“Melissa, where be you?” called a woman’s voice, high-pitched and melancholy. “There’s mother calling,” Melissa said, in a frightened whisper, and she broke away and ran into the house. Her mother stood in the kitchen door. “Where have you been?” she began. Then she stopped, and looked at Isaac Penfield with a half-shrinking, half-antagonistic air. This stalwart young man, radiant with the knowledge of his own strength, represented to this delicate woman, who was held to the earth more by the tension of nerves than the weight of matter, the very pride of life, the material power which she was to fear and fight for herself and for her daughter. “I thought I would step into your meeting to-night, if I were permitted,” Isaac Penfield said. Mrs. Lennox looked at him with deep blue eyes under high, thin temples. “All are permitted who listen to the truth with the right spirit,” said she, and turned shortly and glided into the kitchen. Melissa and Isaac followed. The company sat in wide semicircles, three deep, before the fire. In the open space between the first semicircle and the fire, his wide arm-chair on the bricks of the broad hearth, half facing the company, sat Solomon Lennox. Near him sat his deaf-and-dumb son Alonzo. He held up a large slate so the firelight fell upon it, and marked upon it with a grating pencil. He screwed his face with every stroke, so it seemed that one watching attentively might discern the picture itself from his changing features. Alonzo Lennox was fourteen years old, but he looked no more than ten, and he had been deaf and dumb from his birth. The firelight gave a reddish tinge to his silvery blond hair, spreading out stiffly from the top of his head over his ears like the thatch of a hut. His delicate irregular profile bent over the slate; now and then a spasm of silent merriment shook his narrow chest, and the surrounding people looked at him with awe. They regarded it as the mystic ecstasy of a seer.