So the little world of Pleasant River went on, to all outward seeming, as it
had ever gone. On one side of the stream a girl's heart was longing, and
pining, and sickening, with hope deferred, and growing, too, with such
astonishing rapidity that the very angels marveled! And on the other, a man's
whole vision of life and duty was widening and deepening under the fructifying
influence of his sorrow.

The corn waved high and green in front of the vacant riverside cottage, but
Stephen sent no word or message to Rose. He had seen her once, but only from a
distance. She seemed paler and thinner, he thought,--the result, probably, of
her metropolitan gayeties. He heard no rumor of any engagement and he wondered
if it were possible that her love for Claude Merrill had not, after all, been
returned in kind. This seemed a wild impossibility. His mind refused to
entertain the supposition that any man on earth could resist falling in love
with Rose, or, having fallen in, that he could ever contrive to climb out. So
he worked on at his farm harder than ever, and grew soberer and more careworn
daily. Rufus had never seemed so near and dear to him as in these weeks when
he had lived under the shadow of threatened blindness. The burning of the barn
and the strain upon their slender property brought the brothers together
shoulder to shoulder.

"If you lose your girl, Steve," said the boy, "and I lose my eyesight, and we
both lose the barn, why, it'll be us two against the world, for a spell!"

The "To Let" sign on the little house was an arrant piece of hypocrisy.
Nothing but the direst extremity could have caused him to allow an alien step
on that sacred threshold. The ploughing up of the flower-beds and planting of
the corn had served a double purpose. It showed the too curious public the
finality of his break with Rose and her absolute freedom; it also prevented