Page:Harper's New Monthly Magazine - v109.djvu/160

146 row paths among the low graves around them. Here and there a yellow wildflower grew, undisturbed by human step. On some of the gray headstones, rough and unshaped, the passion-vine hung its green leaves and purple blossoms with their symbols of deathless love and suffering. Then she looked once more at the humble man and woman beside her, with their sincere and sweet faces.

"But there was more in the past than pathos." She held out her slim hand towards the old church. "Through how many years, these long years which no one but ourselves will ever know about, it has borne its witness."

"You mean the meeting-house—"

The old light flashed in her clear eyes. "Yes. Think what it has meant to us; to us who have had so little beside it; to these men and women lying here around us, with less even than we have had."

The voices of the children at their play came again in sweet merriment. The young mother leaned over her little one and kissed him softly.

"Every generation ought to have a better chance than the one that went before it," her husband repeated, gently.

"You know, Melissy," he said after a while, "when you went away and stayed all them four years, I never really believed you would ever come back here and live. Addie Lee an' me both said so often."

"And don't it all seem little an' lonesome an' shut in to you now, Melissa, since you've been away where there are people an' towns, an' great open places for them to live?" Addie Lee was looking at her curiously.

"It is rather shut in right here," Melissa admitted, lightly; "but if you go out to the road you can see a little more; and if you climb the hill you can see still farther. Everything, at last, is joined on to something else. This little Hebron neighborhood is part of all the rest of the world."

But Addie Lee looked a little blank.

"You felt something like that just a minute ago," her husband suggested. "When you heard the children a-laughin' an' callin', didn't it sorter seem to you like the baby was a part of them?"

"And the school-children are mine all the time," Melissa said with a little laugh. And then suddenly she turned with a burst of her old frankness, her old desire to be understood by the man who once had loved her. "But, Timothy! I must speak the truth,—I do love the children, and I do want to help them, and, oh! they help me just as much—but even they, and the new schoolhouse, and all of your and Addie Lee's kindness could never, never satisfy me if I did not have something else. It is my books—all the books you have seen in my little log house, and the rest that will be added to them by and by. The world up here would be little, so little that I should stifle and die in it, in spite of even the school and you, if it were not for them." The eagerness to be understood quivered like a light in her deep eyes.

The face of the young wife softened with comprehension and a simple tenderness. "I know how much better and larger everything has seemed to me since I've had Timothy and the baby," she said.

The child stirred from his sleep, and Timothy laid him in his mother's arms.

