As for her husband, he said, calmly, “Good-night, dear,” and trudged off in the cool May dusk down Lonely Lake Road. He found the door of the house on the latch, and a little fire glowing in the stove; Brother Nathan had seen to that, and had left some food on the table for him. But in spite of the old man’s friendly foresight the house had all the desolation of confusion; in the kitchen there were two or three cases of books, broken open but not unpacked, a trunk and a carpet-bag, and some bundles of groceries; they had been left by the expressman on tables and chairs and on the floor, so that the solitary man had to do some lifting and unpacking before he could sit down in his loneliness to eat the supper Brother Nathan had provided. He looked about to see where he would put up shelves for his books, and as he did so the remembrance of his quiet, shabby old study came to him, almost like a blow. “Well,” he said to himself, “this won’t be for so very long. We’ll be back again in a year, I guess. Poor little Tay! I shouldn’t wonder if it was six months. I wonder, can I buy Henry Davis off, if she wants to go back in six months?” And yet, in spite of his calm understanding of the situation, the wound burned. As he went about putting things into some semblance of order, he paused once and looked hard into the fire.... When she did want to go back--let it be in six months or six weeks or six days--would things be the same? Something had been done to the very structure and fabric of their life. “Can it ever be the same?” he said to himself; and then he passed his hand over his eyes, in a bewildered way--“Will I be the same?” he said. III SUMMER at the Shaker settlement, lying in the green cup of the hills, was very beautiful. The yellow houses along the grassy street drowsed in the sunshine, and when the wind stirred the maple leaves one could see the distant sparkle of the lake. Athalia had a fancy, in the warm twilights, for walking down Lonely Lake Road, that jolted over logs and across gullies and stopped abruptly at the water’s edge. She had to pass Lewis’s house on the way, and if he saw her he would call out to her, cheerfully, “Hullo, ‘Thalia! how are you, dear?” And she, with prim intensity, would reply, “Good-evening, BROTHER Lewis.” If one of the sisters was with her, they would stop and speak to him; otherwise she passed him by in such an eager consciousness of her part that he smiled--and then sighed. When she had a companion, Lewis and the other Shakeress would gossip about the weather or the haying, and Lewis would have the chance to say: “You’re not overworking, ‘Thalia? You’re not tired?” While Athalia, in her net cap and her gray shoulder cape buttoned close up to her chin, would dismiss the anxious affection with a peremptory “Of course not! I have bread to eat you know not of, Brother Lewis.” Then she would add, didactically, some word of dogma or admonition.