ELLEN GLASCOW (continued 7)

Her animation, however, was wasted, for her mother was not following her. Mrs. Oakley had grown so restless that she could not sit still at the table, and she jumped up and ran to the stove or the safe whenever she could find an excuse. She wore the strained expression of a person who is listening for an expected sound and is afraid of missing it by a moment of inadvertence. Already, before lighting the stove, she had put on her Sunday dress of black alpaca, and had protected it in front by an apron of checked blue and white gingham. If she had had the courage, Dorinda suspected, she would have cooked breakfast in her widow's bonnet, with the streamer of rusty crape at her back.

"Is that somebody going along the road?" she inquired whenever Dorinda looked up from her plate.

"No, I don't hear anybody," the girl replied patiently. "Try to eat something, or you'll be sick."

Mrs. Oakley obediently lifted a bit of egg on her fork, and then put it down again before it had touched her lips. "I don't feel as if I could swallow a morsel."

"Drink a little coffee anyway," Dorinda pleaded.

Again the old woman made a futile effort to swallow. "I don't know what can be the matter with me," she said, "but my throat feels as if it were paralyzed."

"Well, I'll fix up a snack for you, and you can nibble at it on the way. Somebody will be sure to ask us to dinner. Now, I'll clear the table before I get ready."

But, after all, Dorinda was left at home for the day. Just as Nimrod, animated by misfortune, was leading Dan and Beersheba out to the wagon, a buggy drove briskly into the yard, and Nathan Pedlar alighted.

"I kind of thought you'd want a man with your Ma, Dorinda," he explained, "so I left Bob Shafer in charge of the store and came right over. Rufus spoke to me as he was going by with the sheriff last night, and I told him I'd take his Ma to the Courthouse."

Though Dorinda was doubtful at first, Mrs. Oakley responded immediately. In spite of her protracted experience with masculine helplessness, she had not lost her confidence in the male as a strong prop in the hour of adversity. "I can't tell you how thankful I am to have you, Nathan," she replied eagerly. "Dorinda had just as well stay at home and look after the farm."

"Don't you think I'd better go too, Ma?" the girl asked, not without a tinge of exasperation in her tone. It seemed absurd to her that her mother should prefer to have Nathan Pedlar stand by her simply because he happened to be a man.

"I don't believe she'll need you, Dorinda," remarked Nathan, who, like Nimrod, was inspired by adversity. "But if you feel you'd like to come, I reckon we can all three squeeze into my buggy."

"There ain't a bit of use in your going," Mrs. Oakley insisted. "You just stay right here and take care of things."

"Well, I won't go." Dorinda gave way after a resistance that was only half hearted. "Take care of her, Nathan, and make her eat something before she gets there."'

Running into the house, she wrapped two buttered rolls and boiled eggs in a red and white napkin, and put them into a little basket. Then she added a bottle of blackberry wine, and carried the basket out to the buggy, while Mrs. Oakley tied on her bonnet with trembling hands.

"Where's my bottle of camphor, Dorinda?"

"Here it is, Ma, in your reticule. Be sure and take a little blackberry wine if you feel faint." Not until she had watched the buggy drive through the gate and out on the road, where the sun was coming up in a ball of fire, did the girl understand what a relief it was not to go. "I believe she'd rather have Nathan," she decided, as she went upstairs to change into her old gingham dress, "because he doesn't know that she is not telling the truth."

When she thought of it afterwards, that day towered like a mountain in the cloudy background of her life. Alone on the farm, for the first time in her recollection, she felt forlorn and isolated. It was impossible for her to keep her mind fixed on her tasks. Restlessness, like an inarticulate longing, pricked at her nerves. When the morning work in the dairy was over, she wandered about the farm, directing the work in the fields, and stopping for a minute or two to talk with old Matthew Fairlamb, who was handing up the shingles to his son William on the roof of the new barn. At a little distance the old house of the overseer, which had been used as a tobacco barn since her great-grandfather's death, was being cleaned and repaired for Jonas Walsh (one of the "poor Walshes") who had undertaken to work as a manager in return for a living and a share of the crops. After Rufus went, Mrs. Oakley insisted, a white man and his family would be required on the place, and though Dorinda preferred loneliness to such company, she found it less wearing to yield to her mother than to argue against her opinion. "Mrs. Walsh will be company for Ma, anyway," she said to herself. "Even if she is slatternly, they will still have chickens in common."

"Do you think Jonas will be useful?" she inquired of old Matthew, while she paused to watch the expert shingling of the roof.

Old Matthew made a dubious gesture, "Mebbe he will, an' mebbe he won't. I ain't prophesyin'."

"Well, he can shoot anyhow," William observed cynically, as he stooped down for the shingles his father held up. "He's got a gun and a coon dog."

"But I need him to work. How can you make a living out of the land unless you work it?"

Old Matthew chuckled. "The trouble with this here land is that tobaccy has worn it out. I ain't never seen the land yit that it wouldn't wear out if you gave it a chance. You take my advice, Dorindy, and don't have nothin' more to do with tobaccy. As long as you don't smoke and don't chaw, thar ain't no call for you to put up with it."

"I won't," Dorinda replied with determination. "All the tobacco fields are giving way to cowpeas."

"I see you're making a new field alongside of the old one."

"Yes. I sowed sweet clover with lime, and turned the clover under when it was in bloom. I can't afford to do that again. It was an experiment, but it improved the land."

"You're right thar, honey. Put yo' heart in the land. The land is the only thing that will stay by you."

She smiled and passed on, stopping to say a few words to Mary Joe Green at the door of the henhouse. Though she was aware that her aimless movements accomplished nothing, she could not settle down to the steady work which was awaiting her. The sound of a wagon in the road shook her nerves into a quiver of fear, and she started whenever a bird flew overhead or an acorn dropped on the dead leaves at her feet. At dinner time she did not kindle a fire in the stove, but drank a glass of buttermilk and ate a "pone" of cornbread while she stood on the front porch and looked at the road. One moment she wished that she had gone with her mother to the Courthouse, and the next she was glad that she had waited at home. Whatever Rufus's fate might be, she felt that the mental strain would be the end of her mother. Even if Rufus were to go free, Mrs. Oakley's conscience would torment her to death.

As the day declined the place became insupportable to her, and leaving the house, she walked across the yard to the gate, with Rambler and Flossie trailing at her heels. The road under the honey locust tree was strewn with oblong brown pods, as glossy as satin, and treading over them, she walked slowly past the bridge and up the shaded slope between the pasture and the band of Hoot Owl Woods. In the pasture she could see the Jerseys gathered by the stream under the willows, and now and then a silver tinkle of cowbells floated over the trumpet vine on the fence.

It was a rich October afternoon, with a sky of burnished blue and an air of carnival in the wine-red and ashen-bronze of the woods. For an instant the brightness hurt her eyes, and when she opened them it seemed to her that the autumnal radiance fluttered like a blown shawl over the changeless structure of the landscape. Beneath the fugitive beauty the stern features of the country had not softened.

She walked on, still followed by Rambler and Flossie, beyond the woods to the fork of the road. Looking away from the gate of Five Oaks, she kept her eyes on the acres of broomsedge belonging to Honeycomb Farm. The stretch of road beyond the burned cabin was deserted, and the only sound was the monotonous droning of insects and the dropping of persimmons or acorns on the dead leaves under the trees. Far away, in the direction of Old Farm, the shocked corn on the hill was swimming in a rain of apricot-coloured lights. "If only it would last," she thought, "things would not be so hard to bear. But it is like happiness. Before you know that you have found it, it goes."

Turning away, because beauty was like a knife in her heart, she called Rambler back to her side. In the middle of the road, bathed in the apricot-coloured glow, Flossie was sitting, and farther on, she saw the figures of old Matthew and William Fairlamb on their way home from work. When they reached her they spoke without stopping.

"Good evening. We'll be over bright and early to-morrow."

"Good evening to you both. There won't be a killing frost to-night, will there?"

"Not enough to hurt. Thar ain't nothin' but flowers left out by this time, I reckon."

Old Matthew's cheeks were as red as winter apples, and his eyes twinkled like black haws in their sockets. "He! He! When thar ain't nothin' to hurt, we've no need to worry!"

As they trudged away, she turned and looked after them. She wanted to ask what they had heard of the shooting; but she resisted the impulse until they were too far away for her words to reach them. Standing there, while the two figures dwindled gradually into the blue distance, she was visited again by the feeling that the moment was significant, if only she could discover the meaning of it before it eluded her. Strange how often that sensation returned to her now! Everything at which she gazed; the frosted brown and yellow and wine-red of the landscape; the shocked corn against the sunset; the figures of the two men diminishing in the vague smear of the road; all these images were steeped in an illusion of mystery. "I've let myself get wrought up over nothing," she thought, with an endeavour to be reasonable.

By the time she came within sight of the house again the afterglow was paling, and a chill had crept through the thick shawl that she wore. Perhaps, in spite of old Matthew, there would be a heavy frost before morning, and she was glad to reflect that only the few summer flowers in her mother's rockery would be blighted. Smoke was rising from two of the chimneys, and she knew that Mary Joe had kindled fires in the kitchen and in her mother's chamber. Already Fluvanna would be well on with the milking. It was the first time Dorinda had trusted it to the girl and Nimrod, and she hoped that there would be nothing to find fault with when she went out to the barn.

Two hours later, when the milking and the straining were both over, she hurried out of the dairy at the noise of wheels in the darkness. As the buggy drew up to the steps, she saw that her mother was seated between Rufus and Nathan; and even before she caught the words they shouted, she understood that the boy had been discharged. It was what she had expected; yet after the assurance reached her, her anxiety was still as heavy as it had been all day. When her eyes fell on her mother's shrunken figure she realized that the old woman must have paid a fearful price for her son's freedom. "She looks bled," the girl thought bitterly. "She looks as if she would crumble to a handful of dust if you touched her." A hot anger against Rufus flamed in her heart. Then she saw that the boy was shaking with emotion, and her anger was smothered in pity. After all, who was to blame? Who was ever to blame in life?

"It's all right, Dorinda," Nathan said, as he helped Mrs. Oakley to the ground and up on the porch. "Your Ma held up splendidly, but it's been too much for her. She's worn clean out, I reckon."

"I wish you'd been there to see the way she did it," Rufus added. "Nobody said a word after she got through." Had he actually forgotten, Dorinda asked herself, that his mother had sworn to a lie in order to save him?

XIII

For the second time in her life Mrs. Oakley allowed herself to be put to bed without protest. She hung limp and cold when they placed her in a chair, and watched her children with vacant eyes while Rufus piled fresh logs on the fire and Dorinda brought bottles of hot water wrapped in her orange shawl. When the grey flannelette nightgown was slipped over her shoulders, the old woman spoke for the first time since she had entered the house.

"Dorinda, the Lord gave me strength."

"They have killed her," the girl thought resentfully; but she said only, "Now you must get to bed as quick as you can."

Mrs. Oakley stared up at her with eyes that were wind-swept in their bleakness. Her face looked flattened and drawn to one side, as if some tremendous pressure had just been removed. "I reckon I'd better," she answered listlessly.

"You must try to eat something. Fluvanna is making you some tea and toast."

"I ain't sick enough for tea."

"Then I'll make you a cream toddy. There's some nice cream I saved for you."

While Dorinda was speaking she leaned over the bed and wrapped the clammy feet in the orange shawl. "Can you feel the hot water bottles?" she asked. The feet that she warmed so carefully were as stiff already, she told herself in terror, as if they belonged to a corpse. Neither the hot water nor the blazing fire could put any warmth into the shivering body.

"Yes, I feel them, but I'm sort of numbed."

"Now I'll make the toddy. I've got some whiskey put away where Rufus couldn't find it. If Fluvanna brings your supper, try to eat the egg anyway."

"I'll try, but I feel as if I couldn't keep it down," Mrs. Oakley replied submissively.

Flames were leaping up the chimney, and the shadows had melted into the cheerful light. When Dorinda returned with the cream toddy, Mrs. Oakley drank it eagerly, and with the stimulant of the whiskey in her veins, she was able to sit up in bed and eat the supper Fluvanna had prepared. It was long after the coloured girl's hour for going home, but the excitement had braced her to self-sacrifice, and she had offered to stay on for the night. "I can make up a pallet jest as easy as not in yo' Ma's room," she said to Dorinda, "an' I'll fix Mr. Rufus' breakfast for him, so he can catch the train befo' day."

There were few negroes who did' not develop character, either good or bad, in a crisis, Dorinda reflected a little later as she went out to the dairy. Though there was no need for her to visit the dairy, since Fluvanna and Nimrod had finished the work, she felt that she could not sleep soundly until she had inspected the milk. Was this merely what Rufus called "woman's fussiness," she wondered, or was it the kind of nervous mania that afflicted even the most successful farmer?

The brilliant autumn day had declined into a wan evening. From the dark fields the wind brought the trail of woodsmoke mingled with the effluvium of rotting leaves; and this scent invaded her thoughts like the odour of melancholy. Not even the frosty air or the fragrant breath of the cows in the barn could dispel the lethargy which had crept over her. "I'm tired out," she reasoned. "I've been going too hard the last six months, and I feel the strain as soon as I stop." Though she was saddened by the haunting pathos of life, she did not feel the intimate pang of grief. All that, it seemed to her, was over for ever. The power to pity was still hers, for compassion is a detached impulse, but she had lot beyond recall the gift of poignant emotion. Nothing had penetrated that dead region around her heart. Not her father's death, not her mother's illness—nothing. Drought had withered her, she told herself cynically, and the locust had eaten away the green of her spirit.

In the morning, Rufus went off on the early train, and Dorinda drew a breath of relief as she turned back to her work. The shock of the tragedy appeared to have cleared the boy's temper, and he showed genuine distress when he parted from his mother. "I feel as if I'd never see her again," he said to Dorinda on the porch, while he was waiting for the farmer who had promised to stop for him on the way to the station.

Dorinda shook her head. Helplessness in the face of misery acted always as an irritant on her nerves. "You never can tell," she replied. "But remember all you have cost her and try to keep straight in the future."

"I swear I'll never give her another minute's worry," he responded, stuffing his handkerchief into his pocket.

Perhaps he meant it; but it seemed to Dorinda that his repentance, like his gift with tools, was too facile. "Whatever comes of this, it has been the death of Ma," she thought, as she went into the house.

When the day's churning was over, and she was in her mother's room, the new doctor from the Courthouse arrived with his instruments and his medicine case. He was a brisk, very ugly young man, with an awkward raw-boned figure, and an honest face which was covered with unsightly freckles. As different from Jason as any man could well be! He had risen by sheer ability from the poorer class, and already, notwithstanding his plain appearance and uncompromising honesty, he had built up a better practice than the hereditary one of the Greylocks. For one thing, he insisted upon having his fees paid, and it was natural, Dorinda had discovered, to value advice more highly when it was not given away.

As the doctor sat down beside Mrs. Oakley's bed, she opened her eyes and looked at him without surprise and without welcome. Her bed was smooth and spotlessly clean; the best quilt of log-cabin design lay over her feet; and she was wearing a new nightgown which was buttoned closely about her neck. Without her clothes, she had the look, in spite of her ravaged face, of a very old child.

"I've never spent a day in bed in my life, doctor," she said, "except when my children were born."

"I know," he rejoined, with dry sympathy. "That is the trouble."

He did not waste words, but bent over immediately to begin his examination; and when it was over, he merely patted the old woman's shoulder before packing away his instruments.

"You'll have to stay in bed a while now," he said, as he stood up with his case in his hands. "I'll leave some medicine with your daughter; but it isn't medicine you need; it is rest."

Her groping gaze followed him with irrepressible weariness. "I don't know what will become of the chickens," she said. "I reckon everything will go to rack and ruin, but I can't help it. I've done all I could."

He turned on the threshold. "My dear Mrs. Oakley, you couldn't get up if you tried. Your strength has given out."

She smiled indifferently. All the nervous energy upon which she had lived for forty years was exhausted. There was nothing now but the machine which was rapidly running down. "Yes, I reckon I'm worn out," she responded, and turned her face to the wall.

Not until they had left the porch and crossed the trodden ragweed to where the buggy was waiting, did Dorinda summon the courage to ask a question.

"Is she seriously ill, doctor?"

At her words he stopped and looked straight into her eyes, a look as bare and keen as a blade. "She isn't ill at all in the strict sense of the word," he answered. "She told the truth when she said that she was worn out."

"Then she will never be up again?"

"One never knows. But I think this is the beginning of the end." He hesitated, and added regretfully, "I ought not to put it so bluntly."

She shook her head. "I'd rather know. Poor Ma! She is only sixty-two. It has come so suddenly."

"Suddenly." The word broke from him like an oath. "Why, the woman in there has been dying for twenty years!"

Her eyes were stony while she watched him mount into his buggy and turn the horse's head toward the gate. The wheels spun over the rocks and out into the road, as if they were revolving over the ice in her heart. Would nothing thaw the frozen lake that enveloped her being? Would she never again become living and human? The old sense of the hollowness of reality had revived. Though she knew it was her mother of whom they had been speaking, the words awoke only echoes in her thoughts. She longed with all her soul to suffer acutely; yet she could feel nothing within this colourless void in which she was imprisoned.

When the buggy had disappeared, she retraced her steps to the house and entered her mother's room with a smile on her lips.

"You'll have to rest now, Ma, no matter how you hate it."

At Dorinda's cheerful voice, the old woman turned over and looked at her daughter as if she were a stranger.

"I don't know how you'll manage," she answered; but her tone was perfunctory.

"Oh, we'll manage all right. Don't you worry. Just try to get well, Ma."

A change of expression rippled like a shadow over the grey features, and passed without leaving a trace. "I was afraid maybe the doctor didn't think I was sick enough to stay in bed. I know I ain't exactly sick, but I seem to have given way. I reckon Mary Joe can look after the chickens till I'm able to be up."

After this she fell into a doze from which she did not awaken until Dorinda brought her favourite dinner of jowl and turnip salad.

"The doctor says you must eat, Ma, or you'll never get back your strength."

"I know I ought to, daughter, but I feel as if something was choking me."

Day after day, month after month. Nothing else all through the autumn and winter.

Though Mrs. Oakley lived more than a year longer, she was never able again to leave her bed. For the greater part of the time she lay, silent and inert, in a state between waking and sleeping, unconcerned after all her fruitless endeavours. Rufus, she never asked for, and when his letters were read to her, she would smile vaguely and turn away as if she had ceased to be interested. Old Rambler spent his days on a mat at the side of her bed, and Flossie lay curled up on the patchwork quilt over her feet. If they were absent long, she would begin to move restlessly, and beg presently that they should be brought back. At the end, they were the only companions that she desired, for, as she said once, they "did not bother her with questions." The tragedy to Dorinda was not so much in her mother's slow dying as in her unconditional surrender to decay. For more than forty years she had fought her dauntless fight against the sordid actuality, and at the last she appeared to become completely reconciled to her twin enemies, poverty and dirt. Nothing made any difference to her now, and because nothing made any difference to her, dying was the happiest part of her life.

"There ain't any use struggling," she said once, while Dorinda was cleaning her room, and after a long pause, "It doesn't seem just right that we have to be born. It ain't worth all the trouble we go through."

But there were other days when her inextinguishable energy would flare up in sparks, and she would insist upon sitting up in bed while the white Leghorns flocked by the window. Then she would recognize her favourite hens and call them by name; and once she had Romeo, the prize rooster, brought into her room, and kept him under her eyes, until he began to strut and behave indelicately, when she "shooed" him out in her old peremptory manner. Frequently, in the last few months, she asked to have Dan and Beersheba led to her window. Tears would come into her eyes while the long sad faces of the horses looked at her through the panes, and she would murmur plaintively, "There's a heap of understanding in animals. You'll never let those horses want, will you, daughter?"

"Never, Ma. In a few years, if nothing happens, I'll turn them out to pasture for the rest of their lives."

Mrs. Oakley would smile as if she had forgotten, and after a long silence, she would begin talking in an animated voice of her girlhood and her parents. As the weeks went by, all the years of her marriage and motherhood vanished from her memory, and her mind returned to her early youth when she was engaged to the young missionary. Her old tropical dream came back to her; in her sleep she would ramble on about palm trees and crocodiles and ebony babies. "I declare, it seems just as if I'd been there," she said one morning. "It's queer how much more real dreams can be than the things you're going through."

At the end of the year, in the middle of the night before she died, she awoke Dorinda, and talked for a long time about the heathen and the sacrifices that Presbyterian missionaries had made to bring them to Christ. "Your great-grandfather was a wonderful scholar," she said, "and I reckon that's where you get most of your sense. I s'pose missionaries have to be scholars. They need something besides religion to fall back on in their old age." Never once did she allude to anything that had occurred since her marriage, and she appeared to have forgotten that she had ever known Joshua.

The next afternoon she died in her sleep while Nathan was sitting beside her bed. For a few minutes Dorinda broke down and wept, less from grief than from the knowledge that grief was expected of her; and Nathan, who was always at his best in the house of mourning, won her everlasting gratitude by his behaviour. She found herself depending upon him as if he had been some ideal elder brother such as she had never known. So naturally that fate seemed to have arranged it on purpose, he assumed authority over the household and the funeral. He thought of everything, and everybody deferred to him. Funerals were the only occasions when he had ever risen to dignity, and though he had sincerely liked Mrs. Oakley, the few days before her burial were among the pleasantest that he had ever spent in his life.

"I shall never forget how good you have been," Dorinda said, when it was over. "I don't know what I should have done without you." And though the words were spoken impulsively, as a matter of fact she never, in the future, forgot Nathan's kindness. It was a mark of her proud and self-sufficient nature that she could not forget either gratitude or resentment.

When he had driven away, she turned to Fluvanna, who was picking up bits of rusty crape from the floor of the porch.

"I really don't know what we should have done without him," she remarked over again.

"If you ax me, Miss Dorinda, he is one handy man at a funeral," answered Fluvanna, who relapsed into dialect on tragic or perilous occasions. "I was thinkin' right along how pleased yo' Ma would have been if she could have seen him, for she cert'n'y did like handy folks about her."

"Poor Ma, I wish she could have had the chickens a few years earlier," Dorinda sighed. "To think of the years she went without a cow."

"Well, she enjoyed 'em while she had 'em," Fluvanna responded fervently. "Have you thought yet what you're goin' to do, Miss Dorinda?"

"Yes, I've thought. The farm is mine. Ma left it to me, and I'm going to stay on as we are."

"Just you and me? Won't you get lonesome without some white folks?"

"After Jonas Walsh moves out of the overseer's house, I'll engage Martin Flower, who is a better farmer, and has a sensible wife. Mary Joe can take care of the chickens, and I'm going to hire her brother Ebenezer to help Nimrod with the cows. If everything goes well this winter, I'll be ready to start a real dairy in the spring. Then I'll need more hands, so we shan't be lonely."

"Naw'm, I don't reckon we'll, get lonesome, not the way we work," Fluvanna agreed. "I ain' never seen no man work as hard as you do, Miss Dorinda. Yo' Ma told me befo' she passed away that you had stayin' power and she reckoned that you was the only one of the family that had. Sprightliness don't git you far, she said, unless you've got stayin' power enough to keep you after you git thar. Well, it's all your'n now, ain't it?" she inquired placidly, as Dorinda's eyes swept the horizon.

"Yes, it's all mine." Walking over to the edge of the porch, Dorinda looked across the vague, glimmering fields. Another autumn had gone. Another sunset like the heart of a pomegranate was fading out in the west. Again the wandering scents of wood smoke and rotting leaves came and went on the wind.

For an instant, the permanence of material things, the inexorable triumph of fact over emotion, appeared to be the only reality. These things had been ageless when her mother was young; they would be still ageless when she herself had become an old woman. Over the immutable landscape human lives drifted and vanished like shadows.

XIV

When she looked back on the years that followed her mother's death, Dorinda could remember nothing but work. Out of a fog of recollection there protruded bare outlines which she recognized as the milestones of her prosperity. She saw clearly the autumn she had turned the eighteen-acre field into pasture; the failure of her first experiment with ensilage; the building of the new dairy and cow-barns; the gradual increase of her seven cows into a herd. Certain dates stood out in her farm calendar. The year the blight had fallen on her cornfield and she had had to buy fodder from James Ellgood; the year she had first planted alfalfa; the year she had lost a number of her cows from contagious abortion; the year she had reclaimed the fields beyond Poplar Spring; the year her first prize bull had won three blue ribbons. With the slow return of fertility to the soil, she had passed, by an unconscious process, into mute acquiescence with the inevitable. The bitter irony of her point of view had shaded into a cheerful cynicism which formed a protective covering over her mind and heart. She had worked relentlessly through the years; but it was work that she had enjoyed, and above all it was work that had created anew the surroundings amid which she lived. In a changed form her mother's frustrated passion to redeem the world was finding concrete expression.

At thirty-three, the perspective of the last ten years was incredibly shortened. All the cold starry mornings when she had awakened before day and crept out to the barn by lantern light to attend to the milking, appeared to her now as a solitary frozen dawn. All the bleak winters, all the scorching summers, were a single day; all the evenings, when she had dreamed half asleep in the firelit dusk, were a single night. She could not separate these years into seasons. In her long retrospect they were crystallized into one flawless pattern.

Through those ten years, while she struggled to free the farm from debt, she had scrimped and saved like a miser; and this habit of saving, she knew, would cling to her for the rest of her life. She went without butter; she drank only buttermilk, in order that she might keep nothing back from the market. Her clothes were patched and mended as long as they held together, and she had stopped going to church because her pride would not suffer her to appear there in overalls, or in the faded calico dresses she wore in the house. Though she was obliged to hire women to help her with the milking and in the dairy, she herself worked harder than any of them. Nothing, she told herself grimly, could elude her vigilance. In her passionate recoil from the thriftlessness of the poor, she had developed a nervous dread of indolence which reminded her of her mother. She went to bed, stupefied by fatigue, as soon as the last pound of butter was wrapped for the early train; yet she was up again before the break of day while the hands were still sleeping. And only Fluvanna, who lived in the house with her now, knew the hours she spent beside her lamp counting the pounds of butter and the number of eggs she had sent to market. If only she could save enough to pay off the mortgage and return the money she had borrowed from the Faradays, she felt that she should begin to breathe freely for the first time in her life.

And there was more than hard work in her struggle; there was unflagging enterprise as well. Her father had worked harder than she could ever do, toiling summer and winter, day and night, over the crops, which always failed because they were expected to thrive on so little. She remembered him perpetually hauling manure or shredding fodder, until he loomed in her memory as a titanic image of the labourer who labours without hope. "The truth is, I would rather have failed at the start than have gone on like that," she thought. "I was able to take risks because I was too unhappy to be afraid." Yes, she had had the courage of desperation, and that had saved her from failure. Without borrowed money, without the courage to borrow money, she could never have made the farm even a moderate success. This had required not only perseverance but audacity as well; and it had required audacity again to permeate the methodical science of farming with the spirit of adventure. Interest, excitement even, must be instilled into the heartless routine. The hours of work never varied. Chores were done by necessity, as in the old days without system, but by the stroke of the clock. Each milker had her own place, and milked always the same cows. After the first trial or two, Dorinda had yielded to the reluctance of the cow when her accustomed milker was changed. She had borrowed money again, "hiring money" they called it at Pedlar's Mill, to buy her first Jersey bull; but the daughters of that bull were still her best butter-making cows.

Gradually, as the years passed, her human associations narrowed down to Fluvanna's companionship and the Sunday afternoon visits of Nathan Pedlar and his children. The best years of her youth, while her beauty resisted hard work and sun and wind, were shared only with the coloured woman with whom she lived. She had prophesied long ago that Fluvanna would be a comfort to her, and the prophecy was completely fulfilled. The affection between the two women had outgrown the slender tie of mistress and maid, and had become as strong and elastic as the bond that holds relatives together. They knew each other's daily lives; they shared the one absorbing interest in the farm; they trusted each other without discretion and without reserve. Fluvanna respected and adored her mistress; and Dorinda, with an inherited feeling of condescension, was sincerely attached to her servant. Though Dorinda still guarded the reason of her flight to New York, she did this less from dread of Fluvanna's suspecting the truth than from secret terror of the enervating thought of the past. That was over and done with, and every instinct of her nature warned her to let dead bones lie buried. Sometimes on winter nights, when the snow was falling or the rain blowing in gusts beyond the window, the two women would sit for an hour, when work was over, in front of the log fire in Dorinda's room which had once been her mother's chamber. Then they would talk sympathetically of the cows and the hens, and occasionally they would speak of Fluvanna's love affairs and of Dorinda's years in the city. The coloured girl would ask eager questions in the improved grammar her mistress had taught her. "I don't see how you could bear to come back to this poky place. But, of course, when yo' Pap died somebody had to be here to look after things. I don't reckon you'll ever go back, will you?"

"No, I shall never go back. I had enough of it when I was there."

"Wouldn't you rather look at the sights up there than at cows and chickens?"

Dorinda would shake her head thoughtfully. "Not if they are my cows and chickens."

In this reply, which was as invariable as a formula, she touched unerringly the keynote of her character. The farm belonged to her, and the knowledge aroused a fierce sense of possession. To protect, to lift up, rebuild and restore, these impulses formed the deepest obligation her nature could feel.

Though she talked frankly to Nathan about the farm and the debts which had once encumbered it, she had never given him her confidence as generously as she had bestowed it on Fluvanna. Kind as he had been, the fact that he was a man and a widower made an impalpable, and she told herself ridiculous, barrier between them. She had grown to depend upon him, but it was a practical dependence, as devoid of sentiment as her dependence upon the clock or the calendar. If he had dropped out of her life, she would have missed him about the barn and the stable; and it would have been difficult, she admitted, to manage the farm without his advice. There were the children, too, particularly the younger boy, who had been born with a clubfoot. The one human emotion left in Dorinda's heart, she sometimes thought, was her affection for Rose Emily's boy, John Abner.

If he had been her own son he could not have been closer to her; and his infirmity awakened the ardent compassion that love assumed in her strong and rather arrogant nature. Though he was barely fourteen, he was more congenial with her than any grown person at Pedlar's Mill. He devoured books as she used to do when she was a girl, and he was already developing into a capable farmer. Years ago she had given Nathan no peace until he had taken the child to town and had had an operation performed on his crippled foot; and when no improvement had resulted, she had insisted that he should have John Abner's shoes made from measurements. As a little girl, her mother had always said to her that she preferred lame ducks to well ones; and John Abner was the only lame duck that had ever come naturally into her life. Fortunately, he was a boy of deep, though reserved, affections, and he returned in his reticent way the tenderness Dorinda lavished upon him. Minnie May, who had grown into a plain girl of much character, had been jealous at first; but a little later, when she became engaged to be married, she was prudently reconciled to the difference Dorinda made in her life. The two other children, though they were both healthy and handsome, with a dash of Rose Emily's fire and spirit, were received as lightly and forgotten as quickly as warm days in winter or cool ones in summer. The girl Lena, who had just turned seventeen, was a pretty, vain, and flirtatious creature, with a head "as thick with beaux," Fluvanna observed, "as a brier patch with briers"; and the boy, Bertie, familiarly called "Bud," was earning a good salary in a wholesale grocery store in the city. It was pleasant to have Nathan and the children come over every week; but John Abner was the only one Dorinda missed when accident or bad weather kept them away. In the beginning they had visited her in the afternoons, and she had had nothing better to offer them than popcorn or roasted apples and chestnuts; but as the years passed and debts were paid, there was less need of rigid economy, and she had drifted into the habit of having the family with her at Sunday dinner. This had gradually become the one abundant meal of the week, and she and Fluvanna both looked forward to it with the keen anticipation of deferred appetite.

The work was so exacting and her nerves so blessedly benumbed by toil, that Dorinda seldom stopped to ask herself if she were satisfied with her lot. Had the question been put to her, she would probably have dismissed it with the retort that she "had no time to worry about things like that." On the surface her days were crowded with more or less interesting tasks; but in her buried life there were hours when the old discontent awoke with the autumn wind in the broomsedge. At such moments she would feel that life had cheated her, and she would long passionately for something bright and beautiful that she had missed. Not love again! No, never again the love that she had known! What she longed for was the something different, the something indestructibly desirable and satisfying. Then there would return the blind sense of a purpose in existence which had evaded her search. The encompassing dullness would melt like a cloud, and she would grasp a meaning beneath the deceptions and the cruelties of the past. But this feeling was as fugitive as all others, and when it vanished it left not the glorified horizon, but simply the long day's work to be done.

Years had passed now, and she had stopped thinking of Jason. Since she never left the farm, she was spared the accident of a meeting, and she had excluded him for so long from her consciousness that his memory had appeared to acquiesce in the banishment. For the first two or three years after her return, she had lived in dread of seeing him again in the flesh, or of having his image awake to life in her mind. She had been afraid to go to sleep, because in her dreams she was still defenseless against him; and after her love for him had died, her fear had remained embedded in hatred. But that had passed also, and she had ceased to remember him, except when Nathan or one of the labourers on the farm mentioned his name.

"Doctor Stout is taking all Jason's practice," Nathan said one day. "That comes, I reckon, of trying to please everybody."

"I thought drink was his ruin," Dorinda rejoined indifferently.

"Of course drink helped it along, though it began farther back with his being so pleasant that you couldn't believe what he said. At first folks liked it, but after a while they began to see through it. By the way, his wife has been acting kind of queer. They say she's got a screw loose somewhere in her brain."

"I know," was all that Dorinda answered, but she thought, "And I once wished I could be in her place!"

She remembered the way Geneva had slipped up behind her one afternoon in an old field where broomsedge was burning, and had talked in a rambling, excited manner about her marriage and how blissfully happy they both were. "Not that we shouldn't like a child," she had continued, with a grimace which had begun as a smile, "but we can't expect to have everything, and we are blissfully happy. Blissfully happy!" she had screamed out suddenly in her high, cracked voice. At the time Dorinda had been puzzled, but now she understood and was sorry. The staring face, with its greenish skin and too prominent eyes, framed in the beautiful flaxen hair, softened her heart. "At least Geneva was not to blame, yet she is the one who is punished most," she thought; and this seemed to her another proof of the remorseless injustice of destiny. "I suppose the Lord knew what was best for me," she said to herself in the pious idiom her mother had used; but, as the phrase soared in her mind, it was as empty as a balloon. When she remembered her girlhood now, she would think contemptuously, "How could I ever have had so little sense?" Were all girls as foolish, she wondered, or was she exceptional in her romantic ignorance of life?

Without warning, after not thinking of Jason for years, she dreamed of him one night. She dreamed of him, not as she knew that he was to-day, but as she had once believed him to be. For a moment, through the irresistible force of illusion, she was caught again, she was imprisoned in the agony of that old passion. In her dream she saw herself fleeing from some invisible pursuer through illimitable deserts of broomsedge. Though she dared not look back, she could hear the rush of footsteps behind her; she could almost feel the breath of the hunter on her neck. For minutes that were an eternity the flight endured. Then as she dropped to her knees, with her strength exhausted, she was caught up in the arms of the pursuer, and looking up, felt Jason's lips pressed to hers.

There was thunder in her ears when she awoke. Springing out of bed, she ran in her nightgown to the window and threw the shutters wide open. Outside, beneath a dappled sky, she saw the frosted November fields and the dark trees flung off sharply, like flying buttresses, between the hill and the horizon. The wind cut through her gown; far away in the moonlight an owl hooted. Gradually, while she stood shivering in the frosty air, the terror of her dream faded and ice froze again over her heart.

Through ten years of hard work and self-denial the firm, clear surface of her beauty remained unroughened. Then one October morning, Fluvanna, looking at her in the sunlight, exclaimed, "Miss Dorindy, you're too young to have crow's feet!"

Crow's feet! She turned with a start from the brood of white turkeys she was counting. Yes, she was too young, she was only thirty-three, but she was already beginning to break. Youth was going! Youth was going, the words echoed and reechoed through the emptiness of the future. Week by week, month by month, year by year, youth was slipping away; and she had never known the completeness, the fulfilment, that she had expected of life. Even now, she could not tell herself, she did not know, what it was that she had missed. It was not love, nor was it motherhood. No, the need went deeper than nature. It lay so deep, so far down in her hidden life, that the roots of it were lost in the rich darkness. Though she felt these things vaguely, without thinking that she felt them, it seemed to her, standing there with her gaze on the brood of white turkeys, that all she had ever hoped for or believed in was eluding her grasp. In a little while, with happiness still undiscovered, she would be as wrinkled and grey as her mother. Only her mother's restless habit of work would remain to fill the vacancy of her days.

"I've been working too hard, Fluvanna," she said, "and what do I get out of it?"

"You oughtn't to let yo'self go, Miss Dorindy. There ain't any use in the world for you to slave and stint the way you do. You ought to go about mo' and begin to take notice."

Dorinda laughed. "You talk as if I were a widower."

"Naw'm, I ain't. No widower ever lived the way you do."

"It's true. I haven't bought a good dress or been anywhere for ten years."

"Thar ain't a particle of use in it. You'll be old and dried up soon enough. What's the use of being young and proud if you don't strut?"

Yes, Fluvanna was right. What was the use? She had made a success of her undertaking; but it was inadequate because there were no spectators of her triumph. She had kept so close to the farm that her neighbours knew her only as a dim figure against the horizon, a moving shape among corn shocks and hay ricks in the flat landscape, an image that vanished with these inanimate objects in the lengthening perspective. Even in the thin and isolated community in which she lived, she did not stand out, clearly projected, like James Ellgood; perhaps, for the simple reason, she told herself now, that she had drilled her energy down into the soil instead of training it upward.

"I believe you're right, Fluvanna," she said. "Now that we're out of debt and things are going fairly well, I ought to try to get something out of life while I'm still young."

After the turkeys were counted, she left Fluvanna to turn them out into the woods, and going into her bedroom, looked at herself in the mirror which had once belonged to her mother. While she stared into the glass it seemed to her that another face was watching her beyond her reflection, a face that was drawn and pallid, with a corded neck and the famished eyes of a disappointed dreamer. Well, she would never become like that if she could prevent it. She would never let disappointment eat away the heart in her bosom.

She was still handsome. The grave oval of her face, the fine austerity of its modelling, would remain noble even after she became an old woman and the warm colour of the flesh was mottled and stained with yellow. It was true that lines were forming about her eyes; but the eyes themselves were as deeply blue as the autumn sky, and though her skin had coarsened in the last ten years, the dark red of her cheeks and lips was as vivid as ever. Her black hair was still abundant, though it had lost its gloss in the sunshine. In spite of hard work, or because of it, her tall, straight figure had kept the slender hips and the pointed breasts of a goddess. She did not look young for her age; the sunny bloom, like the down on a peach, had hardened to the glaze of maturity; but she had not lost the April charm of her expression. "For all I've ever had, I might as well have been born plain," she thought.

XV

That afternoon she harnessed Molly, the new mare, to the buggy, and accompanied by Ranger, son of Rambler, drove over to Honeycomb Farm.

"I want a dress to wear to church," she said to Miss Seena, "something good that will last."

"Then you're going to church again? I must say it is time." Rawboned, wintry, rheumatic, the dressmaker was still an authority.

"The roads were so bad." To her surprise, Dorinda found herself becoming apologetic. "I couldn't take the teams out on Sundays, but I've bought a chestnut mare for my own use, and I'll begin going again."

"Well, I'm glad you ain't a confirmed backslider. What sort of material had you thought of?"

Dorinda reflected. "Something handsome. Silk—no, satin. That shines more."

"Why don't you order it out of a catalogue? My fingers have got so stiff I've had to give up sewin' the last few months. They put everything in catalogues now." Miss Seena selected one from the pile on the table and opened it as she spoke. "You'll want blue, I reckon. You were always partial to blue."

Dorinda frowned. "No, not blue. Any colour but blue."

"I thought you favoured it. Do you recollect the dress I bought to match yo' eyes one spring when you were a girl? My, but you did look well in it!"

"Isn't there any other colour worn?"

"Well, there's brown. The fashion books speak highly of brown this year. Black's real stylish too. With yo' bright complexion black ought to go mighty well. You'd better order this model. It is the newest style." She pointed to a picture which seemed to Dorinda to be the extreme of fashion. "Them box pleats and pointed basques is the latest thing. I reckon you'll have to get a new corset," she concluded sharply, looking the girl up and down. "These styles don't set well unless they're worn over a straight font."

"Then I'll get one." Dorinda was prepared for any discomfort. "And I need a coat—and a hat, a big one with a feather."

"You want a willow plume. They're all the rage this season, and a long coat of seal plush. There're some handsome ones in the front of that catalogue. Seal plush is goin' to be mo' worn than fur, all the fashion books say."

After the choice was made and the letter written by the cramped fingers of the dressmaker, Dorinda drove home consoled by the discovery that crow's feet make, after all, less difference than clothes in one's happiness, Strange how a little thing like a new dress could lift up one's spirits! Her changed mood persisted until she approached the fork of the road and saw a woman's figure against the dying flare of the sun. As she reached the spot, the woman came down into the middle of the road, and she recognized Geneva Greylock.

"I want to talk to you, Dorinda," Geneva began, with a trill of laughter. "Won't you stop and listen?"

She was wearing a thin summer dress, though the air was sharp, and round her waist she had tied a faded blue sash with streamers which blew out in the wind. Her face, in its masklike immobility, resembled the face of a dead woman. Only her gleaming flaxen hair was alive.

"I'm afraid it's too late," Dorinda replied as pleasantly as she could. "Supper will be waiting, and besides you ought not to be out in that dress. You will catch your death of cold."

Geneva shook her head, while that expressionless laughter trickled in a stream from her lips. "I'm not cold," she answered. "I'm so happy that I must talk to somebody. It is our wedding anniversary, and I'm obliged to tell somebody how blissfully happy we are. Jason went to sleep right after dinner, and he hasn't waked up yet, so I had to come out and find somebody to talk to. I've got a secret that nobody knows, not even Jason."

So it was the same thing over again! Her eyes looked as if they would leap out of her head, they were so staring and famished. "I'll tell you what I'll do," Dorinda responded, her voice softened by pity. "If you'll get into the buggy, I'll drive you down to Gooseneck Creek. That will be halfway home." This was what marriage to Jason had brought, and yet there had been a time when she would have given her life to have been married to him for a single year.

"Oh, will you?" Geneva sprang up on the step and into the buggy. She was so thin that her bones seemed to rattle as she moved, and there were hollows in her chest and between her shoulder blades. "Then I can tell you my secret."

"I wouldn't if I were you. I've got to keep an eye on the road, so I can't talk."

For a few minutes Geneva rambled on in her strained voice as if she had not heard her. Then pausing, she asked abruptly, "Why did you never like me, Dorinda? I always wanted to be friends with you."

"I like you. I do like you."

Geneva shook her head. "You never liked me because you loved Jason. Jason jilted you." She broke into her cracked laugh again. "You don't know, but there are worse things than being jilted."

Anger flamed up in Dorinda's heart, but it died down before she allowed herself to reply. "I suppose there are," she said at last. "That was long ago, anyhow. So long that it doesn't matter what happened." Poor demented creature, she thought, how many months would it be before they put her away?

Suddenly Geneva leaned toward her and began to whisper so rapidly that Dorinda could scarcely follow her words. "If I tell you my secret, will you promise never to repeat it? When you hear it, you will know there are worse things than being jilted. I had a baby, and Jason killed it. He killed it as soon as it was born and buried it in the garden. He doesn't know that I saw him. He thinks that I was asleep, but I found the grave under the lilac bushes at the end of the garden path. Now, we are going to have another baby, and I'm afraid he will kill this one too. That's why I pretend to be so blissfully happy. Blissfully happy," she cried out in a high voice as she jumped over the wheel before the buggy came to a stop. Yes, they would probably have to send her away very soon. "I wish I had been kinder to her when I had the chance," Dorinda thought, as she turned the mare toward home.

The next Sunday afternoon she asked Nathan for news of Geneva. It was easy for her to speak of the Greylocks now since that dreadful encounter had obliterated even the memory of jealousy.

"Every six months or so she's taken like that," Nathan answered. "Then she goes clean out of her head; but they say it isn't as bad as the moping in between the attacks."

"Is there nothing that can be done?"

"Oh, they'll have to put her away, sooner or later. Her father has tried his best to get her to leave Jason, but she won't hear of it when she's in her right mind. Once he took her home while she was deranged and kept her in a room with barred windows. It didn't last, however, and as soon as she came to her senses, she insisted on going back to Jason. They lead a cat-and-dog life together, and when she is out of her head she runs about telling everybody that she had a child and he murdered it."

"Poor thing," said Dorinda. "She told me too."

"That's when she's crazy. As soon as she gets her senses again, you can't make her leave him."

For a few minutes Dorinda was silent. When she spoke it was to remark irrelevantly, "How little human beings know what is best for them."

"I didn't understand what you said, Dorinda."

"No matter. I was only thinking aloud."

It was a mellow October afternoon, and around them the fields were resting after a fair harvest. As far as she could see, east, north, west, the land belonged to her. Only toward the south there were the pale green willows of Gooseneck Creek, and beyond the feathery edge she saw the red chimneys of Five Oaks. But for those chimneys she would have felt that the whole horizon was hers!

"They say Five Oaks will come under the hammer before long." Nathan's gaze also was on the red smears in the sky. "It's mortgaged now for as much as it'll ever bring, and there's trouble about the taxes."

A wild idea shot into her mind. "I suppose it will bring a good deal?"

"If it is put up at a forced sale, it will probably go for a song. Nobody is buying land now. Amos Wigfall bought the old Haney place five years ago for a dollar an acre. Some day, if he looks out, it will be worth a hundred."

She looked at him with calculating eyes. "If I could buy Five Oaks, my farm would be as big as Green Acres."

His neighing laugh broke out. "Good Lord, Dorinda, what would you do with it?"

"I don't know what I'd do with it, but I want it. I'd give ten years of my life for the chance of owning Five Oaks before I die."

His laugh dropped to a chuckle. "Now, that's downright queer because I've been studying about bidding on it myself. It looks to me as if that would be the only way to save my money."

"Well, I'd rather you'd own it than anybody else," she said grudgingly. "But I'm going to the sale when it comes, and if I'm able to sell my prize bull, I'm going to bid against you. I've got almost five thousand dollars in bank."

"You'd better leave it there for the present. I wouldn't bid a cent on the place if it wasn't for the fact that I own most of it already. It's going to be hard to make anybody buy it. Just you wait and see."

"What will become of Jason?" she inquired abruptly.

Nathan looked dubious. "He'll go to work for James Ellgood, I reckon, or more likely drink himself out of the way. But he's been doing better of late, I hear. He was at church last Sunday in the Ellgood pew, looking all spruced up, as if he hadn't smelt whiskey for a month."

Her next words came quickly, as if she were afraid of drawing them back before they escaped. "Why didn't he ever go away after his father died?"

"He'd lost the wish, I reckon. Things happen like that sometimes. The old man hung on to him until all the sap was drained dry."

"His father died years ago."

"It must be going on nine years or so." He stopped to calculate as he did when he was adding up an account in the store. "Well, I reckon he'd used up all his energy in wishing to get away. When the chance came, he didn't have enough spirit left to take advantage' of it." He sighed. "I've seen that happen I can't tell you how many times."

She looked away from him, and for a few minutes there was silence. Then he made a sound between a gasp and a chuckle, and turning to glance at him, she met an expression which she had never before seen in his face. Her nerves shivered into repulsion, while she drew farther away. Why were men so unaccountable? she asked herself in annoyance.

"I was just thinking," he stammered.

She regarded him with severity. After all, no one took Nathan seriously.

"I was just thinking," he began again, "that if you could make up your mind to marry me, we might throw the two farms into one."

"To marry you?" She stared at him incredulously. "Are you out of your head?"

He broke into an embarrassed laugh. "I reckon it sounds like that at first," he admitted, "but I hoped you might get used to the idea if you thought it over. It ain't as if I were a poor man. I'm about as well-to-do as anybody round Pedlar's Mill, if you leave out James Ellgood, and he's got a wife already, besides being too old. I ain't so young as you, I know; but I'm a long ways younger than James Ellgood. There ain't more than ten years' difference between us, and I think all the world of you. You might have things your own way just as you're doing now. I wouldn't want to interfere with you."

She was still gazing at him as if he were distraught. "I can't imagine," she replied sternly, "how you ever came to think of such a thing.". It was absurd; it was incredible; and yet she supposed that even stranger things had happened! She had seen enough of the world to know that you took your husband, as Fluvanna observed, where you found him, and she was troubled by few illusions about marriage.

His face turned the colour of beet juice while he looked at her with humble, imploring eyes, like the eyes of young Ranger when they were training him. "I was just thinking how useful I could be on the farm," he said apologetically. "You seemed so set on owning Five Oaks, and then you like to have the children about."

The incredulity faded from her face. "I do like to have the children about."

"Well, you know I'd never put myself in your way. You could have both the farms to manage just as you like. I'd buy Five Oaks whenever it was sold."

"Yes, the two farms could be thrown together—or farmed separately." Her mind was still working over Five Oaks, not over the question of marriage.

"Then couldn't you get used to the idea, Dorinda?"

His tone rather than his words awoke her with a start, to his meaning. "The idea! You mean marriage? No, I couldn't do it. There's no use thinking about it."

His face scarcely changed, so little had he dared hope for her consent. "Well, I won't press you," he said after a minute, "but if the time ever comes——"

She shook her head emphatically. "The time will never come. Don't let that thought get into your head."

While she spoke her dispassionate gaze examined him, and she asked herself, with a tinge of amusement, why the idea of marrying him did not startle her more. He was ridiculous; he was uncouth; he was the last man on earth, she told herself firmly, who could ever have inspired her with the shadow of sentiment. Only after she had speculated upon these decisive objections did she begin to realize that absence of emotion was the only appeal any marriage could make to her. Her nerves or her senses would have revolted from the first hint of passion. The only marriage she could tolerate, she reflected grimly, was one which attempted no swift excursions into emotion, no flights beyond the logical barriers of the three dimensions.

"Of course, I'm not your equal," Nathan said abruptly. "You're a scholar like your great-grandfather, and you've read all his books. You know a lot of things I never heard of."

Dorinda laughed. "Much good books ever did me!" Much good indeed, she reflected. "There's no use thinking about it; I could never do it," she repeated in a tone of harsh finality, as she turned to walk homeward.

XVI

Two weeks later, one Saturday afternoon, Miss Seena brought over the new clothes; and Dorinda sat up until midnight, taking up the belt and letting down the hem of the black satin dress. When s put it on the next morning and listened to Fluvanna's admiring, ejaculations, she remembered the day she had first worn the blue nun's veiling and the drive to church sitting beside Almira Pryde in the old carryall.

"You look like a queen, Miss Dorinda," Fluvanna exclaimed. "Thar ain't nothin'——"

"Anything, Fluvanna."

"There ain't anything that gives you such an air as one of them willow plumes."

"Those, Fluvanna. Yes, it does look nice," Dorinda assented, after the correction. "I'm glad I got it black. It makes me look older, but there isn't anything so distinguished."

A few hours afterwards, while she walked slowly up the aisle in church, she felt rather than saw that the congregation, forgetting to stand up to sing, sat motionless and stared at her from the pews. For the first time in her life she tasted the intoxicating flavour of power. On the farm, success was translated into well-tilled acres or golden pounds of butter; but here, with these astonished eyes on her, she discovered that it contained a quality more satisfying than any material fact. What it measured was the difference between the past which Jason had ruined and the present which she had triumphantly built on the ruins he had left. In spite of everything that had happened, in spite of his betrayal of her faith and the black despair that had wiped love out of her heart, she, not he, was to-day the victor over life!

As she marched up the aisle, in her handsome, commonplace clothes, she might have been a contented rustic beauty whose first youth was slowly slipping away. A warm flush dyed her cheeks; her eyes were like blue stars beneath the projecting shadow of her eyebrows; she carried the willow plume high above the dusky cloud of her hair; and the luxurious swish-swish of her satin skirt was as loud as the sound of wind in the grass. Not until she reached the pew where she used to sit between her father and mother, did she drop her eyes to the level of the congregation and discover that Jason was sitting with the Ellgoods under the high west window. She had not seen him face to face since the afternoon of her father's funeral, more than ten years ago, and he looked ages older, she thought, than she had remembered him. His skin had lost the clear red-brown of health and acquired a leathery texture. Though his hair was still red, there was a rusty edge where the light fell on it. His moustache, which was too long, drooped in bedraggled ends over his chin, as if he had fallen into the habit of chewing tobacco—he who had always been so fastidious! He was dressed neatly enough in his Sunday clothes; but sitting there in the broad band of sunlight, he reminded Dorinda of a tree when the sap has dried, with the brittle ashen brown leaves still clinging to the boughs. Even his hands, which shook a little as they held the hymn book open in front of his wife, were the hands of a man whose grasp had slackened. He was not yet forty, but life had already used him up and flung him aside.

Suddenly, he raised his eyes from the book and their glances met and crossed before they fell away again to the printed lines. In that instant, something passed between them which could never be uttered because it was profounder than speech. Resolute, imperious, her gaze swept him! While her eyes, as hard and cold as a frozen lake, gave back his reflection, she felt, with a shiver of terror, that the past had never died, that it existed eternally as a wave in the sea of her consciousness. Memory was there, flowing on, strong, silent, resistless, with no fresher tides of emotion to sweep over and engulf it in the flood of experience. In her whole life there had been only that one man. He had held her in his arms. He would remain always an inseparable part of her being. . . . Resentment struggled within her. All the strength of her spirit rebelled against the tyranny of the past, against the burden of a physical fact, which she dragged after her like a dead fish in a net. She saw him harshly as he was, and she despised herself because she had ever imagined him tenderly as he was not. As she opened her mouth to sing, it seemed to her that she was choked with the effluvium of the old despair. She shut her eyes while her voice rose with the hymn. Rain on the shingled roof; rain on the bare red earth; rain on the humped box-bush; rain on the bedraggled feathers of white turkeys. The face of the old man emerging from the blue light in the room, mottled, flabby, repellent. Memories like that. He meant nothing more to her now. Only the beauty that had turned into ugliness. Only the happiness of which she had been cheated. . . .

She was the last one to come out of church, and by the time she had spoken to the minister and a few of the older members who stopped to welcome her, the Ellgoods had driven away. She was glad that she did not see Jason again; for the sight of him, though it no longer stirred her heart, left that disagreeable pricking sensation in the nervous fibre of her body.

Nathan and the children were waiting for her at the gate of the churchyard, and she drove home with John Abner, while the others followed in Nathan's new surrey with the fringed top.

"You look good enough to eat, Dorinda," the boy said admiringly. "You ought to keep dressed up all the time."

She smiled down on him. "Much work I'd do on the farm! Ten years ago they almost turned me out of church because I milked in overalls; but they forgot that this morning when I went back wearing a willow plume."

There was no one in the world who adored her as uncritically as did this boy with the clubfoot. He was a good boy, she knew, with a streak of morbid melancholy which was curiously attractive to her adventurous temperament. His face, with its bulging forehead and deep dark eyes, hiding stars of light in them like gleams at the bottom of a well, was an unusual one for a country boy, and made her wonder at times if there could be more in him than any one suspected. In his childhood his clubfoot had been a torment to him, and for this reason he had kept away from the rough sports of other children.

"You'd rather farm than do anything else, wouldn't you, John Abner?" she asked abruptly.

"Except read. I'm glad winter is coming, so I can stay in the house and read."

"You wouldn't like to go to boarding school in the city?"

He shook his head, flinching as if from the cut of a whip. "Not with the other boys. I'd rather stay in the country with Father and you and the animals." His sympathetic understanding of animals was one of the strongest bonds between them. From his birth he had known what it was to suffer and endure.

"I hoped that the new kind of shoe would make it easier for you," she said presently. "Is it comfortable?"

"If it weren't so heavy. They are all heavy."

She sighed, for her heart was drooping with pity. John Abner had penetrated the armour of her arrogance in its one weak spot, which was her diffused maternal instinct. The longing to protect the helpless was still alive in her.

At home they found Fluvanna in a clean apron, with a blazing; fire and a lavish Sunday dinner awaiting them. Roast duck with apple sauce, candied sweet potatoes, tomatoes stewed with brown sugar, and plum pudding, which was Nathan's favourite sweet. True, it was the one abundant meal of the week; but while she sat at the head of her table listening to the chatter of happy children, Dorinda remembered the frugal Sunday dinners of her mother and father, and her eyes smarted with tears. That, she had learned, was the hidden sting of success; it rubbed old sores with the salt of regret until they were raw again.

In the hall, after dinner, while Dorinda was fastening a worn blue cape over her satin dress, Nathan stood gazing thoughtfully up the staircase.

"Have you ever thought of putting a stove in the back hall, Dorinda?" he asked. "It would make a lot of difference in the comfort of the house, and it would help heat the bedrooms upstairs."

She turned and gazed at him, surprised at this fresh proof of his ingenuity. Yes, it was a good idea; she wondered why she had never thought of it herself. Indeed, since he had mentioned it, it seemed to her that it was what she had always intended to do.

"If only we could have had it in Ma's lifetime," she said. "It would have been such a help to her neuralgia."

"Yes, that's the trouble about getting comforts. We always remember that other people went without them. I've got the carpets now that Rose Emily wanted." After all, no one but Nathan had ever really understood her. With the thought she asked herself incredulously if understanding had anything whatever to do with love? Did people who loved ever understand? Wasn't the misunderstanding even a part of love's divine madness?

"Yes, I ought to have done it long ago," she murmured inattentively.

"I'll order one, if you want me to. There's a catalogue at the store, and I can get it at a discount. There are all sorts of contrivances for saving fuel, too, so it won't cost as much as you'd imagine. These newfangled stoves give twice as much heat as an open fire, and don't burn one fourth as much fuel. It's a close sort of heat. You wouldn't like it in your chamber, but it would be the very thing for this hall."

While they went out of doors together, she meditated upon the fact of his usefulness. He was always thinking of ways and means to be comfortable or economical before they occurred to her or to anyone else, and he had what he called a knack for mending anything that was broken. He was kind; he was honest in every fibre; he was neat in his appearance for a farmer; and he was, she reflected cynically, almost emasculate in his unselfishness. To be sure, he had habits which she disliked; but, as she told herself with dispassionate realism, one couldn't have everything. It never occurred to her that these habits might be broken by marriage, for she was wise enough to perceive that a man's habits are more firmly rooted than his emotions. What she felt was that in exchange for his helpfulness she might learn to tolerate the things to which she objected. What good ever came, she demanded impatiently, of trying to make any one over? Hadn't her mother tried for forty years to make her father stop chewing tobacco, and yet it was the last thing that he relinquished. No, she had few illusions remaining. Though she still told herself inflexibly that she could never make up her mind to marry Nathan, she felt, in spite of her will, that the insidious force of logic was gradually undermining her scruples. She had suffered too much from love in the past ever to walk again with open eyes into the furnace. Sex emotion, she repeated grimly, was as dead as a burned-out cinder in her heart. But respect she could still feel, and a marriage founded upon respect and expediency might offer an available refuge from loneliness. As she grew older, the thing she feared most was not death, not poverty even, but the lonely fireside.

She walked on, disheartened by indecision, and Nathan was obliged to repeat his question twice before she heard what he was saying.

"Have you thought over what I asked you, Dorinda?" She shook her head. "There's no use thinking."

His only answer was a comical sigh, and after a long pause she repeated more sharply, "There's no use thinking about that."

Some hidden edge to her tone made him glance at her quickly. This was another moment when the keenness of Nathan's perceptions surprised her.

"You'd be just as free as you are now," he said discreetly but hopefully.

"I couldn't stand any love-making." Though the light bloomed on her lips and cheeks, her eyes darkened with memory.

He sighed again less hopefully. What a pity it was, she thought, that everything about him grew in the wrong way; his hair like moth-eaten fur, his flat clownish features; his long moustache which always reminded her of bleached grass. Well, even so, you couldn't have everything. If the outward man had been more attractive, the inward one, she acknowledged, would have been less humble; and when all was said and done, few virtues are more comfortable to live with than humility.

"It doesn't do any good to keep thinking of that," she reiterated firmly, but the firmness had oozed from her mind into her manner. The fact that she needed Nathan on the farm was driven home to her every day of her life. Without him, she would never become anything more than a farmer who was extraordinary chiefly in being a woman as well; and this provoking disadvantage was a continual annoyance. Her life, in spite of the companionship of Fluvanna, was an empty one, and as the shadow of middle age grew longer, she would become more and more solitary.

They had reached the high ground by the graveyard, and over Gooseneck Creek she saw the red chimneys of Five Oaks. At the sight a suffering thought awoke and throbbed in her brain.

"I'll never interfere with you, Dorinda," Nathan said in a husky tone.

She turned suddenly and looked into his eyes. "It doesn't do any good to keep thinking about it," she insisted in an expressionless voice as if she were reciting a phrase she had learned by heart.

XVII

The exact moment of her yielding was so vague that she could never remember it; but three weeks later they drove over to the Presbyterian church at Pedlar's Mill and were married. Until the evening before she had told no one but Fluvanna; and only the pastor's wife, a farmer or two, and Nathan's children, witnessed the marriage. As they stood together before the old minister, a shadowy fear fluttered into Dorinda's mind, and she longed to turn and run back to the safe loneliness of Old Farm. "Can it be possible," she asked herself, "that I am doing this thing?" She seemed to be standing apart as a spectator while she watched some other woman married to Nathan.

When it was over the few farmers came up to shake hands with her; but their manner was repressed and unnatural, and even the children had become bashful and constrained.

"Wall, you was wise to git it over," John Appleseed said. "I don't favour marryin' fur a woman as long as she's got a better means of provision; but it's fortunate we don't all harbour the same opinions."

He had attended with his idiot son, who was now a man of twenty-five, but still retained his fondness for a crowd or a noise. While she looked into his vacant face, Dorinda recalled Jason's ineffectual endeavours to enlighten the natives, and the lecture on farming that he had delivered to Nathan Pedlar and Billy. Appleseed, the idiot. Poor Jason! After all, he had had his tragedy.

"Nobody wants to hear croaking at a wedding, John," William Fairlamb remarked genially.

"Oh, I don't mind him." Dorinda laughed, but the laugh went no deeper than her throat. Terror had seized her, the ancient panic quiver of the hunted, and her face wore a strained and absent look as if she were listening to some far-off music in the broomsedge. "How did I ever come to do such a thing?" a voice like a song was asking over and over.

On the drive home she could think of nothing to say. Her mind, which was usually crowded with ideas, had become as blank as a wall, and she sat gazing in silence over the head of the brisk young mare Nathan was driving. So small a thing as the fact that Nathan was holding the reins made her feel stiff and uncomfortable.

As they passed the old mill, Geneva Greylock came running out of the ruins and waved a blue scarf in the air. They could not see her face clearly; but there was a distraught intensity in the lines of her thin figure and in the violent gestures of her arms beneath the flying curves of blue silk, which wound about her like a ribbon of autumn sky.

"She's getting worse every day," Nathan said, glancing toward her as they spun past. "It won't be long now before they have to send her to the asylum. Last Sunday, when the minister was taking dinner with James Ellgood, Geneva went round the table and poured molasses into every soup plate. When they asked her why she had done it, she said she was trying to make life sweeter."

"Poor thing," Dorinda sighed. "She was always ailing."

It was a brown afternoon in November, with a smoky sky and a strong, clean wind which rushed in a droning measure through the broomsedge. All the leaves had fallen and been swept in wind drifts under the rail fences. The only animate shapes in the landscape were the buzzards flocking toward a dead sheep in the pasture.

"Did you tell the children to come straight over?" Nathan inquired presently.

"Yes, I've got their rooms ready. I had paper put on the walls instead of whitewash, and they look very nice. The new stove heats them, comfortably."

"You mustn't let my children bother you, Dorinda."

"Oh, no. I'm glad to have them. They will be company for me. We can begin reading again at night."

The mare trotted briskly, and the edge of the wind felt like ice on Dorinda's face. "It's turning much colder," she said after a long pause.

"Yes, there'll be a hard frost to-night if it clears."

She turned away from him, lifting her gaze to the sky where broken clouds were driven rapidly toward the south. A sword of light was thrust suddenly through the greyness, and she said slowly, as if the words were of profound significance, "The wind seems to be changing." Always responsive to her surroundings, she told herself that the landscape looked as if it were running away from the wind. "Does it really look this way or is it only in my mind," she thought, as they went on past the fork. Of course, if she had to go over it again, she could never bring herself to be married; but since she had walked into the marriage with open eyes, all she could do now was to endeavour to make the best of her mistake. Nathan was a good man and—well, you couldn't have everything! Youth, with its troubled rapture and its unsatisfied craving, was well over. Green evening skies. The scent of wild grape. The flutter of the heart like a caged bird. Feet flying toward happiness. . . . Yes, he was a good man, and you couldn't have everything.

When she reached the farm she left Nathan to build up the fire in the hall stove, and ran upstairs to put the finishing touches to the bedrooms she had prepared for the children. Everything was in order. There was nothing that she could find to do; yet she lingered to straighten a picture or change the position of a chair until she heard wheels approaching. Then, after she ran downstairs and exchanged embarrassed greetings, she visited the henhouse and the barn before she went into the kitchen to help Fluvanna with supper. All the work of the farm, so heavy and engrossing on other days that it made her a slave to routine, was suspended like a clock after the hour has struck.

"Do you want me to make the hard sauce for the plum pudding, Fluvanna?"

"Naw, Miss Dorindy, there ain't nothin' on earth for you to bother yo' head with to-day. Miss Minnie May has made it, and she's helping me as much as I want. You sit right down in the parlour and wait till supper is ready. I don't see," she concluded in a faultfinding tone, "why anybody wanted to have a poky wedding like this. There ain't even a fiddle to make things lively."

Dorinda went out, but not into the parlour. As she passed through the hall she caught a glimpse of Nathan, in his new suit of grey tweed, sitting bolt upright in the best chair, while he slowly turned the leaves of the family Bible. No, she had always disliked the parlour, in spite of her great-grandfather's library which almost covered the walls. Would it be possible, she wondered, to turn the room into a more comfortable and cheerful place? Yet she shrank from making any definite change. Though she hated the furniture and the air of chill repose in which it had weathered the years, she could not banish the feeling that it was dedicated to the ancestral spirits of her family.

As she opened the back door, which admitted a gust of wind and a shower of brown leaves, she heard Nimrod laughing with Fluvanna in the kitchen. "Ef'n you ax me, it mought ez well be anybody's wedding ez hem. I lay she ain' never so much as smelt dat ar wedding cake." Immediately, Fluvanna's more educated accents responded, "I declare I couldn't help feelin' all the time that I was baking a cake for a corpse."

"How in the world did I ever do it?" Dorinda asked herself for the hundredth time; and she pictured the years ahead as an interminable desert of time in which Nathan would sit like a visitor in the parlour and perpetually turn the leaves of the family Bible. Nothing but the first day that she had had young Ranger as an untrained puppy on her hands had ever seemed to her so endless. "I don't see how I'm going to stand it for the rest of my life," she thought. A different wedding day from the one of which she had dreamed long ago! But then, as she had learned through hard experience, imagination is a creative principle and depends little upon the raw material of life. Nothing, she supposed, ever happened exactly as you hoped that it would.

Supper was a dreary affair. The children were restless and awkward, and even the wedding cake, which Fluvanna had baked in secret, and over which she had lamented with Nimrod, was lumpy and heavy. Nathan endeavoured to enliven the meal by a few foolish jokes badly told, and when even Dorinda, who felt sorry for him, forgot to laugh, he stared at her with humble, sheepish eyes while he relapsed into silence. It was a relief when Bud, of Gargantuan appetite, refused a fifth slice of the indigestible cake, and the last piece was wrapped in a napkin and put away for Billy Appleseed.

"Are you going to have suppers like this every night?" Bud, the facetious, inquired, giving his stomach a comical pat.

For the first time a laugh unforced and unafraid broke from Dorinda and Nathan. After all, she concluded more hopefully, it was possible that the children might make the house brighter. "I like it over here better than I do at home," John Abner said. "It's farther away."

"Farther away from what?" asked Nathan, who was trying to appear easy and flippant.

"Oh, I don't know. Farther away from school, I reckon."

"I wouldn't want to go back to the city if we could have plum pudding every night till Christmas," Bud persisted.

Dorinda shook her head. "Oh, you greedy boy!" she exclaimed, smiling. "When you are a little older you'll learn that you can't have everything."

When supper was over she put on her overalls and lighted her lantern, for the short November day was already closing in. She knew that the milkers were probably slighting their work, and it made her restless to think that the cows might not have been handled properly. The negroes were cheerful and willing workers, but ten years of patient discipline on her part had failed to overcome their natural preference for the easiest way.

"You ain't going out again, are you, Dorinda?" Nathan asked anxiously, while he watched her preparations.

"Yes, we had supper early so Fluvanna and Mary Joe could help with the milking, but I'd better go out and see what they are doing. There's a lot to do in the dairy and the darkeys are still a little afraid of the new machinery."

Nathan laughed good-humouredly. "I might as well help you. Dairy work is the sort that won't keep."

"No, it won't wait. The butter has to be packed for the early train."

"That means you'll be up before daybreak?"

She nodded impatiently. "Well, you're used to that. Don't you breakfast by candlelight in winter?"

"Yes, I'm used to it. I'll come out now and help."

"I don't want you. There's plenty of work for you in the fields, but I don't want you meddling in my dairy."

For the first time she understood what work had meant in her mother's life; the flight of the mind from thought into action. To have Nathan hanging round her in the dairy was the last thing, she said to herself, that she had anticipated in marriage.

"Of course, I didn't mean to interfere with you." He fell back into the house, and with a sigh of relief she fled out to the new cow-barn, where the last milkers still lingered and chatted over the wedding. As she passed into the heavy atmosphere and inhaled the pasture-scented breath of the cows, she felt that a soothing vapour had blown over her nerves.

"I declar, Miss Dorindy, you mought jes' ez well not be mah'ed at all," Nimrod remarked dolefully.

"Well, I won't let it interfere with my work. No man is going to do that."

Mary Joe bridled and giggled; for, being an engaging mulatto girl, she knew all that could be told of the interference of men. "Naw'm, dat dey ain't, nor breck yo' heart needer. Hit's a pity we ain't all ez strong-minded ez you is."

Dorinda laughed. "Break my heart? I should think not," she replied. And she meant what she said while she was saying it. One man had ruined her life; but no other man should interfere with it. She was encased in wounded pride as in defensive armour.