"I'm going to bed," answered Matthew in a low tone. "I promised to help with the wheat in the morning. Soon it will be a loss."
Levis's eyes twinkled. Matthew had lately shown an inclination to observe that his father's methods of farming were not those of the thrifty neighbors.
"In my church," Manda answered in a tone at once humble and reproachful. She was always a person of few words, but her ability to express a variety of meanings with a _H'm_ or with the valuable _So!_ of the Pennsylvania Germans made a large vocabulary unnecessary.
Again Levis's eyes twinkled and again he thought of Mrs. Gummidge, ever mourning for "the old one."
Ellen's tears refused to be longer restrained. She rose from her chair and went to her father.
"Matthew won't speak to me. I went up seven times to tell him that I was sorry and he wouldn't open the door."
"Matthew is best left alone. He'll come round, never fear! I have a visit to make which will keep me out till after dark. There is a book and Matthew will hear you if you call. If you get sleepy, go to bed."
Levis kissed her and put on his hat and went away. He did not carry his satchel of medicines nor go to the barn to put his horse into the buggy, but walked down the short lane to the road. Ellen watched him until he reached the gate, and stood for a moment listening to the church bells in Ephrata. When he went on his way, she turned with forgetfulness of all troubles to "David Copperfield." The first paragraphs puzzled her, but she did not linger. Mercifully, one did not need to understand everything in a book in order to get intense enjoyment out of it.
Levis retraced Ellen's journey of yesterday, except that he climbed no fences, but kept to the road until he reached the strange group of old buildings in the hollow, now more uncanny than ever in the twilight. They were entirely dark, and about them in his imagination ghosts seemed to wander, some of them saintly and all pitifully deluded. These old buildings had trapped him; entering them from curiosity soon after he had taken the practice of the old doctor, he had come out bewitched, unable to free himself, the course of his life changed.
Midway between an outer and an inner gate he stood still. He was in the little enclosure beside the public highway where for a hundred and seventy years the Seventh-Day Baptists had buried their dead. Here were no ornate monuments, but a few rows of simple stones, some sunk deep into the soil. One, a little larger and whiter than the rest, seemed to invite contemplation. Levis glanced at it, hesitated for an instant, and then went on. He knew well how unimportant are the remains of mortality and that it is mockery even to pause beside a grave in which lies the object of a love, extinguished not by death, but by life. The shadowy stone recalled not grief born when Mary died, but miseries struggled with long before.