He was conscious, certainly, that Lucy was growing older--yet not so fast as he--but he had a shock of surprise when she informed him that she was fifteen. Calvin pinched her cheek, and, sitting on the porch, heard her within issuing a peremptory direction to Ettie. The elder made no reply and, he knew, did as Lucy wished. This disturbed him. There wasn't a finer woman living than Ettie Stammark, and he didn't purpose to have Lucy impudent to her. Lucy, he decided, was getting a little beyond them. She was quick at her lessons, the Greenstream teacher said. Lucy would have considerable property when he died; he'd like her to have all the advantages possible; and--very suddenly--Calvin decided to send her away to school, to Stanwick, the small city to and from which the Greenstream stage drove. She returned from her first term at Christmas, full of her experiences with teachers and friends, to which Ettie and he listened with absorbed attention. Now she seemed farther from him than before; and he saw that a likeness to Hannah was increasing; not in appearance--though that was not dissimilar--but in the quality that had established Hannah's difference from other girls, the quality for which he had never found a name. The assumptions of Lucy's childhood had become strongly marked preferences for the flowers of existence, the ease of the portico rather than the homely labor of the back of the house. Neither his sister nor he resented this or felt that Lucy was evading her just duties; rather they enjoyed its difference from their own practical beings and affairs. They could afford to have her in fresh laundered frills and they secretly enjoyed the manner in which she instructed them in social conventions. At her home-coming for the summer she brought to an end the meals in the kitchen; but when she left once more for Stanwick and school Ettie and Calvin without remark drifted back to the comfortable convenience of the table near the cooking stove. This period of Lucy's experience at an end she arrived in Greenstream on a hot still June evening. Neither Calvin nor his sister had been able to go to Stanwick for the school commencement, and Calvin had been too late to meet the stage. After the refreshing cold water in the bright tin basin by the kitchen door he went to his room for a presentable necktie and handkerchief--Lucy was very severe about the latter--and then walked into the dining room. The lamp was not yet lit, the light was elusive, tender, and his heart contracted violently at the youthful yet mature back toward him. She turned slowly, a hand resting on the table, and Calvin Stammark's senses swam. An inner confusion invaded him, pierced by a sharp unutterable longing. “Hannah,” he whispered.