Madame Proudfit's voice lowered the high key of the others talking in chorus. "We drove over to get it, Calliope," she said. "And here we found our Delia More." * * * * * At eleven o'clock that night, as I sat writing a letter in which the spirit of what had come to pass must have breathed--as a spirit will breathe--Calliope Marsh tapped at my door; and she had a little basket. "Here," she said, "I brought you this. It's some o' everything we hed. An'--I'm obliged for my s'prise," she added, squeezing my hand in the darkness. "I surmised first thing, most, when Delia described you. No; land, no!--Delia don't suspicion you got it up. She don't think of it bein' anybody but just God--an' I donno's 'twas. An' that's what Abel thinks--wa'n't Abel splendid? You know 'bout Abel--an' Delia? You know he use' to--he wanted to--that is, he was in--oh, well, no. Of course you wouldn't know. Well, Delia don't suspicion you--but she said I should tell you something. 'You tell her,' she says to me, 'you tell her I say I guess I take stock now,' she says; 'tell her that: I guess I take stock now.'" At this my heart leaped up so that I hardly know what I said in answer. "Delia's out here now," Calliope called from the dark steps. "The Proudfits brought us. Delia's goin' home with 'em--to stay." Thus I saw the eyes of the Proudfits' motor, with the threads of streaming light, about to go skimming from my gate. And in that kindly security was Delia More. "Calliope," I cried after her because I could not help it, "tell Delia More I take stock, too!" VII THE BIG WIND Of Abel Halsey, that young itinerant preacher, I learned more on a December day when Autumn seemed to have come back to find whether she had left anything. Calliope and I were resting from a racing walk up the hillside, where the squat brick Leading Church of Friendship overlooks the valley pastures and the village. Calliope walks like a girl, and with our haste and the keen air, her wrinkled cheeks were as rosy as youth. "Don't it seem like some days don't belong to any month, but just whim along, doin' as they please?" Calliope said. "Months that might be snowin' an' blowin' the expression off our face hev days when they sort o' show summer hid inside, secret an' holy. That's the way with lots o' things, ain't it? That's the way," she added thoughtfully, "Abel feels about the Lord, I guess. Abel Halsey,--you know."