And then Eli Strobe appeared, and Longwood saw him for the first time since his illness. The young man recoiled from the shock, his angry insistent face smitten with a sudden gravity, even awe. So forlorn and spectral was Eli Strobe, with his pallid, lantern-jawed face; his half-shaven head, still bandaged; his clothes, his very skin, hanging loosely on his big bones. He cast his old familiar sidelong glance at the young fellow, freighted with evident but surly recognition, and he had the dumb, pathetic, shambling dignity that one sometimes discerns in a wounded animal, as with frequent halts he tottered up to an armchair on the porch, in which his deft-handed daughters made haste to prop him with pillows and wrap him with blankets. He muttered something vaguely about “them leetle darters,” and then he sat quite still, looking off at the purple mountains, and the golden sunshine on the red and amber woods hard by, the aspect of the whole world changed since he saw it last. The young fellow, still staring, had sunk down upon the porch in his former attitude, wondering if indeed there were no one else within; why, then, had Marcella sought to hurry him away? She had settled herself again at her spinning-wheel, watching with a tremulous smile the clumsy antics of Longwood’s dog, courtier enough to display great joy upon the reappearance of the master of the house, and leaping about his chair, now and then emitting a short, shrill bark. “Fust time I hev been out, Andy,” observed Eli Strobe. Marcella stopped her wheel to listen. She seemed to hang with doubt and anxiety upon his every word. Longwood, summoning a show of self-possession and cordiality, remarked that the air was likely to do him good. “Ye ’pear ter be gittin’ well now,” he added encouragingly. “Yes,” assented Eli Strobe good-humoredly. “Mam an’ Marcelly an’ Is’bel, though, hev mighty near killed me with kindness. ’Twar mighty hard fur me ter start out ter git well. I felt like I’d fairly enjye stayin’ sick fur a livin’. An’ that thar old doctor,—I actially b’lieves he hev gin me all the med’cine he hev got. The rest of ’em in the Cove hed better not git sick soon; no mo’ doctor-stuff whar that kem from.”