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Updated: May 16, 2025
Lewis Hall was too respectful to tell the old lady what he thought of such selfish advice; he merely did not act upon it. Instead, he went on giving a great deal of thought to Athalia's "feelings." That was why he and she were climbing the hill in the dewy silence of this August morning.
Once he said, with a feeble passion for he was still very weak "I tell you, Nathan, it isn't human!" and then added, under his breath, "but God knows whether that's not in its fa-vor." When he was quite well again he was plainly preoccupied. He pored over the Prophecies with a concentration that made him blind even to Athalia's tired looks.
In April old Jane died, and that put extra burdens on Athalia's capable shoulders. "But I notice I don't get anything extra for my work, not even thanks!" she told Lewis, sharply, and forgot to call him "Brother." She had walked down Lonely Lake Road and stopped at his gate.
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.
The fortnight of Athalia's absence wore greatly upon her husband. Apprehension lurked in the back of his mind. In the mill, or out on the farm, or when he sat down among his shabby, old, calf-skin books, he was assailed by the memory of all her various fancies during their married life. Some of them were no more remarkable or unexpected than this interest in Shakerism.
"Oh, I haven't time to pry into other people's thoughts," she said, acidly. And, indeed, just then her time was very full. She was enormously useful to the community that second winter; her young power and strength shone out against the growing weariness of the old sisters. "Athalia's capable," Eldress Hannah said, and the other sisters said "Yee," and smiled at one another.
She looked at him with those blue, ecstatic eyes, so oblivious to his pain that for a moment a sort of impersonal amazement at such self-centredness held him silent. But after the first shock he spoke with a slow fluency that pierced Athalia's egotism and stirred an answering astonishment in her.
"Wonder if there's anything under it all?" came the sly insinuation of gossip; "wonder if she hasn't got something besides the Shakers up her sleeve? You wait!" If Athalia's imagination spared her these comments, Lewis's unimaginative common sense supplied them.
So here they were, almost at the top, panting and toiling, Athalia's skirts wet with dew, and Lewis's face drawn with fatigue. "Look!" she said; "it's all open! We can sit down and see all over the world!" She left the road, springing lightly through the fringing bay and briers toward an open space on the hillside.
With such a lineage he might have done better, people said, than to marry that girl, who was the most fickle creature and no housekeeper, and whose people this they told one another in reserved voices were PLAY-ACTORS! Athalia's mother, who had been the "play-actor," had left her children an example of duty domestic as well as professional duty faithfully done.
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