At the door she turned, and saw him looking after her. Then she went in. Was he coming? oh, was he, _was_ he? She began to mount the stair, but her heart seemed to stay down there on the bottom step. She wouldn't look back again, but there was no sound, no sign. It was not overwhelmingly important to _him_ to see her alone. She felt the hot tears stinging her eyes. Then the sunshine that streamed into the musty place through the open half of the double door--suddenly it was darkened. She knew it was Ethan on the threshold. He came after her up the narrow seed-strewn stair, that had no banister. "Don't walk so near the edge," he said, and he came on the outside, pushing her a little towards the inner wall. They went up side by side, the girl quite silenced by the sense of his nearness. She half held her breath, expecting every second he would say something--something that for her would be momentous. When they had reached the loft, and he had not opened his lips, a disappointment swept over her so acute it was almost humiliation. She waded heavily through the hay to the open door, that looked out on the horses and the group below. "I can't think what I am to say about this visit, when I get home," she said. "It seems as impossible to tell them I've been seeing you as it does not to say so." "When must you go?" He accepted it, then. No crying out against her going, but merely "when." She turned away from the open door, where she could see Mrs. Ball just arrived on the scene making her a sign, and she steadied herself an instant with her hand against the wall in the shadow. The close smell of the hay choked her. Was it like this people felt before fainting? "Oh, why did I come?" she heard herself saying. And then, instead of losing consciousness, an electric sense of life and joy spread through all her body. Ethan's fingers had closed about her hand that had hung so limp at her side. There must have been some virtue in him, for at the touch she was whole again. "Don't be sorry you came," he said. "Mustn't I?" She tried to subdue her gladness. "No; even though parting is more than I have courage to face." She waited an instant for what was to follow, and then, "What? I--I didn't hear what you said." "But there are some things," he went on, "that we must do without courage." "Ethan"--she turned and faced him with a kind of fierceness like a creature at bay--"if you find you can do that, it will be because you don't care much." "Don't care!"--his face came closer, his voice was so shaken out of its even cadences it sounded like a stranger's--"don't _care_! Do you know that I never in all my life knew what caring meant till I knew you? Do you know that I'd give everything I have on earth, and every other hope of happiness, just to be able to believe there is no barrier between you and me?" He stopped. Val's heart was too full to speak on the instant. In the silence Wilbur's voice rang out clear at the bottom of the stairs: