nearest her in blood—Grandfather had loved her and so had Matthew and Amos. She believed that they would welcome her. Twilight was at hand; it was the hour when tired men and women hasten homeward; she too would go home.

She walked rapidly toward the railroad station. At the Square, while she waited for a break in the line of automobiles, she saw in a group of Salvation Army workers a tall brother shepherding the passers-by to positions within earshot of the preacher's voice. In that figure she could not be mistaken, it was the first feature of a familiar landscape seen after a long journey. She did not stop to account for his presence or his blue uniform, she went up to him quickly.

"Why, Amos!"

Amos looked down at her, growing first pale, then crimson. She had become, he believed, merely a part of the fearful and unrighteous past; she had vanished entirely, together with impulses to worldliness and evil. But here she was, looking up with her dark eyes as she had looked when she was a little girl. Her eyes seemed unhappy, and his heart bounded. Then it sank like a stone and uneasiness succeeded his rapture.

"I'm working for the Lord, Ellen," he explained, glancing at the group of singers who had turned to look for him. "I'm married."

"Don't you live with Grandfather?"

"No."

"Is he alone?"

"He doesn't want anybody," explained Amos quickly. "He knows he has only to ask and I'll come." The sharp whirr of a tambourine summoned him imperatively; it spoke, not with a religious, but with a domestic sternness. His wife had been expecting him to bring the stranger promptly into the circle of inquirers; she did not approve of this lengthy conversation.

"I must go," said Amos uneasily. "She is there."

Back in the noisy group Amos neither spoke nor sang. When one of his companions began to pray, he removed his cap and bent his beautiful head. But he was not praying, he was thinking of the Kloster and the past. Now that he was in the world he was not of it. He was like a monk who had left his monastery too late. The glare of the sun was too bright, the noise of the world too loud. In his hard day's work he forgot himself, but his evening tasks, his public orisons, his soliciting of strangers, were odious. There were times when he bitterly regretted his marriage; there was no time, indeed, when he did not wish it undone. But he believed that in seeking to win souls he was obeying God, and in this conviction he found consolation.

In the dingy railroad station Ellen waited for her train. The station had seemed hitherto an opening gateway; she had thought it vast and wonderful when she had arrived with her father. Her second entrance, when she came to make her living, had been more sober. Waiting for her train for Ithaca, scarcely hearing Fetzer's good-byes because she was thinking of Lanfair's, she had found it again a dazzling portal. Now, at last, it was an entrance to prison. She believed that all happiness lay behind her. She stepped into the train, and when she reached Ephrata went her way on foot.

The moon shone brightly on the Kloster and on Grandfather's cottage and on the white tombstones in the churchyard. Ellen choked back a sob; her absence from this spot reproached her.

It was a long time before Grandfather answered her pounding.

"It's Ellen," she called, when at last she heard his hand on the latch. "It's very late, I know."

Grandfather opened the door. He was dazed; the moonlight was not bright enough to make her outline clear.

"May I stay here to-night?"

He neither greeted her nor answered her.

"It is Ellen, Grandfather."

"Ellen?" He repeated a word without meaning.

"May I stay here to-night?"

He seemed now to see her, but he regarded her as though she were a jinn or spook or other baleful creature of the witching night.

"I never turned any one away," he said at last in a gentle tone.

It was clear in the morning that she was regarded not only as a transient, but as a disturbing visitor. Grandfather followed a regular routine which took him now to the Saal, now to Saron, now out into the fields, as the brethren might have traveled a hundred and fifty years ago. He believed himself to be, indeed, one of them.

In the afternoon Ellen took up her journey to Matthew's. Inexpressibly tired, she wanted only sleep in a quiet bed.

She saw Matthew crossing from the house to the barn and called to him. He did not come to meet her, but let her approach him, which was exactly like Matthew. His face was set in a somber expression, his shoulders were bent. Seeming neither glad nor sorry to see her, he took her satchel and walked with her back to the house.

In the kitchen the old chaotic condition persisted. Esther had achieved the object of her life and had gone away with her prize to a distant farm, and Millie had had a succession of inefficient servants. She languidly accepted Ellen's offered help.

"Where are your grand people?" she asked.

"Mrs Fetzer has left there."

"And the man, where's he?"

"He has been ill."

A plate slid suddenly from Ellen's hands into the iron sink. Her course appeared incredible.

"He's ill, and I'm here!" she said to herself. "He might die and I not see him!"

When Matthew said at supper that he would drive to the station for her trunk, she asked whether she might go with him. She saw at once that Millie wished to go, but she could not yield her place. From the drug-store she would call the hospital and talk to Miss Knowlton—why had she not thought of it this morning? She could have cried with relief. She was sorry that Millie was disappointed, but she would make it up to Millie twenty times over.

The drug-store was crowded with customers for ice-cream and soda water, all of whom were trying to speak above a strident talking machine which ground out a lively song. Only a little man of one of the plain sects seemed anxious to hear the music at the same time that he was a bit disturbed by his own pleasure. The proprietor and the customers regarded Ellen curiously, but did not recognize her. When the telephone bell rang, all looked at her and ceased speaking, believing that she was calling a lover.

The talking machine, too, was silenced and she knew that every word could be heard through the thin booth. Miss Knowlton could not come to the telephone, but a message would be given her. Ellen inquired for Lanfair and was told in the optimistic tone characteristic of hospitals that he was entirely out of danger. She opened the door of the booth weakly and paid the charge. Matthew was waiting outside and she climbed into the wagon. She would have liked to tell him everything, but that was a weakness. He had, she surmised, enough to bear.

She was conscious of an added coolness in Millie's attitude, but to her weary mind it seemed unimportant. She laid her head upon the pillow which had been hers in childhood, and before the tears were dry upon her cheeks she was asleep.

But Millie's attitude was not unimportant. Her disposition was now thoroughly established; she was worn and sour and unhappy and she found pleasure only in believing herself ill-treated. She had never forgotten that Matthew had taken Ellen to the Kloster two years ago without inviting her, and the repetition of the offense was grossly insulting. It was not he whom she blamed, but Ellen. She would have been glad to believe that Ellen was deliberately trying to "come between" them.

The next day Ellen wrote to Stephen. She said that she had gone to the house in Harrisburg and had heard from Professor Mayne about his illness and that he was better. She had then come to her brother's. She had called the hospital and had heard that he was still better. She was sorry that he had been ill. An undefined feeling restrained her from speaking of Hilda.

In a week she had an answer from Miss Knowlton. Dr. Lanfair was improving and was glad that she was with her brother—that was the best place for her to be. He would be well enough in a day or two to leave the hospital, then he and Fickes and Miss Knowlton would go to the shore. Even though it was Miss Knowlton who wrote, Ellen did not visualize him as helpless. She cried at night, but by day she went quietly about innumerable tasks. The postscript of Miss Knowlton's letter was a "Finis" at the end of a story: "We hope that you will pay us a call on your way back to college."

She grew slowly and miserably aware of the domestic volcano over which she lived. Millie believed now with all her heart that she had come to make trouble; though Ellen's help lightened her tasks by more than half and enabled her to put on flesh she made it appear constantly, by devices difficult to describe, but known to all who are compelled to associate with women of her type, that she believed the help to be unwillingly given.

For a long time Ellen did not understand the exact source of this resentment. She laid her hand as of old on Matthew's shoulder; she walked with him about the farm on Sunday afternoons; she pored with him over calculations. Most foolishly of all she tried to improve the extraordinary speech of little Matthew.

The summer was intensely warm; through July the opening of an outer door brought heat like a leaping flame into one's face, and the nights were often one long wish for morning. Ellen grew gradually accustomed to the hard labor, to the rising before dawn, to the insufferable afternoons. She shared Matthew's anxiety about the harvest; it seemed that before the wheat crop was brought in destructive storms must break.

Sometimes in the late afternoon when vitality was at its lowest point, she remembered the airy rooms in which she had lived last summer, the bare floors, the furniture in chintz covers, the drifting of white curtains in a gentle breeze. But of last summer she did not often let herself think. She heard no word from Stephen, nor sent him any. She remembered now half-acknowledged dreams, more vivid in retrospect than they had been in actuality, of position and travel and great possessions, and her heart burned, now with self-reproach, now with resentment at life's cruel chances.

The wheat was safely harvested and no rain fell. Matthew, increasingly anxious about the corn, searched the sky for clouds. He was irritable even with the children. Ellen bore with him and pitied him and obeyed the commands of Millie.

Early in August Matthew sat one evening on the doorstep. There had been since noon a low bank of clouds in the west, but he had often been deceived by banks of clouds. When they rose higher, he was immensely cheered, pointing them out to Millie, who merely looked sullenly in the opposite direction, and said nothing. He turned to Ellen and asked her to walk with him to the woodland from which they could get a better view. She looked at Millie's lowering face.

"Won't you go, Millie? I'll stay here."

"I wasn't asked," said Millie briefly, her very flesh tingling with resentment.

For an instant Ellen hesitated; then she followed Matthew across the yard and the stubble-field to the woodland.

Before their eyes the sun sank in a blaze of glory. On bright days only could a low range of hills be seen from this point, but now they believed they could see beyond to the gleaming river. As the sun disappeared they sat down on the old tree-trunk. The hot wind bred restlessness and sadness.

"I was wrong about everything," said Matthew soberly after a long time. "What I said in the meeting-house was nonsense, as my father said it was. I was misled."

Ellen was appalled. Matthew had arranged his whole life in accord with that confession. But she could give him no comfort; when Levis died she had been a child, and since that time, greatly as she had been troubled, she had felt no need for superhuman reassurance.

"It must have been very hard to give it all up after you had believed it."

Matthew snapped his fingers. "It went, like that! I simply didn't hold to it, that was all."

"Did you ever try to believe again?" asked Ellen.

"No; why should I? I don't want you to think I don't believe anything. When I come up here and the wind is blowing, it seems to me that I get an idea about God, greater than was ever thought of down in those little rooms. But I can't get hold of it. Perhaps some day I shall. It's only that He is and that He's here. I can't describe it."

A long sigh stirred the leaves above them. Ellen was disturbed.

"There's surely going to be a storm, and we should go down."

As she rose there was a bright flash of lightning and the oaks began to sing. She held out her hand.

"Let's run, Matthew!"

Matthew took the hand and lifted it. Thus they stood for a second, their arms outstretched, and then plunged down the smooth field and into the yard. In the doorway Matthew called Millie, but she did not answer. He went upstairs to find her, but she was not there. Both the children were asleep and pinned to the pin-cushion on the bureau, in true melodramatic fashion, was a note. Matthew read it and returned to the kitchen.

"Where is she?" asked Ellen.

"She has started home," said Matthew slowly. "She says it is to stay."

For a long moment there was only the tick of the clock and the rumble of distant thunder. Then Ellen lifted her head.

"Would it help if I went away?"

Matthew leaned heavily against the table. His face was intensely white, his gray eyes darkened. The hand upon which he leaned trembled.

"I have a friend at the University with whom I can stay for any length of time. She'll be glad to have me till the term opens."

Matthew lifted his hand and examined the callous spots upon it. It had seemed to him that peace had descended upon his house. He believed that Ellen would stay with him if he needed her. He saw the peace continued, the old life restored, his children brought up correctly, himself contented. He longed intensely for Ellen's learning, for her outlook upon life. If she stayed he might yet repair the effect of his own madness. But like Ellen, he had been trained to follow a certain rule of conduct and he could not go counter to that which he had been taught.

"I guess I should bring her back," he said at last thickly. Then a quiver passed over his face. His sense of honor was of the variety which leads, if need be, to the stake. What he said was not easy to say. "Oh, I have many, many times wished for my father!"

In a few minutes his horse galloped down the lane. The lightning was now almost incessant and the thunder rumbled heavily. Standing at the door Ellen saw his white face against the side of the buggy. Then she went upstairs, and when she had closed the windows and looked in upon the sleeping children she began to pack her trunk.

In the morning she walked slowly down the road. Matthew had come back, and Millie would return later in the day. The storm had made all fresh; goldenrod was abloom along the fences. She thought with longing of Miss Grammer and of the deep Seminar room at the library. Work!—ah, that remained!

She wished that she did not have to go to the Lanfair house, even though Stephen was away, but there were a few possessions in her room which she must secure. Besides, she did not know how to explain her failure to go. In the station she inquired about the night train to the north. When she heard that it still left at 10.35, she smiled with bitter amusement, having unconsciously expected that a new era had begun, even for trains.

The open space before the station was almost deserted, only occasionally a traveler plunged into the sunshine from the cool shadow of the portico. But indifferent to the heat, which was almost tropical in spite of last night's storm, Ellen made her way toward the street of Mr. Goldstein and thence toward the river. She saw the dome of the Capitol and stood still. Why not spend her brief hour with memories of her father and spare herself a keener pain?

But she went on toward the shining river, her shoulders lifted so that three elderly gentlemen sitting in the windows of a clubhouse opened drowsy eyes and craned admiring necks. All had comfortable fortunes, one had great possessions and one had memories of intense happiness, but all would have exchanged that which they had for that which Ellen had and which they would have no more.

Suddenly she crossed the street and sat down on a bench in the park. She was breathing rapidly, she must compel herself to be composed. She must forget her dreams, she must take account of what she still had and thus fortify herself before she entered Stephen's house.

Work?—the reminder had consoled her this morning, why could it not console her now? Friends?—she had made few, and Miss Grammer was old. Books?—ah, what miserable defect in her made them seem dull? The beauty of the world?—it, alas! merely quickened one's pain.

How often she had stolen away to the heights above the lake or to a secluded seat from which she could watch Triphammer Fall! She thought of it now without pleasure. How often she had marked the perpetually changing aspect of the stream before her! As if to recall her pleasure she looked at it with attention. Below her on the bank stood a pair of young aspen trees whose delicate interlacing branches formed a lattice-work through which the river showed here a pale lavender, here a delicate gray. Toward the farther bank a mile away a rosy cloud seemed to rest upon the water. The sight brought not pleasure but tears. She was to see the river no more with the eye of possession; this was not home to her, it was a place of strangers.

She rose quickly. She would get the books which Lanfair had given her, the dress which hung in the closet which had been hers, and she would flee.