Marg'et Ann went into the bedroom to take off her riding skirt, and she did not come out until she was sure no one could see that she had been crying. Mrs. Morrison continued to complain all through the fall; at least so her neighbors said, although the good woman had never been known to murmur; and Marg'et Ann said nothing whatever about her engagement to Lloyd Archer. Late in October Archie Skinner and Rebecca were married and moved to the Martin Prather farm, and Lloyd, restless and chafing under all this silence and delay, had no longer anything to suggest when Marg'et Ann urged her mother's failing health as a reason for postponing their marriage. Before the crab-apples bloomed again Mrs. Morrison's life went out as quietly as it had been lived. There was a short, sharp illness at the last, and in one of the pauses of the pain the sick woman lay watching her daughter, who was alone with her. "I'm real glad there was nothing between you and Lloyd Archer, Marg'et Ann," she said feebly; "that would have troubled me a good deal. You'll have your father and the children to look after. Nancy Helen will be coming up pretty soon, and be some help; she grows fast. You'll have to manage along as best you can." The girl's sorely troubled heart failed her. Her eyes burned and her throat ached with the effort of self-control. She buried her face in the patchwork quilt beside her mother's hand. The woman stroked her hair tenderly. "Don't cry, Marg'et Ann," she said, "don't cry. You'll get on. It's the Lord's will." The evening after the funeral Lloyd Archer came over, and Marg'et Ann walked up the lane with him. She was glad to get away from the Sabbath hush of the house, which the neighbors had made so pathetically neat,--taking up the dead woman's task where she had left it, and doing everything with scrupulous care, as if they feared some vision of neglected duty might disturb her rest. The frost was out of the ground and the spring plowing had begun. There was a smell of fresh earth from the furrows, and a red-bud tree in the thicket was faintly pink. Lloyd was silent and troubled, and Marg'et Ann could not trust her voice. They walked on without speaking, and the dusk was deepening before they turned to go back. Marg'et Ann had thrown a little homespun shawl over her head, for there was a memory of frost in the air, but it had fallen back and Lloyd could see her profile with its new lines of grief in the dim light. "It don't seem right, Marg'et Ann," he began in a voice strained almost to coldness by intensity of feeling. "But it _is_ right,--we know that, Lloyd," interrupted the girl; then she turned and threw both arms about his neck and buried her face on his shoulder. "Oh, Lloyd, I can't bear it--I can't bear it alone--you must help me to be--to be--reconciled!"