It was in one of those moments when the mists thinned, and he knew that he was shivering over the stove instead of basking in the sunshine in his mother’s room that smelled of rose-geranium leaves, that Athalia came in. She looked conscious and confused, full of a delightful embarrassment at being for once alone with him. The color was deep on her cheeks, and her eyes were starry. “Eldress asked me to bring your mail down to you, Brother Lewis,” she said. “Thalia!” he said; “I am so glad to see you, dear; I--I seem to be rather used up, somehow.” The mists had quite cleared away, but a violent headache made his words stumble. “I was just wondering, Thalia--don’t you think you might go home now? You’ve had a whole year of it--and I really ought to go home--the mill--” “Why, Lewis Hall! What do you mean!” she said, forgetting her part in her indignation. “I am a Shakeress. You’ve no right to speak so to me.” He blinked at her through the blur of pain. “I wish you’d stay with me, Athalia, I’ve got a--a sort of--headache. Never mind about being a Shakeress just for to-night. It would be such a comfort to have you.” But Athalia, with a horrified look, had left him. She fled home in the darkness with burning cheeks; she debated with herself whether she should tell Eldress how her husband--no, Brother Lewis--had tried to “tempt” her back to him. In her excitement at this lure of the devil she even wondered whether Lewis had pretended that he was ill, to induce her to stay with him? But even Athalia’s imagination could not compass such a thought of Lewis for more than a moment, so she only told the Eldress that Brother Lewis had “tried to persuade her to go back to the world with him.” The Lord had defended her, she said, excitedly, and she had forbidden him to speak to her! Eldress Hannah looked perplexed. “That’s not like Lewis. I wonder--” But she did not say what she wondered. Instead, she went early in the morning down Lonely Lake Road to Lewis’s house. The poor fellow was entirely in the mists by that time, shivering and burning and quite unconscious, saying over and over, “She wouldn’t stay; she wouldn’t stay.” “‘Lure her back,’” said Eldress Hannah, with a snort. “Poor boy! It’s good riddance for him.”