Not but right, payin' only half board.

Michaelis.

To the boy.

Do whatever she tells you.

The boy follows Martha out. Michaelis stands by the window in thought. As Rhoda reënters, he looks up. He speaks significantly, with suppressed excitement.

She saw the sun!

Rhoda.

Poor dear Auntie!

Michaelis.

You pity her?

Rhoda.

After an instant's silence, during which she ponders her reply.

I think I envy her.

She removes the cloth from the table, and begins deftly to put the room in order. Michaelis watches her with a kind of vague intentness.

Michaelis.

How long did you say she had been sick?

Rhoda.

More than four years—nearly five.

Michaelis.

She has never walked in that time?

Rhoda.

Shakes her head.

Nor used her right hand, either.

Michaelis.

With intensity.

Are you certain?

Rhoda.

Surprised at his tone.

Yes—I haven't lived here long, but I am certain.

Michaelis.

She has tried medicine, doctors?

Rhoda.

Uncle has spent everything he could earn on them. She has been three times to the mineral baths, once as far as Virginia.

Michaelis.

But never as far as Bethesda.

Rhoda.

Bethesda? Where is that?

Michaelis.

The pool, which is called Bethesda, having five porches.

Rhoda.

Oh, yes. The pool in the Bible, where once a year an angel troubled the waters, and the sick and the lame and the blind gathered, hoping to be healed.

Michaelis.

And whoever first, after the troubling of the waters, stepped in, he was made whole of whatsoever disease he had.

Rhoda.

If anybody could find the way there again, it would be Aunt Mary.

Pause.

And if anybody could show her the way it would be—you.

She goes on in a different tone, as if to escape from the embarrassment of her last speech.

Her saying just now she saw the sun. She often says things like that. Have you noticed?

Michaelis.

Yes.

Rhoda.

With hesitation.

Her brother Seth—the one who died—has she told you about him?

Michaelis.

Yes.

Rhoda.

What she thinks happens—since—he died?

Michaelis nods assent.

And yet in most other ways her mind is perfectly clear.

Michaelis.

Perhaps in this way it is clearer still.

Rhoda.

Startled.

You mean—that maybe she really does—see her brother?

Michaelis.

It may be.

Rhoda.

It would make the world a very different—a very strange place, if that were true.

Michaelis.

The world is a very strange place.

Pause.

Rhoda.

Tell me a little about your life. That seems to have been very strange.

Michaelis.

Vaguely, as he seats himself by the table.

I don't know. I can hardly remember what my life was.

Rhoda.

Why is that?

Michaelis.

Gazing at her.

Because, since I came into this house, I have seen the vision of another life.

Rhoda.

With hesitation.

What—other life?

Michaelis.

Since my boyhood I have been—

He hesitates.

I have been a wanderer, almost a fugitive—. And I never knew it, till now—I never knew it till—I looked into your face!

Rhoda.

Avoiding his gaze.

How should that make you know?

Michaelis.

Leans nearer.

All my life long I have walked in the light of something to come, some labor, some mission, I have scarcely known what—but I have risen with it and lain down with it, and nothing else has existed for me.—Nothing, until—I lifted my eyes and you stood there. The stars looked down from their places, the earth wheeled on among the stars. Everything was as it had been, and nothing was as it had been; nor ever, ever can it be the same again.

Rhoda.

In a low and agitated voice.

You must not say these things to me. You are—I am not—. You must not think of me so.

Michaelis.

I must think of you as I must.

Pause. Rhoda speaks in a lighter tone, as if to relieve the tension of their last words.

Rhoda.

Tell me a little of your boyhood.—What was it like—that place where you lived?

Michaelis.

Becomes absorbed in his own mental pictures as he speaks.

A great table of stone, rising five hundred feet out of the endless waste of sand. A little adobe house, halfway up the mesa, with the desert far below and the Indian village far above. A few peach trees, and a spring—a sacred spring, which the Indians worshipped in secret. A little chapel, which my father had built with his own hands. He often spent the night there, praying. And there, one night, he died. I found him in the morning, lying as if in quiet prayer before the altar.

Rhoda.

After a moment's hush.

What did you do after your father died?

Michaelis.

I went away south, into the mountains, and got work on a sheep range. I was a shepherd for five years.

Rhoda.

And since then?

Michaelis.

Hesitates.

Since then I have—wandered about, working here and there to earn enough to live on.

Rhoda.

I understand well why men take up that life. I should love it myself.

Michaelis.

I didn't do it because I loved it.

Rhoda.

Why, then?

Michaelis.

I was waiting my time.

Rhoda.

In a low tone.

Your time—for what?

Michaelis.

To fulfil my life—my real life.

Rhoda.

Your—real life?

He sits absorbed in thought without answering. Rhoda continues, after a long pause.

There in the mountains, when you were a shepherd—that was not your real life?

Michaelis.

It was the beginning of it.

Rhoda.

With hesitation.

Won't you tell me a little about that time?

Michaelis.

In the fall I would drive the sheep south, through the great basin which sloped down into Mexico, and in the spring back again to the mountains.

Rhoda.

Were you all alone?

Michaelis.

There were a few men on the ranges, but they were no more to me than the sheep—not so much.

Rhoda.

Weren't you dreadfully lonely?

Michaelis.

No.

Rhoda.

You hadn't even any books to read?

Michaelis.

Takes a took from his coat pocket.

I had this pocket Bible, that had been my