What did he want now with her?
Her duty was light; she took it up,--she was glad to take it up; what more would he have?
She put the whole matter away from her.
It grew late.

She sat down by the lamp and began to read to her father, as usual.

Her mother put away her knitting; Joel came in half-asleep; the Doctor put out his everlasting cigar, and listened, as he did everything else, intently.

It was an old story that she read,--the story of a man who walked the fields and crowded streets of Galilee eighteen hundred years ago.

Knowles, with his heated brain, fancied that the silence without in the night grew deeper, that the slow-moving air stopped in its course to listen.