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for a presentable necktie and handkerchief—Lucy was very severe about the latter—and then walked into the dining room.

The lamp was not yet lit, the light was elusive, tender, and his heart contracted violently at the youthful yet mature back toward him. She turned slowly, a hand resting on the table, and Calvin Stammark's senses swam. An inner confusion invaded him, pierced by a sharp unutterable longing.

"Hannah," he whispered.

She smiled and advanced; but, his heart pounding, Calvin retreated. He must say something reasonable, tell her that they were glad to have her back—mustn't leave them again. She kissed him, and, his eyes shut, the touch of her lips re-created about him the parlor of the Braleys,—the stiffly arranged furniture with its gay plush, the varnished fretwork of the organ, the pink glow of the lamp.

She was Hannah! The resemblance was so perfect—her cheek's turn, her voice, sweet with a trace of petulance, her fingers—that it was sustained in a flooding illumination through the commonplace revealing act of supper. It was as if the eighteen years since Hannah, his Hannah, was a reality were but momentary, the passage of the valley. His love for her was unchanged—no, here at least, was a difference; it was greater, keener; exactly as if during the progress of their intimacy he had been obliged to go away from her for a while.

She accompanied Ettie to the kitchen and Calvin sat on the porch in a gathering darkness throbbing with frogs and perfumed with drifting locust blooms. Constellation