Time Is Noon

I

IT WAS SUNDAY MORNING. The year was 1920, the place was Middlehope in eastern Pennsylvania, in the United States of America. Joan Richards, lying softly relaxed and asleep in her bed, opened her eyes quietly and fully to see the sunshine of June streaming into her window. The light illuminated every touch of blue in her blue and ivory room and fell upon the delicately faded cornflowers in the wallpaper. A small summery wind stirred the cream-colored ruffled curtains at the windows. The room was alive with wind and sunlight.

A rush of strong joy swept through her. She was home at last, home to stay. All her senior year of college she was conscious of being through with her girlhood, impatient to begin her woman’s life. All during the last months she had been breaking away, bit by bit, from things which in the years before had absorbed her. Now even the final promises cried out across the campus, to write, to visit, never to forget, were tinged with unreality. In the life to come would she want to keep what she had? Who would stay — what friend fit her need now? She wanted everything as it came, to the full, packed, running over. She was confident of the years, reckless with plenty of time in her long life, plenty of vigor in her big body, plenty of everything needful for whatever she wanted to do. There was such plenty in her that for this hour she could push aside even her own plenty and lie in a happy pause. Later, when life came rushing at her, she would choose this and this. Today she would not choose — only enjoy.

She yawned and stretched herself and smiled. When she stretched, her head and feet touched the ends of the bed. She was always too big for her bed. She was always outgrowing everything — everything except home! She was glad her first morning at home was Sunday. She loved Sunday mornings in this old manse where they had lived since she was born, although on Sundays it was not really theirs. It belonged to the Presbyterian Brick Church, which belonged to the people of Middlehope, except those who were Baptists and Methodists. But these were not many. Middlehope was the Presbyterians, and perhaps the Episcopalians, like the Kinneys, who were too few to have a church of their own and so came to the Brick Church. Once a month her father held a special service for them, and read the Evening or Morning Prayer. She liked it. She liked the slight sense of pomp it introduced into the white-painted old church. She liked the robe her father wore. On other Sundays he wore his frock coat, buttoned tightly about his tall and slender body. There were a few people, like Mrs. Winters and Mr. Parson, who stayed away on Episcopal Sundays, but her father always did what he thought was right, anyway.

A clock struck somewhere in the house and echoed mellowly through the long hall to her room. She counted the slow musical notes. Eight. It was time to get up. In the minister’s house on Sunday, breakfast must be over by nine. She sat up in bed, and then in the mirror facing her bed she saw herself, too big, always too big, but still surprisingly pretty.

She wanted desperately to be pretty. She so loved pretty people. In college she had often wondered if she could be called pretty. But perhaps she was really too tall. Perhaps at best she was only good-looking. There were even a few months in her sophomore year when she wore shirtwaists and mannish ties with success. Then she had revolted against them. She secretly loved wearing very feminine things, like the nightgown she had on. Above its pink lacy ruffles her head rose nobly, her long golden-brown braid over her shoulder. She admired her self a moment, her very clear blue-green eyes, her rather large red mouth, her smooth pale skin. Then she was guilty with her vanity. “Pretty is as pretty does,” her mother always said. Curious how her mother’s little moralities had lain so heavily on her when she was a child — could lie so heavily on her now if she let them! She would not let them. Nothing in life should ever make her sad — nothing, nothing! She wanted only pleasant things, pleasant thoughts, safety from suffering.

She lay back and savored deeply and with joy the fresh wind, the pretty color of the room, herself, her freedom. She was young and strong and free. Intensity flowed in and about her. She put herself wholly into this moment, into this instant of sunshine, at this hour on a quiet morning, in this house of peace. She felt an exquisite sharpening of every sense. Here it was quiet. Here it was safe. Here she was little again, a happy little child for an hour, waking as she had waked so many mornings of her life to the security of the walls about her, to food hot and delicious upon the table, to her mother’s face on the right of her at breakfast and her father on the left, and across from her Francis and Rose, her brother and sister. They made a warm circle of intimacy and safety about her. She loved them ardently.

And beyond the garden gate was Middlehope, almost as near as her own family. Faces sprang into her mind — Mrs. Winters, Miss Kinney, old Mr. Parker — they would all be in church today, all eager to see her. She was richly surrounded by them all, waiting to love her because she was young and beautiful. Surely she was beautiful? In the quiet of the house, on this June morning, she lay waiting, waiting, sure of everything, about to begin richly but prolonging the delicious childlike hour.

Then through the intense Sunday stillness she heard a murmur, a dual murmur, a clear full voice sharply subdued, a lower steadier insistence. She could not catch the words, she had never been able to catch the words. This murmur she had heard at times all her life, coming from behind the closed doors of her parents’ bedroom next to hers. As a child she had listened, sensitive to every atmosphere in her world, and hence troubled. Was it possible her father and mother were quarreling? But her mother always came out of the closed door with her usual brisk cheerful step.

“Now then, Joan darling,” she would say pleasantly, “are you ready for breakfast?”

It could not be quarreling. At the table as a little girl she paused over her porridge and looked from one face to the other searchingly. But there was no new thing to see. Her mother’s dark rosy face was cheerful, the eyes snapping and brown, her curly brown hair rising like a ruff from her forehead. Her father’s pale serene face held its habitual high look. She was relieved. These two who were her childhood gods sat undisturbed upon their thrones. She forgot them and was at ease again. They were all happy. Everything was pleasant.

Yet in this moment she paused. The old sense of childish foreboding fell upon her once more. Were they not quarreling? Had it been quarreling all these years? She turned on her side and listened. She heard her mother’s voice rise swiftly almost into articulateness and then stop. What was that muffled throb? Was her mother sobbing? She had a moment’s panic, the panic of a child who sees an adult weep, and is struck to the heart, since if these weep, too, none are safe from trouble.

But soon, even as she listened, there was a knock, quick and firm, and the door opened and her mother came in, very fresh in her lavender print frock. The brown ruff above her forehead was waved with white now, and she was a little stout and compact. She spoke in her clear warm thrushy voice, and her face changed into a lighting smile. A smile made a great change in her mother’s resolute face. “Still a-bed, lazy bones?” Her swift bright eyes darted about the room and she picked up a pair of stockings and laid them straightened across the back of a chair and her rich voice flowed on in tolerance, “Stay in bed if you like, dear. Father won’t mind if you miss church this once.” How silly to imagine this sure and comforting woman sobbing behind a closed door! She leaped out of bed and wrapped her mother about in long eager young arms and bent from her height and kissed her. “I don’t want to miss anything!” she cried.

Her mother’s cheeks flushed darkly. She received the embrace warmly but with shyness.

“You’ve grown so I hardly know you. You take after Paul’s family, growing so—” she said, half-embarrassed. “When I think of you I still think of a little girl about twelve with two pigtails and suddenly there you are, taller by a head than I am!” She looked up into her daughter’s eyes. “I’m almost afraid of you,” she said. Her face sobered and the two looked at each other in an instant’s gravity. There was strangeness between them. The girl could not bear it.

“I’m the same!” she whispered, frightened, looking down, her head drooping. The undertone of a lost child was in her voice, and her mother recognized it and knew her again.

“Of course you are,” she replied quickly. “Now, dear, if you are coming — then don’t be too late.”

So her mother was herself, practical, able, managing. Under the familiar dominion things were right again. She was happy and safe once more. She began to brush out her hair, humming the tune they would perhaps be singing later in the Brick Church, since it was her father’s favorite: “How firm a foundation, ye saints of the Lord.” The sunshine brightened gloriously with the mounting day. Out of what had been the silence of dawn now sounds arose, the clack of the latch at the gate, her father’s quiet measured step down the stairs, Hannah’s quick dump of coal into the kitchen range, her brother’s shout for a clean shirt, the tinkle of the piano. Rose was playing a hymn gently. Everything had begun in the house.

She came into the breakfast room a little late but sure of their love. She was the eldest daughter in the home, the dearly beloved, the young queen. She caught the fond look in her mother’s eyes and smiled regally. Though with her lips her mother might say “Pretty is as pretty does,” her eyes were proud upon her daughter.

“I do like that green dress,” she said. “I’m glad we got it instead of the white one. It won’t show soil so much, either. And you can wear those ruffles real well — though you are so big.”

Thus her lips spoke staidly and with composure. But in her mother’s eyes the girl saw other words. “Joan is lovely — Joan is what I dreamed I might be — she is big and lovely and strong. She will do everything I have not been able to do.” All this was clear in her mother’s eyes before she turned away and began to pour out the coffee. Then she subdued her pride decently. Rose cried out, “Oh, Joan, you are lovely!” But the mother said quietly, “Sit down, dear. Father is waiting to say grace.”

At this Joan looked penitently at her father, waiting to give thanks before he could eat. She wanted to please him, too. She cried out eagerly, “I’m sorry, Father dear!” He did not reply, but waited mildly. By his peaceful remote look she knew he could never see that her dress was green and ruffled and her hair shining in its large soft mass at her neck. He was a man of God. Her mother was warm and quick and human and she knew her children’s bodies intimately and loved them with secret passion, secret because she was afraid of showing herself out, lest something, lest somebody, have a hold whereby to thrust and injure her heart through her children. If anyone praised them she answered tranquilly, “They’re good children and that is enough.” But her very tone showed that it was not really enough. They were a great deal more and she knew it and rejoiced in it.

But the father knew nothing about his children except that they had souls to be saved. He painfully hoped and believed they were saved. He could not forbear, even in his thanks to God for daily food, to slip in a petition that was really for them, since he knew his own soul of course was safe. “Save us, O Lord, we beseech Thee, and if this day be the day of death for any of us, accept our souls and let us live with Thee to all eternity. Amen.”

Death and eternity — these two words took shape and meaning when he spoke of them in his deep grave way. God also lived for the brief moment of his address. This man could call upon God, and out of the sureness of his belief God was summoned and lived. But when his voice ceased and all their eyes were opened again, God and Death and Eternity returned to their shadows and were no more.

Instead there was life, this life in this room, the painted yellow walls, the fluttering white curtains, the worn brown carpet, the books overflowing from the rest of the house, books everybody had read and were done with, but which could not be thrown away because they were books. Upon the shining table were the very means of life, fruit and milk and bread and butter and eggs and bacon and a glass pot of marmalade which caught and held the sun deeply — so deeply that when Rose reached for it Joan said, “Put it back in the sunbeam, Rose. It’s ambrosia in the sun.”

Rose smiled and set it back, ready to please her sister. But she was silent, for she seldom spoke if she were not questioned.

Then the door opened with a burst and Francis came in. He looked at his mother first and she looked at him and the pride she took in her children blazed in her look.

“Come here, son,” she said. “Let me tie your tie again.”

“Can’t ever get a bow right,” he said, smiling wryly. He folded his long legs and dropped before her, kneeling, and leaned his arms upon her lap and gazed into her face confidently. She pulled the ends of his red tie loose and set it again with neat compact movements. She had bought the tie and chosen it red because her son was as brown as she was and she loved red secretly, although she felt it now a color unbecoming to her age and she would not wear it except as an edge to a collar or as a seldom seen lining. When she was young she had always a red dress among her others. But now instead she loved her son’s round dark chin above a red tie, and she liked to put a red rose in his buttonhole. The blackness of his hair and eyes were richer for red. Now as she finished he clasped his arms about her waist and pressed his face into her bosom.

“You smell nice, Mom,” he murmured.

She patted him on the cheek and straightened a lock of his hair. There was no embarrassment in her when her son made his love to her. She was not shy of him as she was of her daughters.

“Go and eat your breakfast before it is cold,” she said, and to the maid Hannah she said, “Bring in fresh rolls for Francis.” The boy rose and moving with the lazy grace of his too swiftly growing youth, he dropped into his chair and began to eat. But now his father saw him and spoke to him. “Are you not going to give thanks to God?” he asked.

The boy looked at him coldly, unwillingly. Then meeting that clear solemn priestly look he wavered and bent his head an instant and moved his lips, and so placated the man of God who was his father. But he did not summon God.

So the early morning life went on with energy in this room. Hannah brought in fresh bread and fresh coffee, and they all ate robustly except the father, who took his food sparingly. But to this they were all accustomed. Until he had delivered himself to his people of what he had learned newly about God he would not eat heartily.

For his hungry body was his temptation. He loved food. When he was a child he grew fast and he was always hungry, always eating so much that his brothers laughed at him. Then, after he was converted by the missionary in his thirteenth year, he began to know that he must fight to subdue his big body. For how could a man save his soul if his body were master? He had sat at his mother’s dinner table on that cold November Sunday, among all his vigorous brothers and sisters, and had let his piled plate stand before him. “I will take one-third of everything — no more,” he promised God. The rich smell of the chicken gravy moved in his nostrils. The fragrance of baked potatoes, of golden mashed turnips, of hot biscuits, made him faint. There was the sharp sweetness of honey, the spice of the pickled peaches and the heavy intoxicating perfume of hot mince pies. Across the table the missionary ate delicately, refusing much.

“You don’t eat, Mr. Barnes!” his mother cried, despair on her round face. What could be done with anybody who did not eat? In this great farmhouse everybody ate.

The missionary had smiled thinly and a little sadly at her. “I have eaten poorly for so long that now my stomach will not feast. It has the habit of poverty and prefers it.”

Then he also would so teach his own body. His mother saw his plate taken away and was frightened. “Paul, you’re sick! I never knew you not to eat!” He smiled sickly, the palms of his hands wet with the strength of his hunger. But he had not eaten. In a fire of blushing and shyness he had withstood his brothers’ teasing. “Well, if Paul’s not eating, he’s sick enough to die.” Even his father had smiled dryly. “I always say it keeps Paul poor just carrying all his food.” But they had not known how hungry he was all the time.

Even now, after all these years, he never sat down at the table and smelled the food without that voracious faintness in his belly. But no one knew this. He would have been ashamed even for Mary, his wife, to know. So he had early made it his rule to deny himself before he went before God for his people. At night he would eat hungrily and sleep soon, spent, his soul emptied. But now he sat silent and brooding, his eyes shining and strange and his mind not in his body, his ears deaf unless his name were called.

The children were used to this also. They accepted him among them, let him be as it seemed he must be, and turned toward their mother. She was their sun and they turned toward her and told her everything, or nearly everything except the secret core of themselves which without knowing it they kept from her and from everybody.

And she gave to them joyously in turn. Each had what he needed of her. As she had given them her milk when they were born, now she gave them the food of her brain and her thoughts and everything she knew. Sometimes it was not enough, but she did not know it and they did not tell her, if indeed they knew it. She gave them so much that it seemed enough.

Sitting among them on this Sabbath morning she was at her best and richest. She knew her house was warm and comfortable about her children. She was feeding them the best she had, feeding their bodies with milk and bread and meat and fruit, feeding richness into their blood and their flesh, making the mother’s eternal mystic transubstantiation. Soon their souls too would be fed. She did not wholly understand how, but in the house of God they sat and received for their souls bread and wine, and their father’s hands gave it to them. They were safe. Body and soul they were safe. She smiled peacefully and gave them bits of her love.

“Joan, is your egg as you like it? You used to like it coddled that way, but if you want it different — people do change! … Rose, I’ve put a fresh cover on your bed. I didn’t like that one. I decided you might as well have the pink one. It suits your room so well. … Frank, darling, here is more bacon — crisp, just as you like it.”

In all this she did not forget the man. But she spoke to him most often through the children.

“Pass his cup, dear,” she said to her son. “He’s let it get cold. I’ll change it—”

She lifted her voice slightly higher and said clearly, “Here’s some hot coffee, Paul. Now drink it before it chills again.”

He looked at her vaguely and took the cup and drank a little of it and then rose.

“I’m going to the vestry,” he said quietly, and seemed, with his gentle and silent step, to drift from the room.

They knew that in the hour before they were all gathered in the pews he would be praying. He would pray so long and intensely that he would come out to them transfigured, the skin of his face shining and his body holy. They did not understand it. Francis begrudged his father the exaltation. Thinking of it now he said aloud, “I can’t see what he prays about so long. Gee, I’d run out of anything to say long before church time!”

But this even his mother could not endure.

“He is not saying anything,” she said quietly. “He is waiting before the Lord.”

He knew by her voice that now she would not let him have his way, not even him, not in this one thing, this thing between man and God. He dropped his head, pouting his red lips, and piled the golden marmalade recklessly upon his bread and swallowed it in great mouthfuls. Rose was playing with a small heap of dry crumbs, dreaming, absorbed into herself.

But Joan caught the words from her mother and sat gazing across the table into the garden, smiling. Waiting before the Lord! Waiting — waiting — before the Lord! The words marched through the air, shining, sonorous and caught to themselves other words. She was waiting, waiting and radiant — Lift up your heads, O ye gates, and be ye lifted up, ye everlasting doors, and the King of Glory shall come in. Who is this King of Glory? … Lift up — lift up your head — and wait!

She followed her mother into the church proudly, her head high on her straight neck. Years ago her mother had said to her, “You’re tall, so be as tall as you can.” After that, however she hated sometimes to have her head above all others, she remembered, and made herself as tall as she could.

Behind them came Rose alone, small and composed. Francis would come when he chose, or if he were rebellious enough he would not come, if the day were too fair and enticing by the river. But his mother’s wish was still compelling upon him. All her wishes were heavy upon him because of her love for him, and he did not feel her love too heavy since as yet he had no other.

But he resisted her a little now. When she said to him today, her eyes guarded, her voice determined to be pleasant, “Are you ready for church, son?” he looked up at her from the hammock on the porch where he had thrown himself. “I’ll be along,” he said, staring into the rose vines. “Don’t wait,” he said when she waited.

She looked at him, locking her tongue behind her set teeth, keeping her smile on her lips. A year before she would have said to him sharply and naturally, sure that because she loved him she knew best for him, “Go at once and get your hat and coat and come with me.” But now the instinct in her, always alive and fluttering toward her children and especially to this son, warned her that he was very near the moment when he would refuse her utterly. Some morning he would say, “I hate church. I won’t come with you again.” She was afraid of the moment and week by week she pushed it off, and he knew it, and was arrogant with her, lordly because of his youth.

So she had left him alone to come when he would, and she led her two daughters into the church. Joan sat beside her mother and Rose beside Joan. To them this was an air as familiar as home. This place, too, was a sort of home. Years full of Sabbaths Joan had sat in this same front pew beside her mother and Francis’s place was on the other side. Between these two strong lively children the mother sat, dividing them, quieting them, compelling them to their father, that he might compel them to God. Rose was obedient and she did naturally, or seemed to do, those things which she should do.

Yet today they were not complete as they had been for so long. Joan could feel her mother’s unease until Francis came into his place. Her mother prayed quickly, her hand over her eyes, and then sat back waiting for Francis, wanting him to come. Before the congregation she wanted her children assembled, still around her, still faithful. Many parents came alone. The church was full of old people alone, whose children were gone from the small village, or if they were not gone, they were grown and sat willfully at home or went out for amusement. But she was here with her children about her. Joan knew and could smile at her mother’s pride and humor her in it when after the service she would lead her children down the aisle through the people.

She turned her head slightly and looked about. It was early and the people were gathering. All her life she had come early with her family, to be, as her mother said, an example. The sun was streaming through the church in long bright metallic bars and the light, faintly colored by the stained-glass windows, shone upon the silvery heads of a few aged men and women who were early also. She caught old Mr. Parker’s eye and threw him her smile and felt her heart warm toward him. He had taught her music and from him she had learned how to write down the tunes that sang so easily into her head. He kept the little music store in the village by which he could not have lived unless he had tuned pianos and taught classes in singing in the district school. He taught faithfully, regularly, so that at the end he might sometime have a small pension. He could not sing much anymore, although once he had had a mild sweet baritone voice. But these days he could do little more than clear his throat and hum a note for the younger voices to catch from him.

Now the organ began to sound, deeply and quietly, the notes caught and held strongly. Joan turned her face toward the music and listened carefully. She could see a man’s back, straight and slenderly shaped. She knew him, at least she knew him like this in the church, sitting with his back to her, reaching and plucking the music out of the organ. She knew his back better than his face, his music better than his voice. At other times no one knew him very well, though he lived in the village and had been a child here. He had a law business of his own in the city to which he came and went almost daily. At night he slept in his mother’s house in the village where he had always slept except for the two years he had been away at the war. He was an only son, whose father had died when the son was a child. To the villagers he seemed to have no other life than this one in the village, to care for his mother, to walk sedately with her in their garden, to remark upon the flowers. She said to him, “I believe the lilac will be in bloom by tomorrow.” He replied, “I think it will, Mother.” She said to her neighbors, “Martin is all I have to live for.” So she clung to him that she might have something for which to live, and for him she kept the square red brick house rigidly dustless and ordered. He entered every night into the clean shadowy hall and moved in silence about the clean shadowy rooms.

Yet every morning he went away to Philadelphia and did his work and so well that he gathered a little fame about himself as a lawyer, a fame of which the villagers heard remotely and always with doubt and wonder, because they had known him since he was born. They had always said, “His father was no great shakes — he had big ideas about that shirt factory in South End, but he couldn’t keep it going — a good man, but not very bright.” So it was hard to believe in the son. “If Martin had come into the factory and helped me, things would have been different.” But Martin had gone early to his own life, and as soon as his father died he had sold the factory to Peter Weeks.

Of himself Martin Bradley never spoke. Silently, smiling a little to everyone, he came every Sunday morning to play the organ as he had begun to do when he was eighteen years old. On his first Sunday home from the war he was at the organ again. No one asked him what had happened between and he said nothing and soon it was forgotten that he had ever been away.

Now while Joan listened and looked at his straight back and narrow dark head, upon which the hair was beginning to turn gray, he played a Bach fugue meticulously and perfectly, making each note round and complete and valued. The choir door opened and four people came in irregularly as they chose and a little apologetically, as though they felt that everyone knew them in other guise than this. There were two women and two men, Mr. Winters and Mrs. Parsons and Mr. Weeks and Miss Kinney. They took their seats and stared earnestly and self-consciously in front of them, except Miss Kinney, who had once been a missionary in Africa. She smiled continually and her eyes darted here and there, as restless as pale blue butterflies.

Then the vestry door opened and the music softened. Joan’s father came in, a priest newly come from the presence of God to his people. Through thirty years this had never become stale in him or usual. He would not come unless from God. Once in her little childhood Joan remembered a delay. The people waited for him, at first patiently and then in surprise, their eyes fixed on the vestry door. Moments passed and the organ rolled on and on and wandered into bypaths of variation, but ready at any instant to come through to the final major note. She was only six years old, but she caught her mother’s wonder and then her anxiety. She heard her mother whisper, “I shall have to go and see what is wrong.” She felt her mother gather herself to rise.

Then the door opened as though on the wings of a wind, strongly and swiftly, and her father strode in with triumph and his voice rang out to his people, “Let us praise the Lord by singing—”

Later when her mother cried, “Paul, where were you? We were all waiting!” he said simply, “I could not get God’s blessing and I could not go to my pulpit until I did.”

But now, in the beginning of his age, his temper stilled, it seemed he had always God’s blessing. He moved tranquil and serene, tall, a little bowed, but his eyes were clear and blue and guileless as a child’s eyes are. He stood before his people and paused. The organ fell silent and the people looked at him, waiting. But before he could speak there was a sound at the door, a step in the aisle and a movement. It was Francis, come to sit beside his mother once again. His father waited for him.

They were complete now. The father was set above them in the pulpit and the mother and the three children were in their accustomed places. Their faces were turned to him, waiting for what they were about to receive.

So they received their food from God. The people rose in the bars of many colored sunshine, and were for the moment caught and held in the brightness. They sang together, and Joan sang, above them all, her big young voice soaring above their feeble old voices, carrying them along, gathering them in its full stream. Then they sat back comfortably and gave thanks and heard the reading of Scripture. They gave too at the due moment small bits of silver that tinkled into the old pewter plates.

In the choir loft Mrs. Parsons rose tall and gaunt, yet with sweetness in her disappointed eyes, and sang, “But the Lord is mindful of His own.” She sang it a little too slowly, clinging to the favorite words, and her voice faded upon the high notes, but she still sang with a touching hopefulness. What she longed for might yet be. So she sang, believing wistfully in what she had not received. She loved these moments of singing, when she could lose herself in vague hoping about the story she was writing.

Emily was so much like her father, so impatient of her mother’s “scribbling” as they called it. Edward had always been hard on her about it. When he came home and found things not quite ready for dinner because she had been writing, he was so hard. And now Emily, although she was only fifteen, was hard too. “You write such silly stuff, Mother!” Her voice was cold and she rattled the dishes in the sink. But Ned — dear boy — he was older than Emily but still he listened to her stories, and his eyes would grow wet. “Neddie, it’s only a story,” she said to him time and again. He helped her to keep on hoping. Some day someone would want her stories. One of the letters would not be a rejection, and Edward would say, “Well, well, Florrie — you were right and I was wrong.” Edward would say what he never had said about anything. “Forgive me, Florrie.” She would just be patient and keep on writing as nicely as she could.

“But the Lord is mindful, is mindful of His own. He will not—” she crooned tenderly, slowly, her eyes misted, her voice thick and soft in her throat. She sat down, strengthened, and began to plan a new story — the best. It was so easy to plan stories in church, in the quiet while the sermon was going on. She drifted happily away.

So the sermon began. Because of this sermon the children had gone quietly every Saturday of their lives, though the day was a holiday. In the bare study they knew their father sat and searched the Scriptures for them all. They could not go in there for any cause. They tiptoed through the house with their small friends following them, their goal the cookie jar in the kitchen. With their hands full of cookies they burst out of the silent house, and ran down to the end of the street, released and joyful and screaming with glee. About them were trees and meadows and under their feet the grass green, thickly green, and the day was a holiday.

Their voices sang and shouted and they played with desperate pleasure and at times fell into quarreling. But even the quarreling was sweet and intense. They gave no thought to their father in his study, searching the Book to find food for their souls, even as they gave no thought to their mother cooking and baking for them in her kitchen and making and mending for them. All this was of course; it all made the foundation of their life safe, and for them it was forever.

Of God they knew nothing except what they were told. They believed, or thought they did, what their father told them. They trusted him about God. When he said God was a kind father who did not let even a sparrow in the garden suffer, they believed him. Besides it seemed true because all the sparrows they saw were plump and busy. When he told them the very hairs of their head were numbered they believed him, for they were used to love. They would not have thought it strange if their mother numbered their hairs, because she so loved them, and it was not strange in God. They were important and complacent and sure of God, believing He loved them and cared for them.

There was also Jesus Christ who died for their sins, and the Holy Ghost. But the Holy Ghost was a shadow and without substance or shape, and they left it at that. But Jesus was real, “Gentle Jesus, meek and mild.” He was touching and real, though more real before his resurrection than afterwards. Afterwards he became arrogant and proud. He said, “Touch me not.” But before, when he was a man, he said “Come unto me,” and “suffer the little children.” Then they understood him. They would have rushed to him, laughing and shouting if they had been near him, because he was real to them, though dead.

But when he hung on the cross for their sins they were uncomfortable and guilty about themselves although they did not know why. They only knew they were sinful and everybody was sinful. They were “conceived and born in sin.” Long ago Joan had used to wonder what “conceived in sin” was. She asked her mother one day, “Was I conceived in sin, too?” Her mother’s eyes opened in surprise and her dark cheeks flushed and she said quickly, “When you are older I will explain everything. Would you like to take Francis and go and play with Netta Weeks? You can take a couple of cookies so she can give one to little Jackie.”

Still she never did quite explain. But after a while Joan knew it could not be a thing for which she alone was to blame. If everybody was so conceived it was a common sin and so she forgot it because there was so much else to think of in the crowding seasons. There was so much to enjoy and she wanted never to think of unpleasant things. She chose to be happy and to laugh.

But Rose could not forget. Once Rose asked her miserably, her lips suddenly dry, “Joan, do you — do you understand about being conceived in sin?”

Joan was shocked by the question. She knew by then how life began inside a woman’s body, out of a man’s body, but it was secret knowledge. She had learned it secretly at school, guiltily against her will. She had listened, surprised, and had shouted angrily, “I don’t believe it.” But she was compelled to believe it. “I know,” said Netta Weeks. “How do you know?” Joan demanded loudly. But Netta only smiled foolishly. Joan felt sickness rush over her. She went away but she could not forget. It was a long time before she could forget when she looked at her father and mother. But she made herself forget at last, so that she could escape from it.

But she could not bear to speak of it even to Rose. Indeed between them, spoken, it would be the more shameful. Her healthy flesh crawled at the thought, outraged. “I don’t know anything about it,” she said shortly. She ran out into the garden and picked a great handful of her mother’s red roses.

So Rose asked no more. She grew inwardly toward herself. She read her Bible every night even in winter, however cold her bedroom was. She never hurried at her prayers. If she felt tempted to hurry and to get into her warm bed she punished herself and prayed more slowly. Rose was ready always to go to church, to dream, to take the bread and wine, the tears filling her eyes easily as she thought of him who died for her sins. She felt herself full of sin. She saved every separate sin and remembered it when the bread was crumbling upon her tongue and when the wine burned her lips delicately, because it was so sweet to feel herself washed clean by Jesus’s blood. It was almost sweet to sin that she might be washed clean. But that again was sin, to want to sin, and so she prayed in ecstasy, to be forgiven again and again.

This intense and secret life Rose kept within herself and because she lived inwardly, outwardly she seemed always mild and gentle and obedient and her blue eyes were saintly in their mildness. The villagers said often, “She is an angelic child — so good.” And hearing it she felt pleasure, a strange pleasure, tingling in all her body. She planned fresh goodness, a set number of kind deeds every day. She took flowers to old Mrs. Mark who lay in her little stone house, at the edge of the village, bedridden with creeping paralysis. She took flowers until Mrs. Mark said plainly, “I haven’t any more vases, child. Anyways, roses bring on my hay fever. There — I know you mean well enough, but I’ll take the will for the deed.”

“Yes, Mrs. Mark,” said Rose, shrinking away from the harsh fretting old woman. But still she could not give up her goodness. By the time she reached home she remembered that she must not mind being persecuted for her goodness. So she still went to see Mrs. Mark and took her apples and a jar of jelly she had coaxed from her mother, and she welcomed her bitterness. Once when the old woman railed against her useless legs she said gently, “God has a meaning in it, dear Mrs. Mark. He sends us suffering to fit us for heaven.” She had heard Mrs. Parsons say that when little Emma Winters died.

Then the old woman rose up against her. She braced herself against her cottony pillows and shouted at her, “Get out — don’t you dare talk such stuff and nonsense to me! I’d like to know what sense there is in God’s keeping me on my back like this — I could have been a useful woman with my legs. Don’t talk to me! You don’t know anything — you palaver like your father. Go on out and play where you belong.”

Rose gathered up her books gently and went away. At first she was angry and hurt and then she remembered Jesus and exultant righteousness filled her. She had been like Jesus. She had answered nothing. When her enemies persecuted her she was like him, a lamb, innocent, led to the slaughter. But she gave up going to see Mrs. Mark and prayed for her instead, at night, safely in her own room.

Now in the church she sat quietly before her father, her face upturned to his, her spirit subject to his. She loved the hours when he rose to preach, dominating her, telling her what to believe. He was not her father now. He was her priest, her savior. She loved him passionately. He stood for Jesus to her, Jesus who died for her. Now she would be washed, from head to foot, made clean and new. She cried out in her heart, “Wash me and I shall be whiter than snow.” She sat waiting to be cleansed, cleansed and filled anew with love — love — love. Her eyes shone, her lips parted, her breath came soft and quick. She forgot everything except her savior, her beloved savior.

Her quickened breathing sounded fluttering at Joan’s ear. She turned and looked at Rose curiously, small strange silent Rose. Rose’s hands were folded in her lap, little white immaculate hands which she washed many times a day, soft pale hands, full in the palm, pointed in the fingers. Sometimes it seemed as if she and Rose were not sisters. She could not understand Rose’s patience. She was resigned as old people are resigned, ready to suffer. It seemed to Joan that Rose even liked to suffer.

One day in a spring cleaning her mother had flown at her for being so slow and dreaming. “Rose, I declare, we’ll never get cleaned up in the sitting room if you keep stopping for nothing.” And Rose had turned her face to her mother, smiling, drinking in her anger. “I’m wicked,” she had answered in a strange passionate whisper. “I know I ought to be beaten, Mother.”

Her mother, shocked, paused in her sweeping and stared at Rose straightly. “I’ve never beaten any child of mine,” she said, outraged.

“No — no,” Rose urged. “But I really ought to be!”

And yet she was so small and childlike, her little figure so roundly childish, her face as pure as a child’s face, her voice gentle, her leaf-brown eyes sweet. She had no wants, she never asked for anything. She wore uncomplainingly Joan’s quickly outgrown garments. This very hour she had on Joan’s last summer’s dress, a blue voile, now a little faded. Joan felt a rush of love come over her. She must see that Rose had something new. The next dress should be for Rose. Some day she would buy Rose new things from head to foot. She wanted Rose to be happy. It was so pleasant when everybody was happy.

Her father’s voice came earnestly into her ears, “So let us take thought before it is too late what God is to each one of us. He is not far from any of us—”

His voice faded again as the question caught itself into her thoughts. What was God to her? She did not know. It did not matter to her now if he were near or far. She did not believe or disbelieve in God. It was not important. God was like these old people in the church, these loving old people who were kind to her and had known her from her birth and cared for her and would always care for her. He was doubtless there to be called upon if it were needful. But she needed nothing. She had everything. Here was her youth. Here was her beauty. That is, if she was really beautiful?

But she was beginning now to believe secretly and often in her own beauty. She treasured every small affirmation of it that she heard about her. “Joan’s growing prettier as she grows older.” “I believe Joan’s going to be the beauty of the family, though she’s so tall.” “Joan’s eyes are lovely,” and at Commencement there was Mary Robey’s teasing whisper, “Do you know what my brother Tom said, Joan? He said he’d like to kiss your mouth!”

Her lips burned. She had never yet been kissed by any man. Once a shy boy had drawn near at a dance and after a walk in the moonlight he had drawn very near. But she drew back. Her body cried to lean toward him but her heart would not. She laughed because she was so torn in her embarrassment and he drew back too, and she said, half laughing and half crying, “Let’s go back to the others — to the light—”

Yet somewhere the kiss was waiting. She believed in love waiting for her. He would come to meet her, tall and strong, taller even than she was, and she to meet him. She wanted it all, all of love, love waiting for marriage and growing into children, many children. She wanted her house full of children, conceived not in sin but in love. She wanted to work for them, to cook and bake for them, to mend for them, to play with them, to sing to them, to love them passionately, to build about them walls of home and of love and make them safe. Among them she would live safely, too, safe and surrounded by them even as she surrounded them and made them safe. “Miss Joan Richards was married today to — to—” Whom would she marry? “The church was decorated in ferns and June roses. The bride was lovely in white satin and she wore her mother’s wedding veil of lace caught up with orange blossoms.”

Up the aisle she came, under the flowery arches. Rose walked beside her in a new dress of palest shell-pink. She paused a moment to plan Rose’s dress. Then she swept on. Her father stood waiting to perform the ceremony. Her mother was matron of honor. Her mother should have a new dress too, of silver-gray chiffon. What could Francis do? She paused, considering. She wanted them all a part of it. She looked across at him, planning, pausing. He had taken off his mother’s wedding ring mischievously and was fitting it upon his own little finger. The mother was watching him anxiously and he teased her by pretending to let the ring fall.

Then like a scourge cutting across her dreams she heard her father’s voice accusing the people in a solemn anger.

“I say God will not hold us guiltless—”

Her dreams were gone like a mist. She hung her head. She cringed inside her big body. Why wouldn’t he stop talking about that ugly dreadful thing? It happened so long ago. The people were always displeased when he spoke of it, as sober good people are, if their one madness is remembered. It had been so pleasant in the church until he began to talk about it. She could feel the people stirring under his words. There was a dry cough here and there. Only Mrs. Parsons was still smiling her vague misty smile. Out of the corner of her eye she saw Mr. Weeks in the choir loft reach for a hymnbook and begin to read ostentatiously. Everybody knew Mr. Weeks had gone to Mr. Bradley that time, years ago, when they were all small, and had told him what his little daughter Netta had said. … And Mr. Bradley had said she was a damned little liar with a dirty mind and that no boy from South End could have been in the village all day because it was workday in the factory. And then Mr. Weeks, raging, had taken Netta with him to South End to find the Negro boy who she said had put his hand on her. And afterwards when Mr. Bradley failed, Mr. Weeks had bought the factory.

South End had been full of bad blood anyway, what with the white workers on strike against Mr. Bradley because he had brought in the Negroes. He had started with all white workers and then times got bad. Men stopped wearing so many stiff starched collars, for instance, just about the time he had bought a new lot of machinery for making stiff collars. So he had lowered wages and then when the whites struck, he put in Negroes.

Netta had told all the little girls at school that a Negro boy had stopped her on her way to school when she was alone in the lane. “See, he did this to me!” She pulled up her skirt and put her hand inside her thin thigh. “And my father took me right over to South End and we hunted and I knew him right away. He wasn’t so awful black — kind of yellowish.” Over and over she had told it. But then, Netta was a liar. They had listened to her, half believing. Even so, afterwards the boy was whipped by a gang of whites in South End. Men and women had run from Middlehope to watch. Netta shivered when she told of it.

… In the church after all these eight years her father’s voice was scourging them still. He never let them forget.

“God will inquire of us that we do nothing for these people. We have shed blood unlawfully, it may even be innocently — and the stain remains upon us still if we do not remove it by our prayers and good works.”

He was going to ask them again for money for his mission in South End and they did not want to give it. They wanted to forget about South End. The church was suddenly filled with silent strife between the people and her father. She could scarcely breathe. She saw her mother’s head droop, her hands fold tightly together. Only Rose did not mind. Rose was smiling a little, listening. In the choir Mrs. Parsons did not mind, for she was not listening.

But Francis was staring directly at his father, his face a stone. He had put the ring back on his mother’s hand and he was staring at his father, hating him. What good did it do to go and preach to those people? Preaching was no good. If his father knew anything, any of the things other men knew, he’d see how silly it was to think preaching would save anybody in South End.

At last it was over. Joan lifted her head to breathe the old atmosphere of peace in the church. It was so pleasant to have peace in which to dream. Where was she? She was walking down the aisle, satin-clad, her long white train — But now her father broke ringingly into conclusion: “Let us live therefore victorious to the end, triumphant, knowing in whom we have believed. And now unto God who is abundantly able—”

The organ crashed joyfully into dismissal. The people rose eager and relieved, waiting to talk to each other, to saunter out into the sunshine, to make plans for meetings in the week. Her mother gathered the children together and led them down the aisle, her hand upon her son’s arm, and he straightened himself and dropped his childishness and took on the gravity of a young man, and she looked on him with pride shining on her face. She tried to cover her pride decently, but it shone out of her eyes and glittered in her smile and rang out of her voice. On the other side Joan walked, smiling, the sweetness of her dream still alive in her face. They all greeted her with love, with welcome. She was their child, too, the daughter of the village.

“Well, Joan, I see in the paper you took a lot of honors.” “Joan’ll be famous some day—” “Won’t we be proud to have known her—”

“Shucks,” said Mr. Billings loudly, “somebody’ll marry her long before that! She’ll have babies instead, and a sight better, too.”

Joan’s mother held her head a little higher. “Come, Joan,” she said coldly, because she thought Mr. Billings very coarse. He was after all nothing but the butcher and it was a common trade. Then she remembered he gave the parsonage every week a roast of lamb or beef and he was a member of the church and his profession made him coarse, doubtless, so she said, “Good morning, Mr. Billings. It’s a fine day.” But her voice was polite and ladylike, and she turned at once to Mrs. Winters, whose husband was an elder, besides being in the choir, and asked after her peonies. Joan smiled apologetically at Mr. Billings, but he did not mind at all. He winked one of his small merry black eyes at her and his big red face crinkled under his scattered eyebrows. “I sent a tenderloin this week,” he whispered loudly, “specially for you. I thought it would be more kind of suitable, you know, than a plain pot roast.”

“Thank you,” she said, dimpling at him. She accepted the gift, too, of the admiration in his eyes. He was an old fat man, coarse and ignorant, but even so it was worth taking his look which lingered a moment upon her face. Everything was worth having, every least bit of love, all admiration. She wanted flowers strewn to walk upon. She turned from one to the other, laughing, greeting, taking everything. It was all lovely. She lavished her promises richly. “Yes, of course I’ll come!” “Oh, picnics are fun — I’ll make a chocolate cake — I make grand cake!” She forgot her mother and Francis who was pulling them impatiently along. “Gee, I’m starved, Moms,” he was muttering behind his grave grown-up face. “Church always makes me hungry—” She forgot Rose stealing softly along behind them. She was full of herself, a queen returned to her kingdom, a woman returned lovely and young.

For it was excitement to see dreams and yearnings even in old faces. She knew she made them remember again, love again, because she was so living and so young. The few young people were timid of her, she was so confident and so gay. There was Netta Weeks, who hadn’t gone to college after all. “Father says he can’t spend the money now until the factory pays,” Netta had said everywhere. Now she clutched at Joan, and whispered; “I want to see you — I want to have a real old-fashioned talk like we used to have—” “Of course, Netta,” Joan answered quickly. Poor Netta — she understood her — she understood everybody — she pitied them all — she was full of richness for them all. A young man nearby looked at her covertly, a tall stolid young farmer, and instantly she knew it, though she did not look at him, for he was a stranger. But she lingered a moment, letting him look at her.

So at last they came out into the sunshine of the cloudless day and at once Francis broke away and strode whistling across the grass. He was glad to be out of the church. No use remembering things. Sometimes in the sunshine like this he felt maybe he had imagined he had seen the hanging Negro, or made it up from talk he heard around South End. The people talked about it still, some, on lazy afternoons around the streets there. But at night he knew he had seen.

“Hi there,” he shouted loudly to a boy across the street. “Meet you this afternoon!”

“I’ll go along and start the meat,” her mother said.

“I’m coming,” Joan answered. She looked about her. Everyone was scattering now, suddenly hungry and remembering their Sunday dinners.

“I’ll wait for Father,” said Rose.

“Then I’ll go and help Mother,” she replied.

But there was one more person to come out of the church. It was Martin Bradley. He came gracefully down the steps, his music rolled under his arm. He always waited and came out alone. Now he lifted his hat easily. “How do you do, Miss Richards?” he said. “It is nice to have you home — I hope, to stay?”

She was surprised. He had never spoken to her so directly before and never had he called her Miss Richards. She looked into his melancholy brown eyes. He was a little shorter than she, a very little — no, they were the same height. “Why — I don’t know — for a while, anyway,” she stammered, suddenly taken aback. He lifted his hat again and she saw his smooth dark hair, white at the sides. He smiled slightly and pleasantly, but only with his lips, and walked away. She strolled smiling across the lawn to the manse. It was strange how when one was grown up, people seemed different. She had known Martin for years, on Sundays a part of the organ, on weekdays a face in the village. Now suddenly he took on a shape for himself; he was even rather handsome in a quiet secret oldish way.

But what his shape was she did not know and the little wonder she had now faded, at least for the moment. It was driven away by the warm noon, by the peace of the shadowy lawn, by the roses hung upon the porch and now by the smell of broiling steak and spiced apple pie. She ran up the steps and into the house. There was food upon the table, hot and delicious, ready, waiting to be eaten. She was suddenly very hungry.

On weekdays the house became itself again. It no longer belonged to the red brick church and to the village — it belonged to them. It was theirs to live in as they chose and each of them lived his own intense life, intensely alone and yet always warmly, intensely together. There were the occasions of every day when they were drawn together by a need of each other, not so much by the need of any one of them as by the need of all of them together.

In the mornings Joan drowsed in the sweetness of half-waking sleep. Her body was at once heavy and light, her mind deeply slumberous, and yet on its surface awake to the sunshine, to the angles of familiar furniture, to the smoothness of the sheets against her limbs and to the softness beneath her. There was no need to rise. There was no urgency yet to work. Life was still waiting and still holiday. Each morning her body was appeased with sleep and she was not immediately hungry. She could sleep as long as she liked, she told herself, and eat when she liked. This was her home and she was free in it. She smiled, deeply free, deeply happy, and turned upon her pillows to sleep again.

But then her sleep would not come. Perversely her mind crept out of her languorous body. It crept downstairs and saw the others at the table together. Her place was empty. Her father hesitated before grace, as he always did if one of them were not there. He asked, “Where is Joan? Is she ill?”

“Let the child rest,” her mother answered comfortably. “This is her vacation — let her be.”

So they went on without her. But they missed her and she knew they did. The meal was not complete. They were not wholly fed unless they took their meal together. Her mind came creeping upstairs and into her body again. It urged her body lying inert, her eyes closed. She found herself thinking, I miss them, too. I’d rather have breakfast with them than all alone. I want to be in my place among them.

Suddenly she leaped up, wide awake, and dashed off her nightgown and darted under the shower in the bathroom. She turned it on full, a cold stinging rain against her. She whirled around and received it upon her breasts and let it rush to her feet; and turned and caught it upon her shoulders and down to her heels. She wrestled an instant with the thick towel, passing it this way and that over her body. She drew her garments over her head and buttoned the few buttons, quickly and slipped into her stockings and shoes and brushed the length of her hair out and twisted it. She ran to the table laughing, the tendrils of her hair still wet.

They looked at her joyously. “I thought you were going to sleep this morning!” her mother cried gaily.

“I didn’t want to miss anything,” she answered. “I suddenly felt I was missing something.”

“You sure would have missed these muffins,” Francis shouted. “I’m seeing to it you miss as many of ’em as I can manage.” He reached for a hot one as Hannah passed them, smiling and flattered.

They were all cheerful with her coming. Each one began speaking for himself and of his own thoughts except the mother, who must listen to them all. But each had needed the circle complete before which to speak. Her father ate with appetite today, pondering on the day before. He looked up in the midst of the chatter to ask his wife, troubled at a thought, “Mary, did you think there were as many out as usual yesterday?”

She answered him at once, although her eyes were still merry among her children. “Yes, I did, Paul — considering the time of the year. People like to take trips and picnics in weather like this.”

But he was not wholly comforted. He murmured, “The church members ought to remember their duty. The service ought to be necessary to them — as necessary for their souls as food for their bodies.”

“Oh, but, Father,” Joan broke in. “Don’t you think food for the soul comes in other ways, too? I know I find it in music — in beauty everywhere—”

Her father’s grave face grew a little more grave. He compressed his lips into patience before he answered with certainty, “These things do not lead to the knowledge of God. There is but one Saviour, and He is the Crucified.”

Now Rose lifted her secret heavy-lidded eyes and flashed them at her father and dropped them again, musing. Beyond Rose’s blond young head Joan looked into the garden and there she saw the glowing newly opened roses and the summer lilies in the border. The lemon lily was wide open. She forgot what her father said. After breakfast she would go out and dip her face delicately into the lily, as the hummingbird did when he discovered it. She remembered from summer to summer the fragrance of the lemon lily; among a hundred scents and perfumes she knew that clear single sweetness. But such knowledge, her father said, was not the knowledge of God. She turned to her mother impatiently.

“Mother—” she cried.

But her mother was not ready to hear her. She was listening to her son and her face was troubled.

“I don’t see why I can’t, Moms,” he was arguing. His dark beautiful face grew darker and somehow still more beautiful. Red rushed into his dark cheeks and he bit his lip to crimson. “All the fellows are going. Why, even Ned Parsons is going and you’re always holding him up to me — Gee, I’ve already asked my girl.”

“I don’t like your going off to that dance hall,” she answered stubbornly. “Your father is the minister.” She paused and pressed her full lips together. They were shaped exactly as her son’s were. Then she asked with constraint and in a different voice, “What girl have you asked?”

Now he was determined to punish her. “Why should I tell you if I can’t take her?” he muttered. He really had not asked a girl. But he wanted to hurt her.

“Oh, Frank,” she breathed, beseeching him, “don’t be so — You know I want you to have good wholesome fun. But I can’t think this is good for you.”

“That’s not the reason,” he retorted. “It’s because Dad is the sacred minister. Gosh, I’ve been hampered all my life because Dad is the sacred minister!”

But now his mother’s mobile face changed. She could be angry even with her son.

“If you’re half as good a man as your father, Francis—”

“I hope I’ll die before that,” he said between his teeth.

“Where do you want to go, son?” his father inquired. He had heard nothing, but now he looked up suddenly, aware of some discord.

“What’s the use of asking anything?” the boy broke out against his mother, ignoring his father. “I ought to do like the other fellows and not tell — I’m a fool for telling!”

Now he had the victory over his mother. Above all else she wanted him to tell her everything. She dreaded the hour when there would be silence between them, the silence of trivial surface speech. She clung to him as he still was. When he was stormy, and rebellious at least she knew what he was, and as long as she knew him he was still hers. But she perceived that she was holding him now only from day to day, even from hour to hour. She gave way before him, frightened lest this was the last hour.

“I’ll see about it,” she said.

He understood her and he grew amiable at once and turned to his father. “There’s a new place to eat and swim about three miles down the south road and a bunch of us thought we’d go down tonight for supper and stay a while afterwards.”

“I see,” his father said vaguely. It occurred to him nowadays that he should take an interest in his son’s life, now that he was sixteen — or was it seventeen? At any rate he was ceasing to be a child. When they were children it was natural that their mother should care for them. But Francis was no longer a child.

“Your — ah — studies are over?” he asked politely.

The mother broke in impatiently, half ashamed for him before the son. “Paul, don’t you remember we went to the closing exercises a week ago?”

“Yes, my dear, I do,” he replied mildly, looking at her with his clear blue distant gaze. “But I thought there was something said about Latin to be done this summer.” He brightened suddenly and seemed to come nearer. “I might be of help there,” he said with diffident eagerness.

“Or I could,” said Joan, smiling mischievously.

The boy broke out into rich laughter, “Gee, I’ll have to work yet with a bunch of teachers right in the family! Now don’t you speak, Rose!”

“I?” said Rose, looking up out of mists. “Oh, I couldn’t — Besides, I’ve promised Father to take a special catechism class for little girls this summer.”

“I’ve promised him a month’s vacation, Paul,” the mother said. Then she beamed unexpectedly upon him. “But it’s dear of you to help him — I know he’ll be glad—”

“Oh, sure,” said the boy gaily, satisfied, and pushing away from the table.

So the meal came to an end and they were knit together again by it. Their lives parted now and each went his way, but three times a day they were knit together again bodily. The body was their tie, the sameness of their blood and flesh. They met together and ate and drank and they renewed their flesh and their blood. They rose refreshed and ready to live apart for a while. In the search for what they wanted beyond the body they lived alone. But they would come together again and again, so they were never lost in loneliness.

What her own life alone was to be, Joan did not yet know. She rose, light and idle in her heart, and walked into the garden. The sun poured down into it like wine into a cup. The smell of the earth rose up through the grass, hot and close. It came up even between the flowers. She went to the lemon lily and bent over it and drew its fragrance into herself. She drew deep breaths until her body was filled, a vessel full of fragrance. But under its delicacy was the strong musky odor of the hot earth.

She straightened herself and walked about, unhurried and at her ease, looking at every leaf and flower. There was nothing she had to do and the garden was lovely. Between the opening buds of a white rosebush a spider had spun a web, catching delicately here the point of a leaf, there the edge of a calyx, drawing a cluster of white roses together surely and lightly into a silver net. In the center of the whiteness and the silver the spider sat small and black and still.

Beyond the garden stretched the street, leading away from the house and the garden, away from the village, into country and beyond. She gazed east and west. To the east the church was closed and silent. It had nothing to do with today. Yesterday people had gone into it and lent it life, but today they passed it by, putting their lives elsewhere. A woman passed now. It was Martin Bradley’s mother, and she did not even turn her head to see where she had been yesterday. But she stopped when she saw Joan alone, for here was someone to whom she could talk and she could not resist that. She smiled at Joan cozily and sleekly. She was small and plump and satisfied with herself and her son, and her neat gray cotton dress fitted her as closely as feathers are fitted to a plump bird.

“Isn’t it a nice day?” she said. “I’m on my way to the butcher’s to get the sweetbreads early. Martin loves a good crumbled sweetbread for his dinner, done with a bit of bacon. I do myself. We’re both fond of sweetbreads.”

She nodded and smiled and went on importantly, stepping solidly on her small fat outward pointing feet. She was on her daily mission. Each morning she went early to the butcher to get the tidbit she planned that day for her son. If she got it she was triumphant for the day. If she failed, if someone was before her, the day was embittered. She carried small intense hatreds against her neighbors if they were before her.

“Sorry, Miz Bradley,” Mr. Billings would roar, cheerful and bloody among his carcasses, “Miz Winter’s just been and got my kidneys today. How about a bit of liver? My liver’s extra fresh this morning.”

But Mrs. Bradley would not be consoled by liver. “Martin doesn’t like liver so well,” she replied coldly and chose a chop. If she met Mrs. Winters on the way home she would be cool. She would be cool until she was successful again. If for several days she failed she grew bitter. Then she would revenge herself on Mr. Billings and Martin must bring her something from the city. She boasted among the villagers, “I declare, it’s getting so I can’t get anything I want at Mr. Billings’. He don’t run near so good a place as he did. Martin brings home the meat from the city as often as not.”

“Joan — Joan!” her mother’s voice called suddenly from an upstairs window.

“Coming!” she sang back. She lingered lazily. It would be fun to see what happened today to Mrs. Bradley. But her mother would not wait. “Joan!” she called again.

So she put aside Mrs. Bradley and ran to her mother.

In the big upstairs bedroom her mother moved swiftly and competently. She had made each movement exactly the same each day of each year for many years, and now her hands knew the quickest direction, her feet the sparest step. She squared the corner of the bed tightly, the large double bed where she had slept with the children’s father since the night they had come home from their honeymoon. It was all as familiar to her as her own hands and feet. She finished as Joan came in and sat down in the rocking chair. Joan was used to her there. In this chair of worn brown wood, with its strip of brown cotton quilting lining in it, her mother had always sat to darn and patch, and on the sagging carpet-covered hassock at its foot each child had sat in turn to recite the psalms and hymns and catechism they must learn by heart. It was always noisy downstairs in the family sitting room and the parlor was not to be thought of. But here was quiet. As a little girl Joan had looked out of the low window over the roofs of the village to the rolling hills where the sheep grazed, and had chanted, “The Lord is my shepherd, I shall not want,” and here she had stammered over “the chief end of man is to glorify God and enjoy Him forever.” How did one enjoy God? She asked her mother, and listened and never understood. Her mother never could make it clear. Here in this room, too, her mother had talked to them when they were in fault and here set upon them her rare punishments. Once, Joan remembered suddenly at this moment, she had thrown herself down upon the bed with a wail of sorrow because she had told a lie — she could not remember about what. She remembered only that she could not go to the Sunday school picnic because she had lied. Their mother could not endure lies. She might waver and delay judgment in anything else, but her voice came down as hard and bright as a sword after a lie.

“Don’t tell me a lie!” she would cry. There was no patience in her then.

Now here she sat in the rocking chair and looked at her daughter straightly and shyly, with an unaccustomed pleading. “Joan,” she said, “I’ve been waiting until you were home a few days to tell you something. I haven’t wanted to spoil your graduation and coming home. But today I’ve got to tell you because I just don’t feel equal to the missionary meeting this afternoon. Miss Kinney’s going to speak on Africa and I want you to go instead of me.”

“Mother!” she cried, astonished, sinking on the firm square bed. Why, her mother had never been ill! She was a little thinner, perhaps — She searched her mother’s face. “Why haven’t you told us?”

“I’ve wanted to keep up,” her mother said wearily. “I’ve always felt I ought to keep up before the children. Trouble comes soon enough. Children oughtn’t to share their parents’ troubles.”

She stared at her mother. “I didn’t know you had any troubles,” she said in a low voice.

“I didn’t mean you should,” her mother replied. “I wouldn’t now, only I’m in pain — and yesterday morning when I went into your room, Joan, it came over me that you aren’t a child anymore. You’re a woman grown, so tall as you are, and I can’t keep trouble from you any longer.”

Joan could not answer. This was not her mother, this woman sitting slackly in an old warped chair, the smile gone from her face as though she had never smiled. She felt afraid of her.

“I’ll do anything I can, of course,” she said uncertainly. Had she been in the garden in the sunshine ten minutes ago?

“I have something wrong with me,” her mother said vaguely. “I haven’t been right since Francis was born.” She paused, embarrassed, and went on with difficulty. “He was such a big baby and I was torn somehow.” She did not look at Joan, but turned her head and stared out of the window. About her hung shyness. She could not quite forget that this tall young woman had also been born of her. A slight repulsion wavered between them. Joan, filled with anxiety, felt a thread of disgust in the anxiety and instantly would not feel it. If this were only a strange woman she would have poured out quick sympathy. It was easy to be kind to strangers. But this woman was also her mother. She felt entangled in something she did not understand, entangled in a bodily repulsive way with her father, with her mother, even with Rose and with Francis. They were all bodily entangled together. She hated it and rose restlessly from the bed. She wanted to be happy all the time.

“Have you seen the doctor?” she asked. She went to the other window away from her mother and looked out. She should not have asked the question so coldly. Why was she cold to her mother now? She was afraid of something. She did not want her mother to come close like this. She wanted her mother as she had always been, cheerful and sure and surrounding them with warm pleasantness.

“Yes, I’ve seen Dr. Crabbe,” her mother answered unwillingly.

“Dr. Crabbe!” Joan repeated. “He’s nothing but an old country doctor.”

“He was with me when each of you was born and he knows me,” her mother replied simply.

Again she felt the throb of rushing repulsion. Her body — once it had been torn from her mother’s flesh, held in old Dr. Crabbe’s rough coarse hands. She knew his hands. She had felt the thick fingers pushing bluntly into her mouth when she was a child, to feel a loose tooth, to hold down her tongue when he looked at her sore throat. She remembered his peering red face coming hugely near, spotted with scars and badly shaved. He opened his mouth while he stared and his teeth were stained with tobacco and he breathed heavily through his hairy nostrils. His eyebrows were like yellow beards, and whiskers an inch long grew out of his ears. He was as short and thick as a topped tree.

“You ought to see somebody else,” she said, looking steadily out of the window. Now Mrs. Parsons was going down the street. She had been to the post office again and under her arm was a bulky package — a returned manuscript, of course. If this were her mother sitting here as usual in the rocking chair, her hands busy instead of lying loosely like that in her lap, she would cry, “Mrs. Parsons has her novel back again — I wonder which one it is?” and her mother would answer kindly, “Poor soul, don’t laugh at her. It’s been such a curse in that family, her wanting to write novels. I declare I don’t see how Ned and Emily have grown up so good. It’s really poisoned Ed’s life. He told me once he felt he’d never really had a wife or the children a mother. They don’t mean anything to her beside those novels she writes. She measures her whole life by them. If one were accepted I don’t believe she’d ask for heaven. She’s been like that ever since I knew her.”

But now it was trivial to speak of Mrs. Parsons. “What does Father say?” she asked.

There was no answer. She turned and saw her mother’s eyes downcast, but along the edges of the lids there were tears. “Mother!” she cried. She rushed to her mother and knelt beside her and put her arms about her. Strange — strange to feel her mother’s body relax in her arms! The repulsion was gone. She wrapped her arms about her mother and pressed her head down upon her shoulder. “Mother — Mother — Mother—” she said over and over. Oh, what was this disaster?

“There’s no use telling your father anything,” her mother said, choking. “He doesn’t understand anything — he never has.”

There was the closed door and the subdued passionate voices were behind it. Was this — but before she could ask the question her mother straightened herself and wiped her eyes.

“I’m a wicked woman,” she said suddenly. “I don’t know what came over me to say that. Your father is a wonderfully good man. I’ve a lot to be thankful for. I look at poor Mrs. Weeks and thank God — that awful Mr. Weeks—” she pushed Joan aside and got to her feet and took the pins out of her long hair. She went to the bureau and picked up a brush and began to brush her hair swiftly. “I haven’t anything to complain of,” she said. “Lots of women at my time of life don’t feel quite as strong as they did.”

So she pushed her daughter away, and Joan stood up quickly, shy to the heart, made ridiculous. She hesitated, and then said, “What shall I do this afternoon, Mother? I want to help.”

“Just go to the meeting for me, dear,” her mother said calmly. She coiled her hair on top of her head and thrust the gray bone pins in swiftly. “Just make a few remarks about Miss Kinney — anything you like — you know her. If you can, dear — I think I will just rest the once. I’ll be all right with an afternoon’s rest. And Rose will go — she always wants to go—”

She looked into the mirror at her mother’s face. Framed and in the bright light of the windows it looked whiter and more tired than it would when she turned around. “Of course I will,” she said to the white face. She went to the door, and there hesitated again. After all, there had been this half hour. “Just the same, you ought to see another doctor,” she said.

“Maybe I will one of these days,” her mother said tranquilly, busy about her hair.

She went out and left her mother standing before the mirror.

In the afternoon before she went to the meeting she tiptoed to her mother’s room. The door was open and she went in softly. Her mother lay asleep on the bed, covered by an old knitted afghan the Ladies’ Aid had given her, once gay, but now faded into squares of faintly varied pallors. Above it her mother’s face showed darkly pale, the mouth a little open, and ashen shadows about the nostrils and eyes. She could scarcely believe this was the same face she had watched secretly at the table, for at the noon dinner her mother had been quite herself among them. A little quiet perhaps, but then they were used to her rare stillnesses, although they loved her laughter. When they were small children and she fell into stillness they were afraid and begged her, “Mother, what’s the matter? Mother, do please be funny again and laugh!” Sometimes she roused herself, but sometimes she turned her dark eyes on them in terrible gravity and said. “May I not be still sometimes in my life? I want to be still.”

So she would be still and they could scarcely bear it. The whole house was gray with her stillness and they were burdened with it until even the father noticed it.

“Are you ill, Mary?”

“No, Paul,” she answered serenely. “Just still.”

In her stillness they clung to her in misery, not able to leave her, not able to play. When she came out of it they began to live again, and everything took on its true color once more. They ran and sang and shouted and played busily, and they could leave her and run out into the village to look for pleasure.

Now, looking down at the sleeping face, Joan felt again the old dependence on her mother’s mood. Everything was wrong. She turned away frightened, and went softly from the room. The meeting suddenly became a burden to her. It would not be fun. She dreaded it — she did not like to hear sad things told, not even about people heathen and far away. She had not been to a missionary meeting for years, not since she was a little girl too small to leave at home alone. And she dreaded it because her mother had dreaded it always, too, although she made jokes about it. Still it had been one of her tasks, and when it was over she always came home sparkling and laughing and relieved. “There,” she would cry, “I’m done with the heathen for another month!”

Nevertheless she had always worked steadily, since she was the minister’s wife, at getting together the money the church promised. One hundred dollars each year they promised and the women planned and contrived and gave chicken suppers at which they sold bags and lace-edged handkerchiefs and embroidered towels and knit dishcloths and a score of such small things which they made and bought of each other, although they would have preferred neither to make nor to buy. Old Mrs. Mark regularly bought the same bag each year and donated it the next and bought it again, without pretense, and called it “my missionary bag.” … Her mother, Joan perceived with surprise as she went slowly downstairs, had done many things she hated.

At the door she came upon Rose, dressed in white linen and with her wide straw hat already on her head. “Shall I go with you, Joan?” she inquired seriously.

“If you like,” Joan said. She walked across the lawn beside Rose, constrained. She was somehow very constrained with Rose now. She had not thought much about her these last years. She had been too busy feeling her own growth. But Rose had been growing, too. After the summer it would be her turn to go away to school.

“What shall you do after the summer, Joan?” Rose asked suddenly, turning her large sweet eyes upon her sister. “What do you plan for your life?”

Plan? She planned everything. But she answered vaguely, “I don’t know—” She could not tell Rose anything. But then it was true she did not know.

Besides, they were at the church. Miss Kinney came to them out of the side door, and she was softly anxious, her small nose trembling like a rabbit’s. “I’m always nervous before I speak,” she began breathlessly. “But somehow God gives me strength as I go on. I miss your dear mother. She did cheer me up always at the beginning — she always looked so interested—”

Under her arm was a portfolio of pictures. She had shown them many times, but still they were pictures of Africa and she had been there. Yes, she had walked among jungle trees and beneath swinging serpents and she had crept out of a hut on a tropical summer’s night and seen the moon red behind palm trees and she had heard the throbbing beat of deep-toned distant drums. Once for five years out of her life she had escaped from this village and from her father and her mother. She said the voice of God called her. No other voice could have enticed her, not love, not lust. But when she was thirty-three, “yet not too old to learn the language,” she always explained, she obeyed God’s call, as she put it, and became a missionary.

Mr. and Mrs. Kinney had been shocked and deserted in their dignified old house. But they could not in decency protest against God as they had against the voices of young men. Nevertheless they delayed her. They said, “Sarah is impetuous. She decides everything so quickly.” So year after year they delayed her, as they had delayed the two young men who had loved her childish ardent eyes, who came and waited and went away. Yet the parents could not drive away God. She kept him invisible but constantly beside her. “I have the call,” she reiterated with more firmness than she had ever said anything in her life.

She grew quite wildly firm after a year or two, so that Dr. Crabbe said gruffly, “Let the girl have her own way for once or she’ll have to be put into an asylum.”

Old Mrs. Kinney wailed aloud, “But what shall we do without her? Her father’s devoted to her. She’s all we have — our only child!”

“You ought to have had grandchildren ten years ago,” he replied with rudeness.

“Sarah’s delicate,” said Mrs. Kinney positively. She was old, but she was very pretty and fragile and her house was exquisite. Mrs. Kinney had inherited the house and some money with it, and neither she nor Mr. Kinney had ever needed to do anything.

So they never did anything, and Mrs. Kinney, who had always been afraid of everything, grew more afraid as the years went on. She would never, she said years ago, ride in one of these new automobiles. It was tempting God, it was suicide. She walked down the street every afternoon a little way, clinging to Mr. Kinney’s arm, and on Sundays they walked the three blocks to church and back. She always explained, “We are both rather delicate. We have to take care of ourselves. Sarah inherits my delicate constitution, I’m sorry to say.”

But for once Sarah was not delicate. She took ship and made the voyage breathless and arrived at the remote mission in the jungle and plunged intensely into the life. Hardship could not touch her and she was afraid of nothing, although always breathless.

After five years when she came on a furlough the old pair had her again. They clutched her with their love. They spoke piteously of their age, of their fragility. She heard her father’s cough. She saw her mother’s hand tremble with a palsy. Now they did not speak of her delicateness. Instead they spoke of her strength. They cried, “You are so young and strong and we will soon be gone. You will never miss a year out of your life. It will not be more than a year.”

She waited year upon year. She served six years’ waiting and her father died. Then her mother, trembling very much and grown as thin as a dried leaf, cried, “Sarah, can you bear to leave me alone? It will not be more than a year. I shall not live the year out.”

So Sarah Kinney waited a year and two years and then five years and now she was beginning the seventh year of her waiting, and the old woman lived fretfully on, thin to her bones, trembling so that she must be fed and dressed like a child, and each day death was no nearer. Of course Miss Kinney was tender with her and never even in her heart did she allow herself to hope for anything except her mother’s health. Her one self-indulgence was to remember the five years of her own life in Africa, to remember them and hope.

She stood before the two young girls now, happy because she could remember again, a narrow spare old-maidenly figure, so much taller than everyone else that she had stooped timidly since she was sixteen and first saw how she really looked in the mirror, her hair, now whiter than her mother’s, flaring about her small excited face. “Five blessed years, dear friends,” she began, her voice quivering. “I did God’s work. The African people came to me — the dear people. They were not afraid of me at all. I loved them. When they were ill it was such joy to me — joy to minister to them, I mean — the little babies especially were so sweet. They were not afraid of me, although I know I looked strange to them. You know we do look strange and pale in a country where everybody is black.”

Her gaze fluttered from one face to the other, all unbelieving because they remembered her as a small sickly child with protruding front teeth, upon Rose, sitting rapt and listening, her eyes downcast, her soft hands folded in her lap, and then she found Joan’s eyes. Joan felt the beseeching eyes like lighted lamps upon her face. Staring down at her the white-haired woman hesitated, and her voice deepened and trembled. “It wasn’t only the people,” she said.

In the bare quiet room no one knew what she was saying, not even Rose, dreaming Rose, who turned everything into her own thoughts. No one understood except Joan, and to Joan this misty-eyed woman, whose wild white hair would not lie smooth, talked. She talked on and on, the words rumbling out of her, trying to make Joan see. Mrs. Parsons leaned over to whisper to Mrs. Winters. “Poor Sarah Kinney!” But Mrs. Winters said aloud, “Joan, I think we ought to take up the collection and adjourn. I’ve got company coming for supper.”

Instantly Miss Kinney recalled herself. She began to gather up her pictures, her fingers shaking. Her voice quavered, shocked, apologetic, “Oh, is it late? Oh, I’m so sorry. When I get talking about my Africa—”

Joan started guiltily. Was it so late? She ought to have held the meeting better. She tore her eyes from Miss Kinney and gave a shudder of relief. She rose and said clearly as her mother might have done, “After the collection for the mission at Banpu — Rose, will you take the collection? — we will sing hymn number sixty-one and the meeting will be adjourned.”

The minute bits of copper and silver tinkled the plate that Rose passed quietly and they stood to sing. The women sang heartily and quickly. They were thinking of suppers to be set upon their tables, of men and children to be fed. If food were delayed a man might growl sourly, “Better be taking care of your own family!” They sang hastily, “The Son of God goes forth to war.” Joan heard their loud plain voices, slightly out of tune. She looked at their honest aging faces. No young women came to missionary meetings. It was one of her mother’s problems. “How shall we get the young ones interested?” She looked from one to the other of the kind abstracted faces, at the frank open mouths, at cotton gloves being slipped surreptitiously on roughened hands. Her heart warmed to them. She was glad to be back among them. She was safe with them. How good they all were, how dear, how kind they were to care about Africa! Why should they give their pennies to sick babies in Banpu? Their own babies were often ill — a hospital in Banpu when there was none in Middlehope. But they would go on giving, go on rolling bandages and sending soap and safety pins because they were so patiently kind. Any tale of sorrow would take their pennies from them in small steady streams — sorrows of people whom they would never see.

She loved them warmly. They were so dear and warm about her. They stopped even in their hurry to say, “Joan, I’m sorry about your mother. I’ll be over to see her tomorrow sure.” “I’m making yeasten rolls, Joan, tell your mother, and I’ll send her a pan.” “I’ll bring a jar of crab-apple jell. She’s always been partial to my jell.”—She felt comforted, so comforted that she forgot Miss Kinney until everyone was gone in the summer dusk, all except Miss Kinney and Rose and herself. Then she remembered and turned contritely to Miss Kinney.

“Oh, Miss Kinney, thank you so much. It’s always so interesting to hear about your experiences in Africa. I’ll tell Mother we had a good meeting.”

“Did you really think so, dear?” Miss Kinney’s voice came out of the twilight under the trees toned in delicate wistfulness. “I sometimes think — I’m afraid I talk — you see, it’s the only thing that ever really happened to me. I still hope to return, you know, some day, when dear Mother is safe in heaven. She’s eighty-two this year. Of course I couldn’t leave her. But I practice the Banpu words every day so that I don’t forget the language. I could pick up right where I left off.”

Rose had said nothing. She had stood, a younger quiet figure behind her sister. But now she spoke, her voice soft. “You made me see everything. I saw it all just as it is.”

Miss Kinney looked up at her, her face a pale emptiness in the shadows, and she gasped. She cried out, “Why — why — why — you dear child!” She began to weep a little and reached for Rose’s hand and squeezed it hard and hurried away into the shadows. They walked quietly across the lawn in silence until Rose said softly again. “How wonderful it must be to have served — like that!”

But Joan’s heart rose up. It rose against the sweetness in Rose’s voice. Suddenly she hated sweetness, Rose’s steady unvarying holy sweetness.

“I should hate it,” she said abruptly.

“But, Joan,” Rose protested with gentle reproach, “wouldn’t you go — if God called?”

Her mind glimmered with dark half-formed pictures shaped out of Miss Kinney’s words. She felt the heat, too fierce for health, forcing the strange dark jungles into fearful lush unnatural life. She saw the black people, their eyes gleaming whitely through the jungles.

“No,” she answered shortly, and ran into the house, into her home. She wanted always to stay where it was safe and warm and light. She wanted her own.

When she looked back upon that summer, months after it was over, she saw it was more holiday than she knew at the time. For her mother said no more of her illness. She rose as usual in the morning and when after days Joan put a question to her shyly, for she was still shy of flesh intimacy with her mother, the mother wore her accustomed cheerfulness and she answered, “I’m no worse, anyway. Don’t worry, child. Go on and have your fun this summer. I’m all right.”

And because it was what she wanted to believe Joan believed it and took her pleasure, falling easily back into the old happy dependence. They all leaned more than ever upon the mother. The house was full of their merriment. Tall half-grown boys stumbled up the wooden steps of the porch and shouted for Francis, and when he came roaring to meet them they clattered off to fish and to swim and to their own haunts by river and road. Older youths came shyly asking for Joan, and Rob Winters asked always for Rose. He was a tall fair grave boy, his parents’ only son, in school to be a minister, and careful and always anxious to be right. If Rose minded that only this one asked for her she did not show it. She met him with her invariable quiet smile and they went away alone together.

But Joan did not want to be alone with any of the ones who came to find her. She welcomed anyone. She was full of warmth, ready to live, hungry to laugh. All she did she did as though she starved for it. A small picnic of village boys and girls was a feast to her. She woke on the morning of a day set for pleasure and found her heart beating with pure joy and a song in her mouth ready. It did not matter who was to be there, whom she would meet or what she would do in this time of her life, this time when she waited, sure of what was to come. It was joyful to rise, to bathe, to dress, to eat, to run out of the house and cry out to other young who came to meet her, to run down the quiet street and plunge into woods and clamber up mountainsides and dive into deep cold pools. She lived in her body only, and all the rest of her lay sleeping, shut off alone and asleep. She scarcely read a book, or if she did it must be some easy story of summer love. For a while she was through with learning. Her body grew very beautiful. Her face rounded and the color of her skin grew dark and rich with sun and health. The hours of play made her eyes merry and her laughter quick and some nonsense was forever bubbling at her lips.

So during the short lovely summer she paid no heed to anyone while she lived for her own sake. Her father was a ghost to her. She kissed him gaily in passing and cried a greeting to him because it was a pleasure to be kind to everyone, and then he was gone from her mind. Rose she forgot except as they passed and then she laid a careless gay hand upon her sister’s cheek, and Francis was nothing to her except to give and receive teasing and laughter.

One would have said she was in love and yet she was not. She was not in love with anyone or anything except with the whole world. She was in love with the morning and the sun. She was in love with rain and moonlight. But she was not deceived by any hot young voice swearing his love by the moon. She smiled and listened gladly, because she liked to listen to love, to any love while she waited, and out of what she heard she made dreams. Ned Parsons, strumming his guitar under the wisteria and staring lovesick into her eyes, could make her smile. She could not love Ned, whom she had always known and whom as a little girl she had fought and conquered many times, poor Ned to whom his mother had given with her blood her foolish romantic imagination. He did not look like Emily, dusky, stocky Emily who was like her father. Emily was going to the city to get a job. “I’ve got to get away from here,” she told Joan tersely. “I want to make my own way.” But Joan said quickly, “I’ll never go away from home. I love it here in the village, with everybody always exactly the same.”

“I don’t,” said Emily shortly.

But then Emily never laughed. And Emily was ugly, with her long hard upper lip and coarse black hair and her decided way of saying even small things such as wanting the sugar passed to her. Joan liked Ned better, though she knew even in the moonlight that his pale gray eyes were a little popped and she heard in the midst of his loving how his big bony fingers faltered upon the strings and she winced at every discord. She was not deceived by him, but in his reedy voice she heard another voice. In his gangling body bent toward her she dreamed another devotion, and so she cried softly, “I love music under the moon!” And she cried it with such ardor that he felt it next to love for him. Meanwhile, she gazed across the lawn while he sang and saw with ecstasy the tall deep shadow the church threw among the lighter shadowing trees. Someday, somewhere, in a lovelier place upon this earth, she would hear a song, a great new song. Because of this she was tender to Ned, warm even to Jackie Weeks who was still in high school, warm to every voice she heard. So she enjoyed everything, a campfire beside a lake, a canoe darting down a stream, a bird’s call in the night.

And there was always about her the good steady warmth of her home. She accepted her mother’s ready smile and pushed away a foreboding that her mother grew thinner or that she seemed tired. Once in the night, near the end of the summer, she woke to hear the old subdued quarrel behind the bedroom door. Or was it a quarrel? She did not know; she did not want to know. She wrapped her braid about her ears and pushed her head into the softness of her pillow and slept again deeply. When the morning came she thought she had dreamed it. Surely she had dreamed it.

Suddenly the summer ended. Her mother said one day, “It is Rose’s turn now. I must see Rose through four years of college. When Rose is through and Francis, when you are all ready to begin your own lives, then I will rest — not just rest a little of an afternoon, but a long rest. I’m going to be selfish then for a long while.” She smiled over a heap of flowered summery lawn she had in her lap and threaded her needle again with pink silk.

“As if you could be selfish!” Joan cried. She was still not dressed for the day, though it was nearly noon. The morning had turned gray and soft with rain and she had danced late at a party the night before and then slept far into the morning and waking very hungry had gone to find food. Now she sat in her yellow silk pajamas upon her mother’s bed, a slice of bread and apple butter in her hand — she was always hungry — and her mind full of sweet leisure. But her mother was unexpectedly grave. “I could do with a rest,” she said, sighing. Then she made haste to amend it. “Oh, I don’t mean I don’t want to work. I’ve always enjoyed every kind of work. When I was a girl I used to think I didn’t like sweeping. But I’ve learned to like it, too, now, through having to do it so much. One might as well enjoy what one has to do. I like now to feel a room grow clean under a strong broom. … There comes Mrs. Billings. I daresay she wants me to tell her what to talk about at Ladies’ Aid tomorrow. She is a good soul — but stupid. Darling, would you mind calling Rose and having her slip this dress on? You have such a good eye for style, and I want her dresses to look right when she goes away. I’ll try to get rid of Mrs. Billings, quickly.” Her mother was up swiftly and with energy, calling as she went, “Rose — Rose, come and try on your dress—”

Joan, shaking out the flowery folds, waited while Rose took off her dress. Then she dropped down the fluffy stuff over Rose’s head and over the smooth round shoulders and met Rose’s eyes in the mirror. “Oh, Rose, you’re pretty,” she cried in honest praise. “I’m glad it’s your turn for the new things.”

The small multicolored flowers upon the pink background suited the round pale face, the dark eyes. But Rose was composed. She smiled a little and said nothing. Joan cried at her again. “Don’t you care, Rose? Don’t you want to be pretty? When I was your age I was so frightened I’d never be pretty. You’re so much prettier than I was then. I’m too big — bony big — and my mouth is awful. I try to think it isn’t, but I know it is.”

Rose hesitated. “I don’t want to think of such things,” she replied.

“But you are really pretty,” Joan said laughing. “Silly little saint!” She shook the pretty shoulders lightly. Funny Rose, always afraid of sin! She began to sing carelessly, her mouth full of pins, fitting the dress here and there, letting it into a little more fullness at the breast — Rose’s breasts were rounder than her own — tightening it at the waist. She felt her sister’s body soft and warm under the lawn, a girlish shape. Here and there her fingers touched the fine skin. She saw the little yellow-brown curls soft upon the bent white neck. Tenderness flowed up in her for her sister. She did not often feel near to Rose like this. The touch of Rose’s flesh brought her near, the service she did her brought her near. She felt warm toward the young girl, warm as a mother might, full of generous love for her.

“Little, little saint,” she murmured and smiled intimately and kindly into Rose’s eyes in the mirror. She was so much bigger than Rose. She would always take care of Rose.

Then abruptly one day the house was empty without Rose. Until now when each summer ended it had been she, Joan, who had gone away to fresh faces and new life; she who when she came back again made complete the family. Now she stood with her father and her mother and watched Rose’s face at the train window with secret dismay. Her own safe years, years when she knew clearly what to do, were now so quickly gone. Slow in passing, now that they were gone, they were so swiftly gone.

When they walked home together in the early sunlight of a September morning she felt very grave. Her holiday was over. Even though she walked to her home and between these two who had always given her shelter, she was no longer sheltered. She must push out from between them, go out from her home. She must begin something for herself if she were to live at the pitch of delight. But she wanted and feared this independence. She wanted to live for herself, and yet she wanted this warm home about her at night.

Her mother looked at her and smiled. “I felt lost when you went away as Rose is doing today. I never get used to any of you going away. The first time you went away I went home and cried.”

“Did you, Mother?” said Joan, astonished, staring. Such a thing had not occurred to her. She had gone away that first morning four years ago filled with herself and with her wonder at what was about to happen to her, and her strong cheerful mother went home and cried because the house was empty without her! She was immeasurably touched and comforted. It was lovely to be loved. Wherever she went there would be this love to which to return. She put out her hand and patted her mother’s gray hair under the small brown homemade velvet toque. Her mother smiled back to her and the moment was warm and close until in mutual shyness they looked away from each other’s eyes.

“I hope,” said her father gently out of his own silence, “that Rose will not lose her faith, even as you did not, Joan. But I never saw a young soul with clearer conviction than hers.”

A guiltiness fell upon Joan. She ought to tell her father she didn’t really know what she believed. But she shrank from hurting him.

“I hope Rose has a good time,” her mother said with energy and then went swiftly on. “Joan, I’ve been thinking that old gold-brown cashmere of mine could make Rose a pretty jumper dress, and the color would be becoming to her. The skirt’s old-fashioned and it has a lot of cloth in the gathers. I believe I’ll set to work on it. It helps to get to work on something.”

Incredibly soon they were home and soon the house was still except for the sounds of the morning. Hannah polishing the stairs, the whir of the sewing machine from the attic where her mother sewed, her father’s slippered footfall in his study. So it might have been if Rose were there. Rose who in her quietness seemed to add nothing to the noise of the house, and yet now the house seemed empty. But it was not that Rose was gone, not that Francis was in school again. It was that she, Joan, was still there, idle, when the others were busy. She must think what to do next. She must of course earn her bread. Her mother had said many times, “Stay at home a year, darling. Take your time.” But she was restless now that the summer was over. It was time to work, to do something else. She wanted the next thing. The house was suddenly too small, the furniture worn and old and tiresome to her sight.

She went to her own room and closed the door and sat down by the window. Where was the mood of the summer gone? Why was she discontented? But the village was absurdly small, a crisscross of half-a-dozen streets, a little nest of poor houses, a few dull folk. She brought to her memory one after another of the houses whose interiors she knew completely, where not a chair or table had been moved since she could remember. She was weary of them. They stood dingy in the sunshine of this day. It was not enough.

I want something more, she thought resolutely. I must find the thing I can do really well. … Maybe music …

But she knew in her secret heart what she wanted to do, and what she could do well. She could love a man well and keep his house clean and make it beautiful and bear his children. It was all she secretly asked of life, that she might follow this old beaten path. But how could love find her, hidden away in a little country manse?

There was a knock at the door and Hannah thrust in her rough red head. “Miss Joan, your pa says there’s a couple downstairs to be married and will you come and be a witness with your ma?”

She rose mechanically, used to the summons. But today there was acuteness in the moment. Downstairs she waited while her father drew off his study gown and put on his old frock coat. The groom was a young country fellow, a hired man, doubtless, upon some farm. His hands hung huge and misshapen and his great stooped shoulders were bursting his coat. The girl was his mate, a strong squat figure, her arms red and thick, her face broad and low-browed and burned red by the sun. They were foreign, sprung from some peasant soil in an older world. They stood awkwardly, closely together, their dull greenish eyes fixed faithfully upon the minister’s face. She could hear their heavy breathing, and on the man’s thick neck she saw the sweat stand out in coarse drops.

It was over in a moment, a few words, a halting promise interchanged, an instant’s suspense about the ring. He fumbled at the girl’s finger and she snatched the ring from him. “Here, give me it,” she said loudly, forgetting where she was. He watched absorbed while she worked the thing over her knuckle, and then sighed gustily in relief.

“Now come and have some cake and coffee,” her mother said with brisk kindness. It was her custom. They smiled sheepishly and followed her into the dining room with the stumbling docility of beasts. Behind them Joan saw their hands clasped, two rough knotty young hands, holding each other hard. They would go back to some house, some small wooden house in a field, and they would work and eat and sleep and make crude love and rear children together, mated. It was a life. She was suddenly very lonely. She turned abruptly and went back to her room.

In a night autumn came rushing. The wind blew cold across her sleeping and when she opened her eyes in the morning it was to find upon her bed a shower of leaves from the maple tree outside her window, dry leaves veined with yellow. She sprang up to shut out the cold and saw early frost upon the green grass. The chill woke her sharply and she did not go back to bed. She must get to work this day. As soon as breakfast was over she would work on the prelude she had begun last spring and never finished. She would go over to the church and work alone at the organ. She dressed resolutely and swiftly and ate her breakfast quickly.

Her mother worried, “Joan, you haven’t eaten enough.”

She answered, “I want to get to work, Mother, I must work this very day. I have an idea for my prelude.”

But her mother did not hear her. She sat listening, her head lifted, her hands hovering above the coffee cups. There was a clatter on the stairs and the door burst open and Francis fell into the chair beside her.

“Say, Mom, gimme my food quick, will you? Jackie Weeks said he’d help me with my math this morning if I got there early, and I want to get it done so’s I can go nutting. I’ll bet the frost was hard enough last night to make ’em drop. He’s a shark at math. Lord, how I hate math!”

“Perhaps Joan would help you, darling,” said his mother. “Here — let me butter your muffin. I wish you wouldn’t go so much with Jackie.”

But she would not wait, Joan told herself. She had her own work to do. Besides, her mother had not even heard her. “I’m not good in math, I’m afraid,” she said, and then hated her selfishness. “Of course I will help, Frank,” she said.

“Jackie’ll do it quicker,” he said carelessly, and she was released.

With her music under her arm she walked across the still frosty lawn and into the quiet church. Outside the air was pungent and fresh, electric with cold, but here in the church it was warm and still and untouched by freshness. There was a faint aged odor, the odor of old people, a little sweet, a little dying. She tiptoed through the empty aisle, past the empty pulpit, and sat herself at the organ and opened it and immediately the waiting keys invited her. She was tired of idleness — work was pleasure. She spread her pages and played the first bars softly and critically. She played on and then broke off. There she had stopped writing it down last spring just before Commencement. A melody had come to her and she had written it down in haste and then left it incomplete because they had called for her, Mary Robey and Patty, her roommates.

“Joan — Joanna! Practice — practice for the senior parade!”

The senior parade was the most important thing in the world to her then. It was nothing now — less than a memory. Strange how she could hear their voices and yet she did not want to see them — not really. They were over, somehow. She wanted — she wanted — not them — someone. She set herself resolutely to the music. Slip there into a fourth, now minor it in the left hand, now repeat the theme slowly and so through the variation to the last bar — the last chord — major, minor? A fifth, perhaps. She moved her fingers tentatively over the keys, humming the air softly — so — to a minor sixth. There let it be. Though it might sound unfinished, she could not find another end.

She tried it over again from the beginning. The church, empty as a shell, echoed deeply behind her. It flung back at her her own lonely music. The melody ran through the arches and came back again to her ears and she listened, absorbed. Not quite right somehow, not quite right. The minor note was not introduced soon enough into the melody of the right hand. It began too gaily for its end. The minor note must be sounded very soon, there in the beginning. She put her pencil to her lips and dotted in a note and then tried it over softly.

“That is right,” said a voice out of the church. She leaped up from the seat and turned. There beneath the pulpit in the front pew sat Martin Bradley. His hat was on his knee and in his hand was a roll of music. She remembered instantly that it was Friday morning. Of course he always practiced on Friday mornings. How could she have forgotten it when all through her childhood her Friday mornings had echoed with strains of his music from the church? She ran quickly to the choir rail.

“Oh, I’m sorry,” she gasped, looking down at him.

He rose gracefully and smiled. “Why?” he asked simply. “It’s been delightful. That was a charming little thing — delicately sad. What is it?”

“I made it,” she answered shyly.

His face, upturned like this, was new to her, a narrow sensitive face. He did not look old at all, even with his gray hair.

“I can’t make up my mind where to introduce the fifth,” she added with impulsive confidence.

“Let me see.” He mounted the steps lightly, a spare, graceful figure, and came to the organ and sat down. Very precisely and clearly he began to play her prelude. Strange to hear her own music come like this from his hands! She was intensely conscious of him, his look, his presence; the church was full of his presence. Suddenly he began to vary it. “How’s this — and this—” He modulated softly, plainly. “Is it your idea still?”

“Yes, yes, that’s lovely,” she said eagerly. “Now bear upon that sixth and repeat it in the left hand. Yes!” she cried delightedly. “Why didn’t I see how to do it myself?” He played on. The fine black hair grew smoothly upon his neck, a little silvery at the edge. She was listening to the music, thinking about the music, but she saw his brown neck with the fine short clipped hair smoothly upon it, and the white about his ears, as smooth as though the white were brushed evenly over his hair. When he turned to her, questioning, she saw the dark skin wrinkled closely about his eyes, but he was not old, not as old as she had thought he was. She liked the spare distinguished line of his shoulder. “So — to the minor end,” he finished, and wheeled around and smiled at her.

“Thank you,” she said with ardor, and he smiled again quickly and then she was shy and began to gather her music together.

“Don’t go,” he said.

“I must,” she answered, and then wondered at her urgency. She did not need to go. She might linger here as long as she liked and no one would miss her. But still she was urgent to go away. What should she talk about to him? For now she did not see him at all as Mrs. Bradley’s son, for whom the old woman searched out tidbits. He was a man, mysterious and able, who made his own life in a great city, and only slept in this village. Doubtless he knew many women, beautiful and clever, and she was only a girl out of school. Beside his finished slightness she felt herself too hearty and too big and hopelessly young. Then she found herself looking down into his smiling steady eyes, and she saw he thought she was pretty. She was relieved and at ease, and mischief rose in her. She smiled back at him.

“I must go and help my mother. She’s making a dress for Rose.”

“You look like a tall pretty boy. A boy doesn’t sew!”

He was teasing her and she laughed with pleasure. “I can cook and sew and sweep and make beds and lead missionary meetings and dance and swim—”

“Surely out of so much there is something we can do together?”

She felt a heat run into all her veins. It was the first time a man had ever asked her — she dismissed with huge momentary scorn all the boys she had ever known, and looked at him, shy again. “Do you sometimes walk — on a Sunday afternoon?” he continued.

“I can,” she said with gravity.

“Then Sunday — about four? If I let you go now?”

“At four,” she promised, very gay.

He turned again to the organ, smiled at her, nodded, and began to play long smooth rills of notes. She walked softly away and the music followed her across the lawn and into the house. She went to her own room and opened a window and the music mounted and climbed in, muted but still clear. He was playing gloriously now, swiftly and triumphantly, clear, climactic chords. She sat down to listen, and leaned upon the window.

Strange how she had forgotten they were in the church! Something had begun for her, though she did not know what it was. But she knew that now the house was empty no more and now she had plenty to do. There were a hundred things she could do, wanted to do. Why had she felt so empty yesterday? Life was rushing again and full and deep with promise. Anything might happen to her any day now in Middlehope. She laughed and turned contentedly to her desk, and opened the pages of her music score. She would write in the notes he had given her, that muted varying fifth which introduced early the minor theme. Sunday afternoon would be here before she knew it.

“But I can’t see what you find in that old man!” her mother was crying at her.

“He isn’t old!” she cried back hotly.

They were in her mother’s bedroom, and her mother had shut the door so that she might say what she had to say. She sat down in the rocking chair and began to rock frantically back and forth, her arms folded tightly across her bosom in the way she had when she was beside herself. Joan stood by the window, rebellious, determined, furious that her mother made her still a child.

“He’s forty-five if he’s a day! You’re twenty-two! Why, he’s old enough to be your father! You’re Ned Parsons’ generation!”

“Ned Parsons bores me,” she answered shortly.

“I thought this summer you liked him—”

“Only to play with—”

“You’ll break my heart — every one of you children seem to have your own special way to break your mother’s heart—”

“It’s not fair for you to try to force me by making me sorry for you,” she answered hardly, shocked at her hardness.

There was silence except for the creak of the rockers. Now she remembered that sometimes in the night, when she heard the subdued quarreling voices, she heard also this same swift loud creak. But she said nothing. She stared steadily out into the gray November afternoon. The leaves were gone already from the trees and the red brick church stood tall and bare and angular, immovably large in the landscape. But it was all nothing to her. In less than ten minutes Martin would be home and the telephone would ring. She would hear his voice. She had been waiting for it all day.

“Has he proposed to you?” her mother asked in a dry voice.

“No,” she replied coldly.

“He’ll never marry you, that’s one comfort,” her mother said bitterly. “He’s philandered with one girl after another. It’s a joke in the village, Martin’s girls. And no one knows what goes on in the city. But he’ll never marry anybody — his mother wouldn’t let him even if he wanted to. But he’ll never want to. There’s talk about him — I can’t tell you—” She paused a moment and went on with difficulty. “There’s something downright queer about him. I feel it.”

She would not answer. What did she care what this foolish, little village thought? They did not know Martin. Besides, he had been honest with her. Only yesterday he had said to her, “I won’t pretend never to have loved anyone before. But, darling child, you came when I thought it was all finished. You’ve come like a lovely late spring into my life. And there’s never been anyone like you. You’re everything I’ve wanted — you are a sweet boy, you’re a pretty lady, you—”

“I know all about him,” she said to her mother, her voice very even and clear.

“Joan — Joan — Joan—” her mother cried helplessly. “You’re nothing but a silly child. Don’t you see what you’re doing? Everybody’s talking about you. And your father’s the minister! Why, even Mrs. Winters—”

“Don’t tell me!” she broke in, turning furiously on her mother. “I don’t care — what’s Mrs. Winters?”

Her mother was silent before her fury, but she did not turn away her eyes. She swallowed hard and began again, looking at her steadily, making herself calm and reasonable. “Let’s talk gently, Joan. Every young girl falls in love once with an older man—”

“Listen!” she cried. The telephone rang loudly in the hall and she ran to it. There was his voice at her ear, warm and ardent and rich. He had a beautiful tender voice, not deep, but light and tender as a woman’s.

“Joan?”

“Martin — Martin—”

“Meet me in ten minutes, sweet — in the same spot?”

“Yes.”

She hung the receiver up softly and flung herself into her coat and ran bareheaded from the house into the dusk.

But her mother was in her still. However she might answer rebelliously, however she might run, however she might cry aloud to herself in the dusk that now she would choose her own way and have her own life, her mother had carried her in herself, now she seemed in some strange like way to be sharing her body with her mother. Once she had lain, small and curled, a stubborn part of her mother’s larger being. Now in her own large strong young being her mother held a small dark stubborn part. She could not be free of her mother.

She strode on through the cold darkness and met Martin outside the station and threw herself passionately into the darkness to find his arms and lips. But though it was dark he drew back.

“Wait,” he whispered. “Wait. Someone else got off the train behind me.”

He stood away from her a moment and they waited in the silence. A girl’s figure came by and passed at a little distance.

“Do you recognize her?” he asked in a whisper.

“No,” she replied, shortly and aloud. Her mother in her made her answer shortly. Her mother in her made her go on against her will. “Why should we care? I hate sneaking about.”

He answered very gently. “It’s not sneaking, sweetheart — it’s only being discreet.” He took her arm coaxingly and she could not answer. They walked pressed closely, together in the dusk along a roundabout road by the edge of fields to the other end of the village where he lived. She longed passionately for his arms. She was hungry for his touch upon her. She did not want to make him angry, because when he was angry he did not smile. He was silent then and took his arms away. If he were angry he could leave her with absolute silent suddenness. But her mother was doggedly with her.

“Why should we be discreet? We have nothing to hide.”

“Sweet …” he began, and he reached for her hand and thrust it into his overcoat against his breast. She felt her hand there alive with a separate life. But still her mother drove her hard against him. She had not been willing to hear what her mother said, but she had heard and was saying it over again.

“What’s the end of it all, anyway? Martin, aren’t we ever going to tell anybody?”

Now he stopped and in the lonely back road took her in his arms and kissed her. Against his kisses the voice of her mother struggled once more. “Isn’t our love ever coming to anything?” He gave her no answer except his kisses. He held her against his hot thin body and kissed her again and again and again, hard strong practiced kisses that played intolerably upon her young unused flesh. For a moment the thunder in her ears silenced her mother’s voice, the thunder of her own rising rushing blood. So she was silenced. She put her head down upon his shoulder and stood trembling against him.

In her home her mother said no more. Days passed and she said no more. She moved usually about her household tasks and if she were quiet, Joan would not speak of it. She would not ask why her mother was quiet because she did not want to be shaken in her love. She would not give up her love. She worked every day upon her music, long hours alone in her room, long hours alone in the empty church, but now she was never lonely. She had conceived the idea of a love sequence in music. Each day she would put into it some meaning of her love with Martin. But she had not yet really begun to write it into a shape. As yet it was only a drift of melodies in her imagination.

For now she lived entirely in the secret life of her sudden love. To her mother she was always pleasant, always ready to be helpful, to conciliate her. There was a quick cry always ready on her lips, “Let me do it for you, Mother!” Sometimes her mother would let her take a broom or a duster from her and sometimes she would not. Sometimes she answered tranquilly, “Thank you, child.” But sometimes she cried bitterly, “Go on and do something you really want to do.” Out of this bitterness once she looked at Joan and said hopelessly, “I expected too much — I seem always to have expected too much from my children.” Then Joan went away quickly and in silence, for she would not hear her mother speak of that one thing which now fed her.

Yet she still wanted the old family love about her and now she turned eagerly to her father, grateful for his guileless ignorance of all that went on about him. She knew her mother had not told him anything — why tell him who understood only the mysteries of God? So in the daytime, when she was waiting for the night and Martin, that she might escape her mother she went sometimes with her father along the country roads when he went to visit his people, and she sat silent in his silences or heard him talk of his far thoughts.

In the silence she thought of Martin. But it was not really thinking. It was not her brain saying words and making thoughts about him. It was only that if she were left alone for a moment without occupation, talk in her ears, tools in her hand, a task to be done, suddenly she was empty and in that emptiness there was only Martin. Nothing she could read in books, nothing she had once learned in school, had any meaning for her now. There must be something for hands and feet to do, a question to be heard and answered, or else she was empty and in the emptiness was Martin.

So when her father talked she listened, her upper surface hearing, answering what she scarcely heard. He said, not talking to her, but speaking aloud to himself as he often did riding along the country roads, speaking aloud to himself or to God, “I must enlarge the chapel at South End. I am grieved continually that in that village of several hundred souls there is no real church. People live together like savages without marriage laws and their children are not baptized. Even though they are black they are nevertheless souls in God’s sight. But I need help — I need help — the people in Middlehope don’t help me—”

She listened, and for a moment she heard. Black souls — she remembered. Miss Kinney and Africa. South End was like Africa. The people were black. They were savage — that meant they lived together without marriage laws. At missionary meetings no one spoke about South End. But since she was born she had known that people did not like to pass that way by night. Ever since the factory closed things had been worse, quarreling and feuds between families. Peter Weeks kept saying he was going to open the factory again, but meanwhile people lingered on, waiting and quarreling and drinking.

Her father’s voice continued gently and calmly.

“But if my people do not see it as I do, yet I can say as Christ said also, ‘I have other sheep not of this fold.’ I will tell them God has spoken to me of it. I will proceed upon God’s call and leave it to God that my people will hear his voice also.” He spoke as definitely as though what he had planned to do was done.

She did not answer, letting him talk. On their homeward way her father turned his small old car and they passed by South End. He drove slowly past the chapel, full of plans.

“It’s an ugly place,” she said, looking down the dirty broken street, the shabby people shambling out of doorways.

“It is ugly because it is full of sin,” he replied tranquilly.

But now she did not want to hear him. She wanted to hurry away from South End and get home, for the afternoon was late and she must be there to meet Martin.

Yet her father had his part in her, too. If her mother had made and fed her body, here was her father, and he had fed her spirit. Day by day, week by week, by his presence, by his words, he had shaped something in her. Her mother’s part in her was passionate and dark and strong and hard with good sense. “He will never marry you,” her mother cried in her continually now. But her father’s part in her was not weaker than her mother’s. He was not in her blood. He had not shaped her bones or created her flesh. But he had breathed into her life of a sort, a life not of this world. He had informed her spirit. He said, “It is ugly because it is sinful,” and she understood him.

She could not, therefore, forever live quite wholly in her body with Martin. Her soul had a hunger, too. Her father had not satisfied her soul, but he had fed it enough to keep it alive. It was alive and hungering in her so that she wanted to talk to Martin, to feel his mind and hers in communion. But he did not talk to her. When she talked he listened smiling, tolerant of her as of a child, and then he took her into his arms and kissed her again and again. It was his only answer to her, and after a while she foresaw, dimly, that this would not be enough. But as yet this was enough, or nearly enough for joy. The very strength she had from her mother’s share in her being, the dark earthy strength, made her hungry for joy and Martin was the only means that had come to her. She did not see him for himself, but only as a means of joy. For it was indeed joy to have him kiss her as often as he would, because it was a man’s lips upon hers. It was a joy to have his hands upon her hands, even though she was secretly ashamed because her hands were broader than his and harder in the palm. It was joy to have his touch smoothly upon her throat, delicately at her breast. She called these lips, these hands, this man’s shape that stirred her, Martin. That he could by his music also move her heart did not make the true Martin the more clear to her. He had her by the blood.

And yet he did no more than kiss her and fondle her when they were alone — no more than that. He was very guarded. She made her joy out of very little — a moment or so every day when she could meet him at the train, a half hour in the church when they were alone on Fridays. There by the organ she bent to him while he played, leaning her cheek against his hair, watching his quick supple narrow hands upon the keys. Or she waited for him, sitting quietly in a pew while he played over and over again a phrase that did not please him. And he let her wait.

For now as months went on he changed, as often as a woman might change — as she, indeed, never changed, because she did not know how. It was her being to be straight and simple and unchanging. But he was delicately hot and cold, and she did not know what to do with him, or how to shape herself to his changefulness. Sometimes he was anxious and then he forced her to leave him soon. The church, he said, was so near her parents. They might be discovered. He was afraid her mother might discover them. He was cold and hot together, a strange cold hot creature. Sometimes he kept her waiting miserably, shy because of her youth and his maturity. Sometimes he came late to practice and he said coldly and formally when he found her already there, “Good morning, Joan,” as though she were a little girl, and he went directly to the organ and began to play, and did not touch her. In his aloofness he behaved as though he had never touched her. Then she did not know what to do. Once in the spring, in a fury of hurt she had run noisily out of the church and to her own room, and there she sat shivering by the window she still must open to hear him play. He played on and on steadily. Surely he did not even turn once to see if she were there. When at last he stopped she closed the window. … Now he missed her. Now with some excuse he would come to the door of the manse and ask for her. …

But he did not. She saw him walk quietly and gracefully down the street toward his mother’s house. That day and the next she did not go to meet him anywhere. He did not call her and she forced herself to silence. On Sunday morning he came into the church before the people as he always did, and he did not look at her. But by now her heart was like a beaten puppy. For her own sake she must not go to meet him again. She swore she would not meet him in the afternoon in the deep hidden spot they had, a small well-like dale between two sharp little hills, halfway to South End.

But she went. He was there before her and without a word he began to kiss her and to fondle her with his smooth expert hands. And she had not the heart to ask why two days ago he had not kissed her or wanted to touch her. She did not understand him. He was strange and not to be understood. She only said sadly and at last after long silence, “Why do you love me at all?”

“Why do I love you?” he repeated. They had risen from the log where they had sat. He looked up at her, and ardor flew into his eyes again. “You’re like a lovely boy, Joan,” he said. “I love you because you’re so lovely — and like a boy — you’ve a boy’s head and a boy’s mouth. Look at your hands—” He held outspread on his own palm her strong spare hand. “Even your hand is like a boy’s! I wish you’d cut off your long hair.”

His face was dry and brown and wrinkled in the hard sunlight and for the first time he looked old to her. She saw him for one moment as himself, as Martin Bradley who had always lived in the village. Something repelled her. Was there some odor about him? It was faintly sweet, faintly vile. It was like a perfume a woman might have used upon her handkerchief yesterday.

“We’ll never be married,” she said suddenly.

“Darling—” he began.

“You’ll never marry anybody,” she said.

“Darling,” he began again, and drew her toward him by the hand he held.

But now she knew he was repulsive to her. “No,” she said abruptly. “I’m going to South End to meet my father at the mission.” She remembered that on Sunday afternoon her father went to South End. She could go to her father. She wanted her father.

She strode off sharply and left him on the instant. She held her body straight and hard and she did not look back once to see what he did. But within herself she began to weep. Behind her straight grave face she was weeping inwardly and bitterly, and when she asked herself why, she found herself crying in her heart, “I wish it had not been he who kissed me first.” But she forced her feet to go on and on, and soon she was at her father’s chapel door.

In the small bare room, she sat down at the very back and watched. The room was crowded with shuffling curious people. They were dark and sullen. They were yellow and livid. They were filled with black blood and white, with blood ill-fused and cross-currented. But when they were old, their faces grew placid, aged beyond good or evil, as tranquil after evil years as Mr. Parker or Mrs. Parsons in their goodness. All the faces were upturned to her father who towered over them.

She turned her face upward to him, too, with a rushing sense of safety in his goodness. He was to be trusted because he was so good, so simply good. She lifted her face to him again.

But inside her body something beat and ached strongly. Her defrauded body, denied, drew back upon itself its own ardor. To what should touch and kiss proceed, then? her body inquired most passionately. To which her good brain answered coldly and relentlessly, “He would never have married me.”

So she turned to her father and received from him hungrily another sort of food. Among all the others she sat and received certain words for food. “And Jesus Said, ‘Come unto me all ye—’” Surely this was a sort of food her father gave her, too, while he gave to the others. She listened anxiously when he told of the prodigal son. She listened, groping for something from her father.

But then it seemed to her she could not, after all, bear his unearthly physical presence. While he was standing in benediction over the restless half-subdued crowd she slipped away and swung solitary down the country road toward home. She was glad for the dusk. No need to turn her head now toward that dale, no need, for he was long gone. She was clear of him now. No more — no more of his kisses! Her mother and her father had her back again. She would go back into them. Tomorrow she would humble herself and say to her mother, “I have been a fool.” The prodigal son two thousand years ago in the old story had said, “I have sinned.” Perhaps it was the same thing. She turned at the gate of the manse to enter.

But as she turned she saw someone standing there, waiting for her. It was not a man — not Martin. It was a woman. A trembling hand came out to her and she seized it and knew it.

“Why, Netta Weeks!” she cried. She forced heartiness into her voice. Poor Netta, for whom she was always too busy! They had never had their talk.

“I had to come, Joan — I had to see you—”

“Yes, Netta?”

“Everybody’s saying — they’re all saying—” The voice choked, the twitching hand tried to free itself.

But Joan held it hard. “What are you saying?” she demanded.

“You and Martin — and I saw you once — when I got off the train — I saw him — Oh, Joan, I’ve never told anybody, but we used to go together — and I thought — I was sure if ever he married anybody, he’d marry me!”

Now strength came pouring into her, good scornful prideful strength. Oh, how could she ever be clean of his kisses?

“Did he?” She heard her own voice very cold and clear. “I’m sure he meant it. There’s nothing between Martin Bradley and me.”

“Oh, Joan!” Out of the darkness she felt Netta’s head lean upon her shoulder, and she heard her weep and she felt her hand clutched again. “Oh, Joan, I’m so relieved!”

She shrank away from the leaning head, from the weak hot hand. She did not want to be touched. No one must touch her. “Nothing — nothing at all,” she repeated cheerfully. “Good night.” She moved away quickly toward the house.

But she never went to her mother with any confession of herself. She was saved it. For she could not speak that same night, not with the dry sterile pain she bore in her defrauded body. It was so dry a pain that she felt fevered with it. Her mouth was dry, her palms were dry, when she thought, I will never see him again — I will not. If he comes back I must remember the moment this afternoon when I hated him. I must hold fast to that hate, because he’s never really loved me — never wanted to marry me. While I was loving him terribly, he was only — playing.

She scarcely saw the others in the lamplight. Beside the fire with them she was immensely alone. Far away she saw them, heard them. Her father was saying, “I had a very good meeting at the mission, Mary. I believe the Spirit is working among those people.”

Francis sat in the next room at the dining table whistling as he sharpened a pencil for his homework. She knew the tune, she had heard it often during the winter, and she had sung it at a campfire, delighting in knowing that while she sang her voice rose clear as a thrush’s note above every other, but she could not have spoken its name tonight. Her mother read aloud a letter from Rose, but she could not understand what it told, though her mother said contentedly as she folded the letter, “I am glad the cashmere fitted. The gold is almost the color of her eyes.”

Nothing was near to her. She sat hunched deeply in the old blue chair, staring into the fire, crying to herself, “How shall I ever be clean of his kisses?” And then to her terror she made another cry. “What shall I do if he never kisses me again?” She shivered and stared into the fire, her book open on her knees. Where were they? Why did they not come near, these who were her own? Why was the fire cold? Her mother caught her look and her instinct flew awake, like a bird frightened by the chance touch of a wind, threatening storm.

“Joan, you are ill!”

“No,” she answered quickly. “No, not ill. I’m tired. I’m going to bed. I’m all right.”

She fled from them. She could not speak tonight, not when there were two voices clamoring in her. How could she silence one — how not speak what she did not want to tell? She must wait until she was clear, until she was sure she was glad that Martin was never to touch her again. She lay in her bed and began to sob suddenly and quietly, her face in her pillow. The door opened and she stopped her sobs instantly. She held her breath. It was her mother, driven by unease.

“Sure you’re all right, child?”

She swallowed and turned her face up in the darkness. She made her voice, even and careless. “Sure — only sleepy.”

Her mother came over to the bed, and went to give her one of her seldom given kisses. But she did not move to meet it, and in the darkness the kiss fell upon her hair. Her mother laughed. “Where are you? There — good night, darling!” She patted the covers, waiting a little. But still Joan made her voice even and careless. “Good night, Mother.”

So her mother went away and the door closed. Perhaps tomorrow she could tell. But tonight her breast was hard and cold and shut. She must weep to ease herself, weep as long as she could, so that she might sleep at last.

She was awakened by a soft uncertain knock at the door. It was not a knock she knew. She heard it through her sleep and she seemed to come up for a long way toward it, through a long silence until she heard her own voice calling drowsily, “Yes — yes? Come in—” But she was not awake. She was not awake until the door opened and she saw her father standing there in the doorway, his gray cotton bathrobe clutched about him. He looked immensely tall and thin and out of the folds of the collar his neck rose bent and thin as a bird’s neck, and his head with the high white brow looked much too large for the thin neck.

“You’d better get up, Joan,” he said. “Your mother’s ill this morning.”

Then she was awake indeed. “I’ll be there right away,” she said. But even though alarm was beating in her breast she waited to leap out of bed until he had shut the door softly and carefully and until she heard his slippers pattering down the hall. He had always been shy of his body before his children. She had scarcely seen him even in his gray bathrobe except as a shadowy figure slipping in and out of the bathroom, a towel over his arm. If he met her at such times he did not speak to her. Because of him she stopped now to tie her own kimono securely about her waist and to find her slippers. But she stayed no longer. She hurried fearfully down the hall. Something was about to happen. In the early morning she felt life impending, large, looming, unknown. At her mother’s door she hesitated, dreading not so much to go in as to begin upon something that was about to change. “I’ve got to go on,” she said half-aloud, and opened the door, dreading.

Instantly her dread sharpened and focused upon her mother’s face. The room was empty except for her mother’s face, lying upon the pillow, turned to the door, waiting for it to open. The blankets were drawn tightly about her shoulders, tightly about her neck. Her body lay small and scarcely mounded under the covers. But the face was vivid. Withered, and strangely yellow in the hard morning light, it was vivid because of the great dark despairing eyes.

“I’ve got to give up, Joan,” she said. “It’s my legs. They won’t hold me. I got up to take my bath and they gave under me like old rotten sticks.”

She stared down at her mother’s face, horrified at the change. Surely it had not looked like this yesterday — this was the whiteness of the pillow and the counterpane, this was the bleakness of the gray hair drawn back from the forehead. She was afraid again. “What shall I do?”

“Go downstairs for me when you are dressed.” Now it was her mother deciding, and somehow she was immediately comforted. “See that everything is right for the breakfast. Let me see — It’s Monday. Tell Hannah not to buy much meat — not a big roast or anything. There’s enough left from yesterday — maybe have baked beans for dinner tomorrow and that hash tonight. Frank likes beans. See that your father gets his two cups of coffee — like as not he’ll forget to ask. And I’d started to write to Rose. You’ll find the letter in my desk. Just put a little note in saying I don’t feel so well but I’ll be up tomorrow and mail it so she’ll get it tomorrow. Now hurry, dear—”

“Yes, Mother,” she answered. She felt lighter. Listening to her mother’s commands, hearing her mother’s voice strong, the room was natural to her again. Her mother turned over and closed her eyes. Now she looked more herself and as she might look sleeping. Closing those great shadowy eyes made her face her own again.

“Don’t you want anything to eat?” Joan asked.

“No,” her mother answered drowsily. “I want only to rest. I’ll be up again tomorrow. I’ll just rest a little today. Such a help to have you—”

Her voice dropped off into a whisper and Joan went away. But at the door her mother’s voice caught her and held her back. It came strongly and clearly, so clearly that she turned instantly and saw her mother’s eyes open again. “If Hannah has boiled eggs for breakfast, and she will if you don’t tell her not to, you crack Frank’s for him. He minds hot things — his skin’s so tender.” The eyes stayed open until she answered. “Yes, I will, Mother.”

In her mother’s place at the table she felt strange to herself. Everything was strange because the mother was not there. It was she who bound them into one and when she was not in her own place they were each separate and desultory and critical of each other. “You have made my coffee too sweet,” her father said in mild surprised rebuke.

“Oh, I’m sorry,” she said, in equal surprise. He did not then, as he seemed to do, eat whatever was before him. It was that her mother always set before him what he liked. The eggs came in boiled and she cracked two in a cup for Francis, a quick irritation hot in her breast when they burned her fingers. Why should his fingers not be burned? He was late to his breakfast as usual. She should have called him. Now she remembered that each day their mother called him several times and she had forgotten this morning to call him at all. She must go — but before she could rise he was at the door.

“Say, what’s the matter?” he demanded indignantly. He halted, his eyes astonished upon Joan. “Say, where’s Mom?”

“She’s ill,” Joan answered coldly. But when she looked into his tempestuous face she felt herself beginning to feel like her mother. His cheeks were ruddy and dark and he had put on his red tie. Her voice grew milder. “I forgot she always called you. Here are your eggs. It’s late — you’d better begin.”

Now she could remember what her mother did for Francis. Now she knew she had always secretly noted with a small inner jealousy everything her mother had done for Francis. But she did it all too, this morning, half against her will, buttering his toast, stirring the sugar and cream into his coffee, putting the jam in his reach. Even her voice for the moment sounded like her mother’s voice. “Hannah, bring in fresh toast for Francis — Frank, pass me Father’s cup.”

Then perversely she found a pleasure in it, the pleasure of something to do. Last night she had wept herself to sleep — yesterday she had met Martin in the dale where she would never meet him again. But this morning was another life for her. There were things she must do — a house, a family, a sick woman to be tended. When Francis had swallowed his breakfast and dashed up the stairs to see his mother, before school, when her father had wiped his lips and folded his napkin meticulously into the old silver ring that he had had since he was a child and had gone away into his study as usual, it was somehow pleasant to sit there in her mother’s place. It was pleasant to answer Hannah.

“Miss Joan, I’d better be getting down to the butcher’s.”

“I think you needn’t go today, Hannah. We’ll have baked beans tomorrow — Francis likes them — and today we can have that meat left over made into hash.”

“Just as you say,” said Hannah, docile as she had never been before, Hannah who had once spanked her for spilling a tin of coffee into the sink. She clattered a heap of dishes together and went back into the kitchen.

Now as she sat in her mother’s place the whole room began to shape about her in a new way. It was almost like a strange room in some other house. All her life she had seen the table, the chairs, the pictures, the old carved buffet, from her own place and in a certain same composition of planes and angles. At this moment these were all changed, just as the garden was changed as she looked out of the window. She could see from the window what she had not seen before when she sat at the table — the north corner of the lawn, the two big maples, and the front of the church and the steeple, but with the top cut off. She felt the whole house gather about her strangely. Today she was something more to it than she had been yesterday. Yesterday it had looked to her mother but today it looked to her. And it was more to her, too, than it had ever been. Yesterday, only yesterday afternoon, it had been no more than a place from which to escape. In the afternoon after the heavy Sunday dinner it had been dull and close and heavy about her, and she had been impatient with its dinginess, and so she had escaped into the sunshine and then against her own will her feet went toward the dale. But this morning she did not want to escape — she must go all over the house, straightening, freshening, putting fresh flowers in the vases. It was almost her own house.

The door opened and Francis thrust his head in the crack. “You still sitting there? Say, Joan, I didn’t want to wake her up. She was sound asleep and she looks awfully tired, even when she’s asleep. Besides, I didn’t want to tell her I’d be home late tonight — we’re going down the road — a bunch of us—”

She found herself speaking for her mother anxiously. “But, Frank, your lessons—”

But to him she was nothing but herself. “That’s my business,” he retorted, and banged the door.

She jumped from her seat. She was furious with him for a second, a sister’s fury, but her father came in helplessly, and she paused. “What is it, Father?” she asked.

“On Monday afternoon,” he began, “I usually make pastoral visits, and I’ve mislaid my little black book. I cannot remember where I went last, and I usually mark the name. Your mother wrote down the complete list for me alphabetically in a little black book, and I can’t find it.”

She was needed again and so assuaged for Francis’ independence. “Where did you have it, dear?” she asked. Her voice was rich with kindness, as her mother’s was when any of them needed her.

He put his hand to his brow in a gesture of bewilderment. “I can’t remember,” he said in agitation. “Your mother—”

He was for the moment as different to her as the house. Was this simple creature the priest of God whom she saw coming out of the vestry every Sunday morning to preach to them all, radiant with assurance? She said as she would have said to console a child, “It must be in your study somewhere. I’ll come and hunt for it.”

She went out and he followed her hopefully. Under a heap of his papers she found it. “This it?” she said, holding it out to him and smiling.

“Yes,” he answered, and laughed a small noiseless laugh and sat down at his table, instantly forgetting her. She went back to the dining room and began to clear the table. She hurried happily. There was a great deal to do.

All morning the house grew thus at once more strange and more real. She tiptoed several times to her mother’s room, but each time her mother lay motionless in sleep. Heretofore her own room had been the only real part of the house to her. In her own room she had been meticulous, placing the furniture exactly, studying the effect of each picture and small ornament. But the rest of the house had been neutral, a place in which to live and share life. There were certain pictures she did not like and secretly she had wished when she came home from college that her mother would take them down from the walls. She had thought often, If ever I have the chance I’ll take them down. Now she looked at them uncertainly — Hope sitting upon the world, Christ entering Jerusalem, Samuel in the temple. But, no — her mother would be up tomorrow. The house was not quite her own.

Tomorrow came and her mother was not up. When Joan entered her room this second morning already it did not seem strange to see her mother lying there. But today there was fear in her mother’s dark eyes. “You’d better send for Dr. Crabbe, Joan,” she said, and then, “I don’t feel able to get up and wash myself. Fetch the basin here, dear.”

This was no common weariness. Joan, troubled, watched her mother wash herself slowly, stopping often to rest. The skin on her face and hands shone yellowly. She lay back and closed her eyes and the lids were like shadows upon her face. Joan crept on tiptoe with the basin and towels, and set them down and ran to find her father.

At this hour, at seven o’clock in the morning, he was where he had been for thirty years. She knocked furiously upon the door of the study, for even now she would not have thought of entering otherwise. She had seen her mother there knocking. She knocked impatiently and frightened, and then without waiting she pushed into the room. He was on his knees by the worn old brown leather armchair, his head in his hand. At the sound of her entrance he looked up.

“Father,” she cried, “Father, Mother is really ill this morning — you must go for Dr. Crabbe!”

He stared at her bewildered. The change was too swift for him. He had been drenched in the radiance of God, and now he was back in this drab room. “She seemed to sleep quietly all night,” he protested mildly. “She scarcely moved, although sometimes I have been disturbed by her tossing. I left her still sleeping quietly this morning.” He was so bewildered he forgot to rise from his knees.

Joan’s eyes upon him sharply saw him absurd, upon his knees, his pale blue eyes looking up at her childish and absurd. She repeated harshly, “She’s very ill now — you or Francis must go for Dr. Crabbe. … Francis — I’ll send Francis,” she went on quickly. Of course Francis would be quicker than this old man. It was the first time she had known he was really old.

“Frank — Frank!” she called, leaping up the stairs. “Frank!” She burst into his room. He was sleeping vigorously. The sun was streaming across his bed and over his face and in his sleep he was scowling a little against the strong light, his black brows drawn and his mouth pouted in determination to sleep. He was beautiful in his sleep, in the sun. Even in her haste she caught the moment of his beauty, full of youth and wildness though in sleep. She shook his shoulder.

“Frank, get up! Get dressed quickly and get Dr. Crabbe. Take the car and bring him back with you.”

In the strong sun close to him she saw the faint first stubble upon his lips and his chin. They had been shaved — Francis shaving! He had said nothing. Unknown to them all he had been growing into a man. He had gone and bought a razor and secretly he had shaved. None of them knew, unless perhaps their mother.

“What?” he cried. His eyes flew open and he looked up at her, instantly clear and comprehending.

“It’s Mother,” she said.

“Get out of here!” he roared at her, leaping out of bed. “How can I put on my clothes unless you get out?”

She went away comforted. It was strength to feel his impatience and his haste. She had always thought of him as a boy, a child, a younger child. She remembered him as a strong impetuous baby, a frowning red-cheeked little boy. For years he had been this hobbledehoy, tumbling down the stairs, eating voraciously, demanding loudly his freedoms, absorbed in his next good time. Now he was none of these. He was the one person to whom she could turn. He had leaped from his bed, tall and a man. He was strong. Their blood was the same. …

Upstairs at her mother’s door she listened. She heard his clattering footsteps and a moment later she heard the roar of the engine. She looked out of the end window of the hall. He was gone in a whirl of smoke and scattered gravel.

Downstairs in the sitting room Dr. Crabbe laid upon her shoulders the burden of her mother’s life. The uneaten breakfast was cold in the dining room and Hannah stood sniffling and listening at the door. Her father was there, his face solemn, the eyes grave and pure and exalted. Upon his lips was the stern peace of his continuous prayer, “Is this Thy will, O God? Thy will be done.” Francis stood by the window, staring out into the winter sunshine, his face turned away from them all. His hands were thrust furiously deep into his pockets. But it was to Joan Dr. Crabbe spoke, his loud voice sharp and each word a thrust of emphasis. “She should have told me long ago, Joan. I can’t take the responsibility now — you’ll have to get somebody in on consultation. The idea of her dragging on and on in mortal pain!”

In mortal pain! The words were an accusing sword to cut her heart in two. While she had been absorbed in her foolish love, while she had heard no voice but Martin’s, seen no face but Martin’s, dreamed of nothing else, and lived for nothing else, her mother had gone in mortal pain. She pushed Martin away and turned passionately to cry out, her heart strangling in her throat. “How long do you think she’s been suffering?”

“Months — maybe even a year—” he answered shortly. “I can’t get the truth out of her — her damned cheerfulness. She always was that way. You hadn’t been born an hour until she was chirruping, ‘I must get up soon, Doctor, as soon as I can. Paul’s got to go to the presbytery.’ And though she nearly died the last time with that great feller there by the window, it was the same thing. ‘I’ve got to get up as soon as I can’—for something or other. Well, Joan, it’ll be a long day now before she gets up, in my opinion. The thing we have to find out is whether or not she can stand the operation or whether it’s too late whatever we do.”

Out of the silence of doom Francis’ voice came shrill and breaking. “Get the other doctor here, can’t you? What are you all sitting here like this for? Just sitting and sitting—” He turned his face toward them, his face a grimace against weeping. He looked away again quickly.

Dr. Crabbe went on as though he had not heard or seen and Joan received steadily his commands upon her life. “I’ll get the specialist up from the city right away — this afternoon or tomorrow. But it means days and days — maybe even years of nursing. This kind of thing goes on and on even if it’s hopeless — she has a strong constitution — a lot of life — unless they decide to operate and something goes wrong.”

Days and years, days and years — She gazed at Dr. Crabbe’s hairy old face and did not see him. She saw her life passing steadily by — days and years — years and years made of day after day after day. She gave them up in an instant’s foresight. “I will take care of her myself,” she said.

Dr. Crabbe rose. “Good thing you’re home, my girl — good thing you’re big and strong!” he said, brusquely cheerful. “I’ll be getting on after that other chap. Now brace up, the three of you. We’re going to do all we can.”

He was gone in a gust, slapping his thick knee, touching Joan’s cheek delicately with his stubby forefinger, clapping Francis’ hunched shoulders and throwing a short nod at the man.

Then they were alone, the three of them. They were alone and separate because the mother who had bound them together was not there. The mother had bound them together, pouring into each of them a part of herself and gathering them into one whole by the parts of herself. Now she had left them. She was fighting for herself alone, and only as they poured themselves into her could they be united. Each must think of something to do for her. Joan saw her father put his hand to his head in his gesture of bewilderment. His eyes were vague and fixed upon the ground. “Yes … yes …” he whispered, forgetting them. “Yes, O God!” He rose abruptly, and left the room. They heard the door of his study shut. He was in his refuge.

Francis said, “I can’t go to school — I can’t sit there — like any other day—” He stood as he had stood, his back to her, his sharp young shoulder blades drooping through his old coat, his hands jammed in his pockets above the wrists.

But in Joan there was a large sorrowful tranquillity. She looked at Francis’ discontented face and her mother in her spoke to comfort him.

“There will be so many times I’ll need you, just as I needed you to fetch Dr. Crabbe. But just now I have things to do for her that you can’t do. We each have a special thing to do for her. She will want everything to go on in the house as it always has.”

She looked about the room. On the wall opposite hung the Hope drooping over a gray and barren world. She had so hated it. Only yesterday she had planned secretly to take it down to make the house hers. Now she knew she would never take it down. For this house would never be hers. It was her mother’s house and it would always be so. She could live in it only insofar as she took upon herself her mother’s function, her mother’s being.

“Guess you’re right,” said Francis. He turned. “Well—” he said, and sighed gustily and marched from the room. It was the first time she had ever heard him sigh. She smiled with a sad mature tenderness for him and went slowly upstairs. She climbed, gathering herself together for what was ahead of her, for all that she had never planned.

Now the mother drew her children’s lives into her. She drew them by her willful dominations and by her catastrophes of weakness and by her little cheerfulnesses. Joan never could know, though she opened the door a score of times a day, what woman she would find there in the bed. She came in when Francis was gone to find her mother washed and fresh and sitting in her bed, cleaned and freshened. While they were downstairs, while Dr. Crabbe was dooming her, she had risen in sudden willful strength and put the best linen on the bed and upon herself she put an orchid-colored bed-jacket which Joan had once given her at Christmas, which she had never worn because of its delicacy of silk and cream lace, but which she had cherished. For two years it had lain in her drawer, on top, hiding by its beauty the old and mended garments beneath. She kept it there for the pleasure of seeing it whenever she opened the drawer.

Today when Joan came in she lay propped up in her bed, faint but triumphant. She was panting a little. “I’ll be up tomorrow,” she said. “I’ll just take today to rest. Tell Dr. Crabbe. And Francis is to go to school. And you mustn’t write a word to Rose, because before the letter gets to her I’ll be up and around. Tell Hannah I’ll have my breakfast. Don’t I look lovely? It’s the first chance I’ve had to wear this.”

And Joan was gladly deceived. The orchid jacket, the bright, dark smiling eyes, the neatly piled white hair, the brown strong hands upon the counterpane, nearly deceived her. She ran down and called to Hannah and then she went out into the garden to gather a handful of short-stemmed violets to put upon the tray. She bore the tray herself, entering the room with a quick gaiety. After all, they might be wrong, all of them. She would not tell Rose yet.

Her mother’s eyes warmed at the violets. “You’re the only one who would think to do that,” she said. “Not many people know a flower on a tray seasons all the food. I never taught you, Joan. You’ve always known. Rose now, would be careful, but she’d forget the flowers — and of course men don’t think.”

She began to eat happily. “What did Dr. Crabbe say?” she asked. “Did he say I just needed a little rest? Sit down a minute, child. It’s so pleasant to talk.” The whole room was pleasant in the morning light, in the vigor of her mother’s voice.

But on the bed, very near her mother’s face, Joan was undeceived. The eyes, if they stopped their sparkle even for an instant, were sick and dulled. Her mother could made her eyes sparkle, but the impulse failed quickly and the eyes were veiled as a sick bird’s eyes are veiled. She cried out suddenly, “Why didn’t you tell us you were in pain? Why did you let us go on leaning on you?”

Her mother put down the bit of toast she held. “Did he say I had such pain?” she asked.

“Yes.”

“It is true,” her mother said slowly. “I have often such pain. I shall never be healed of it, and so I have learned to bear it.”

“But you may be healed of it,” Joan cried passionately, yearning over this woman, her mother. “He is going to bring a city doctor to see you this afternoon.”

Her mother stared at her, startled. She pushed the tray away. “I won’t see him,” she said suddenly and loudly. “Do you hear, Joan? I won’t have a stranger peering into me. Dr. Crabbe was with me when all the babies came. He’s different. Besides, I know myself. I know—” Her lower lip began to tremble and she looked piteously at Joan. Above the gay bed-jacket her face shrank into grayness. “Don’t let me die!” she begged, in a whisper.

“No — no — no” said Joan passionately behind her clenched teeth, tears hot under her eyelids.

But in the late afternoon her mother was willful again and stubborn against the new doctor. Joan, waiting beside her, saw her grow momentarily strong with her stubbornness. She sat braced by her pillows, her hair smoothed, her gaze upon the door. Her eyes met the doctor’s eyes, freshly and strongly with a shock of life.

“Mary, this is Dr. Beam — Mrs. Richards,” said Dr. Crabbe.

“How do you do?” said Dr. Beam languidly. He stared perseveringly at her face and hands.

“Patient has vitality,” the doctor murmured to Dr. Crabbe wearily. He was a tall drooping gentle figure, his hat and gloves still in his hand because no one had come forward to take them from him and put them down for him.

“Not physical vitality, though,” grunted Dr. Crabbe. “Sit down.”

“Will to live, perhaps,” hinted the doctor. He held his hat on his knee, dropped it, and set it at last upon the floor beside his chair. He fixed his large vacant eyes again upon her, without noticing Joan.

“There is nothing really wrong,” Joan heard her mother say, brightly. “I don’t know why they got you here.” She arranged the covers briskly. She looked suddenly well, her hands normal with vigor.

“Yes,” murmured Dr. Beam. He rose, unexpectedly alert. “Let me see your abdomen,” he demanded. His languor was gone. He was avid, keen for knowledge of her. No, not knowledge of her, for what was she to him? She was nothing. It was the thing in her body which interested him. Without it, with nothing but health, she would not have existed for him. She did not exist for him now, except as the possessor of this malignant life in her, this monster feeding upon her. He felt her abdomen with his long thin delicately probing fingers. His face grew sharper. His eyes were black and narrow and inquisitive and about his lips the skin was hard and white. He was excited by what he felt.

“Hm — hm—” he kept murmuring to himself. “Hm — hm—”

At last he knew everything. He covered her exhausted body quickly, and turned to Joan. “Where can I wash my hands?” At the door he commanded, “Fetch my hat and gloves along. I shan’t need to come back. Crabbe, I’ll meet you downstairs.”

Downstairs with Dr. Crabbe she waited. He rumbled along of other things. “Miss Kinney’s down with that queer fever she brought back with her from Africa — don’t believe she’ll ever get over it — old girl, her mother, sound as a dried hickory nut — never saw the beat of it — she’ll outlast us all — I don’t dare hope to be at her funeral myself. Mr. Parson’s got bronchitis — needs outdoor life instead of clerking in an office the way he does. Where’s your pa?” he asked abruptly.

“It’s his afternoon for the mission.”

Dr. Crabbe coughed suddenly and went out to the porch and spat in the yellow rosebush under the window.

“Well … yes,” he said, coming back and sitting down.

“Well, you can tell him when he gets in. Here’s Dr. Beam.”

Upon the threshold Dr. Beam stood in cultivated haste. “I need not stop, I think, Crabbe,” he said. “My car’s waiting. You’re quite right — no use — the whole organ’s hardened and everything is hopelessly involved — if you’ll come along I’ll talk as we go—”

“Back later, my dear,” said Dr. Crabbe.

Joan at the window watched them move down the walk to the street, the tall slender stooping figure and Dr. Crabbe, short and burly and rolling along like a sailor. They were talking excitedly. She could see Dr. Beam’s face now as he climbed into the motor. It was eager and animated. One long probing forefinger stabbed the air as he talked. Dr. Crabbe thrust out his square short hands. They were tossing her mother’s life back and forth between them. She sank suddenly into a chair and wept bitterly.

But weeping could not endure for long. The house clamored at her now as it had clamored at her mother. Hannah, thumping in from the kitchen, dried her tears at their source. “What’ll your pa relish for his supper, Miss Joan?” she asked mournfully.

Joan wrenched her mind from its torture to think of her father’s appetite. She must remember there was also her father.

“He’ll be tired coming in — a milk soup, and corn muffins — he likes them—”

“I have a little chicken left over — Frank likes chicken,” Hannah suggested.

There was Francis, too.

“Your ma—” Hannah began.

“I’ll go and ask her,” Joan replied. Upon the stairs she hesitated. She was dragging her steps slowly, hating to go in. Her mother’s vivid eyes would be turned on that door waiting, searching. No use lying to her, no use pretending she had not heard those two words, “hopelessly involved.”

She put her hand upon the knob and swallowed. Her mouth was dry. She was afraid to see her mother’s eyes.

But when she went in the room was in shadow. She had not known that the sun had set in the little while she was away. Her mother’s form was shrunken, a little heap. She could not discern her face.

“Mother!” she cried, moving to the bed.

“Yes,” her mother said. Her voice came up small and tired.

“You frightened me,” she cried in relief. “I couldn’t see you. What do you want for supper, darling Mother?”

“Joan,” her mother said in that small voice, “Joan, do you suppose you could do one thing for me — just one thing?”

“Why, yes — anything,” she answered, surprised, tender. She felt for her mother’s hand and found it. It was not a small hand. Awake it was shapely, beautiful and strong. Now it was asleep. Without life it seemed larger than it was, inert, stiff, difficult to hold, the fingers limp and sprawling. Out of the shadows her mother lifted her head from the pillow, suddenly intense. Her eyes came out to beseech Joan. “Don’t let him come in here by me — make up the bed in the guest room. I’m too … tired …”

She dropped the stiff hand “You mean—Father?”

“Yes.” Her mother sank back again and Joan could not see her eyes. They were closed in the even pallor of the face vaguely outlined.

“Tell him — I’m — tired,” her mother said with weak urgency.

She had sat down on the bed. Now she rose, aware again of repulsion — that subdued quarreling in the night — was it this? She would not think of it.

“Of course,” she said resolutely, turning to the door. But her mother was not eased yet.

“Don’t let him even come in — not tonight,” she said. “Tell him I’m sleeping — tell him—”

“I’ll tell him,” said Joan, and shut the door behind her. She wanted to hear no more. This was not for her to hear.

But still he must be told. How could she tell him? She wondered, her hands busy about his solitary bed. How tell a man who had slept with his wife for thirty years that he could sleep beside her no more? Before she could plan she heard his steps upon the stair, soft footfalls, the left foot dragging a little. She ran out to meet him at the head of the stairs.

“What did the doctors say?” he asked.

“Dr. Crabbe said he was coming back, but he hasn’t,” she answered, putting him off.

He hesitated, and then moved to go in. Now she must speak, now before he went on. She stood before him, stopping him, her blood beating in her ears. “Father,” she cried above its beating, “Don’t — you mustn’t go in!”

“I mustn’t go in — to my own room?” he said, astonished.

“No — Father — I’ll explain—”

“Did the doctors—”

“No — she did — she — she’d rather you didn’t come in — she wants to sleep — to be alone. I’ve made the other bed for you. She’s very, very tired.”

They looked at each other, father, daughter. The daughter cried at him in her heart, “What have you done to make her so tired?” The father answered with his calm righteous look. His look said, “I have done nothing that is not my right to do.”

But she was stronger than he. Without a word he turned and went downstairs.

She was not herself anymore, not Joan, not a young woman home from college who had been waiting. She was some strange composite creature, more than a sister to Francis, more than a daughter to her father, less than herself. Her mother, lying in her bed, shut into her room, was a secret life to her. She was living secretly there. Though outwardly they called her Joan, though outwardly she was doing the things her mother had always done in the house, her secret, intense life was in the room upstairs. It set a wall about her, it made all else unreal. Now the only reality was this woman, whose body was dying while her mind was full of ferocious life. There was the reality, and it removed her from everything.

It removed her even from the memory of Martin. Sometimes like an echo, far away, she heard music coming from the church, but when she heard it she went steadily on about her moment’s business. She threw open no window to catch a chord or to hear the fragment of a melody. Music — even her own music — she had put aside and why should she stay her feet to listen to the echoes of his music? Nor did she ever hear his name anymore. Her mother had forgotten that the name was once a quarrel between them, and she could forget, for now she had her child back home again, completely returned. And in Joan’s heart there was no name either, and if there was the faintly echoing music she passed without listening to it and went on to what was now her work.

One morning the doorbell rang and passing by on her way upstairs, she opened the door and there he stood, smiling his faint melancholy smile. For a second it was familiar as seeing her own face unexpectedly in a mirror might be familiar. He said, “I’ve waited — I thought surely you would give me a sign — I thought you would come back—”

His voice was known to her. Once she had heard it with ecstasy and painful desire. Now she heard it only as something once known, a voice to which she had once listened but wanted no more to hear. He leaned with both hands on his stick, his hat in his hands, his music rolled under his arm. She stared at his narrow dark aging face, the white sides of his smooth dark hair, his sad hazel eyes, his thin beautiful mouth.

“Come back to me, Joan? I am not changed — I shall never change.”

Strange that his eyes, fixed deeply upon her, were no more than the eyes of a photograph, now put aside! Yes, he was not changed. He would never change. So he was not enough.

“I am busy with my mother now. She’s very ill.” She waited a moment. It was said rudely, like a child, and she thought an instant for something to add to it, to soften it. But when she tried to think of more, there was no more. She stared beyond him into the garden, and saw what she had not seen, that it was a sunny morning, gentle with spring. So after the moment’s waiting she shut the door on him quietly and without anger, and even with a little remorse lest it be too rude. She did not even care enough now to be rude to him or to hurt him.

Then she went upstairs.

At first the village came clustering about her mother. Miss Kinney was often at the door with flowers. “A few flowers, dear Joan — and if there is anything I can do — sit with her a little if you want to go out.”

“Thank you, Miss Kinney,” Joan said.

Mrs. Bradley brought calf’s-foot jelly. “It’s toothsome,” she explained. “Martin’s fond of it. How is she, Joan?”

She looked into Mrs. Bradley’s small stubborn gray eyes. “Thank you, Mrs. Bradley.” But the jelly she would not give her mother. She threw it into the garbage when Hannah was busy in some other room.

They all came to the door, all the old people — asking for her mother, missing her. At first they came often. They came expecting to sit by her mother’s bedside, and at first, because they had been middle-aged when she was a child, she thought she must let them have their way. It seemed impossible to say to Mrs. Winters, who had taken over the missionary society and the Ladies’ Aid work, that she could not come in to see her mother. “I’m sure your mother would want to know about the meeting — if she’d listen to me a minute. I won’t stay, but a minute.”

But Joan saw her mother did not care about the missionary meeting any more or want to listen to Mrs. Winters. Her mind was turned now upon her own life. For the first time she was absorbed in what was to happen to herself. Her eyes were dull and empty, staring at Mrs. Winters. “It’s very nice, I am sure,” she said faintly. “I’m very pleased — so pleased — Joan, my feet are cold.”

“You must get well, dear Mrs. Richards,” said Mrs. Winters warmly. “We miss you very much. I can never take your place with the ladies. You have such a way with you — you keep us all laughing so nicely that it isn’t so hard when the collection comes round — there, you dear soul!” She bent and kissed the sick woman, her corsets creaking over her large bosom. “Now you just listen to me!”

But after she was gone Joan saw her mother’s eyes full of wonder, staring at the wall opposite her. “I’m finished with it all,” she said in a half-whisper. “It’s all gone far from me, all I ever used to do. I’m only in this body lying here.”

So after a while Joan kept them all away and soon they forgot and went about their days only remembering sometimes to ask how she did and to murmur or cry heartily, “Oh, I’m sorry to hear that,” or sometimes, on Sunday, when good deeds were natural to think of, they wrote little notes: “We remember you in our prayers, dear friend.”

Prayers! Joan smiled bitterly. At first prayers had gone up from the village like smoke to heaven. Everywhere people were praying for her mother. Her father came home from Wednesday night meetings comforted by the prayers of his people. He went straight to the sick room. “Mary, I wish you could have heard Mr. Parsons’ prayer for you tonight and the ‘Amen’ that went up from the people. It may be the Lord is going to use your illness to stir the people’s souls into life again.” He spoke happily and unusually quickly, his pale guileless eyes beaming. He could bear even his dear wife’s illness if he saw God’s will in it. He hurried downstairs to pour himself out to God gratefully. Joan, listening to his footsteps, thought to herself that one could not be sure about praying. “Do you pray, Mother?” she asked timidly. There was no physical shyness left now between them. She tended her mother’s body as she did her own. But her mother’s soul she had not penetrated. She dared not think of it. Did her mother know she must die?

“No, I don’t pray,” her mother said simply, “I don’t pray anymore. I guess I began to get out of the habit when you children were little. You woke me so early in the morning and at night I was too tired. And it never seemed worth while to pray for myself.”

And so it was after a while with all praying. It became tedious to pray for a woman who steadily grew weaker. It became rebellion against God finally to keep on praying when obviously she would not get well. Even the father at last prayed only thus, “Thy will be done, O God.” Or he prayed, “Help us to be ready for sorrow.” So the mother slipped gradually out of life and out of the minds of the people. She was not yet dead but since she was not seen or heard and since her struggle was solitary, she had no more to do with them. Only Miss Kinney still brought flowers faithfully to her door.

“I won’t come in,” she said, standing drooping upon the threshold, her narrow length topped by her flopping leghorn hat. “Just a nosegay for your dear mother! I love her, you know. She always understood so well about Africa. No one else will ever understand so well as she did — just as though she had been there. She used to see it all, just as it was!”

And so the spring passed, and summer came and it was the grave autumn once more, and it seemed as if her mother had always lain like this, helpless and to be cared for, as if for years she had been in her mother’s place. Rose came home and the summer passed and it was autumn and Rose was gone again.

Now Joan and her mother lived quite alone together. If her father or Francis or even Dr. Crabbe came to see her mother, Joan was the gate through which they must pass. Her father was no more her mother’s husband. She stood between these two, her father and her mother, at first shyly, feeling herself between them, knowing there must be some secret life she interrupted. Then she came to see there was no such secret life. She intercepted nothing, no warmth, no hidden tenderness. Twice each day her father said to her, “Would your mother like to see me?” She went in and asked her mother, “Do you want to see Father?”

Her mother always paused to consider it, bringing her mind back from afar to consider, and her mood changed. Though she had been cheerful now she would say fretfully, “I want to sleep,” or she would say with suspicion, “What does he want?” or sometimes, and usually, she would say, “A little while, perhaps,” and unknowingly she sighed. Then her father went in and they talked. “Well, Mary, how are you today?” “Thank you, Paul, I am about as usual.” “Would you like me to read to you?” “No, thank you, Paul. Joan reads to me a good deal.” He paused, searching his mind for something to tell her, and then he began again carefully, “You will be glad to hear, my dear, that at the mission at South End I have baptized—”

“Yes, dear Paul.” Her eyes closed. Soon he would leave the room on tiptoe to find Joan and say, “She is asleep. She seems to sleep a great deal. It is best, perhaps.”

“It’s best,” she answered, with pity for this unearthly man. In some sort of momentary human warmth she must have been conceived, but there was no human warmth in him now. All significance of him had passed from that room upstairs. It was as though he had never been there at all. The room was given over to her mother, now.

In the evening after supper Francis rose from the table quickly. “Mom ready for me?” She nodded, for she did not come down to supper until her mother was ready for Francis. She had brushed her mother’s hair and put on her fresh bed-jacket and touched her face with rouge. For one evening her mother had asked for the mirror from the bureau. “I want to see how I look,” she said. “I don’t want my son to remember me ugly. I look ghastly—” She stared at herself mournfully.

Joan said playfully. “I could dress you up with a little rouge.” Her mother had never worn rouge. She would have felt ashamed, as though she were aping a worldly woman. But now she looked at Joan with a gleam of the old mischief suddenly shining out of her eyes. “Why not?” she said. “It can’t matter much what I do now. I have to stand or fall by what’s done. A little rouge here and there won’t weight the scales much.”

So laughing together a little sadly, they did it. Joan fetched her rouge pot and touched with delicate faint rose her mother’s wan cheeks, while her mother held the mirror. “It does look nice,” her mother said with great interest. “I do believe I’m a little pretty even yet.” She looked up at Joan shyly and the tears rushed into the girl’s eyes. She bent to kiss her mother quickly and as she bent she caught from her mother’s body that smell of death. No washing with perfumed soaps, no sprinkled scent could hide it. But her mother did not know it was there, since it was the atmosphere in which she must now live. She was sprightly for the moment.

“Don’t you tell on me,” she cried gaily.

So every morning the rouge was put on and every night she would have it there, peach bloom upon her deathly pallor.

But Joan did betray her a little. She coaxed Francis, “Tell Mother how pretty she looks, Frank — tell her over and over.”

“Gee,” he muttered, and the father looked up astonished to say in mild rebuke, “Your mother hates flattery, Joan.”

“You tell her, Frank,” she insisted. “Tell her and see what she says.”

“Oh, sure, if it’ll do her any good,” he shouted back, leaping up the stairs. Ten minutes later he thrust his head into the kitchen, where she was cutting raw beef into cubes for beef tea. “Gosh, she did like it,” he said. “Looked like a kid when I told her — cheeks all pinked up.” He hesitated and she saw sudden tears in his eyes. He swallowed and snorted, “Wasn’t any lie I told, either,” and slammed the door.

And Dr. Crabbe, bursting open the front door in the mornings, shouted to her, “Joan, you got her ready for me?” Afterwards, to Joan alone, waiting in the hall, forcing his voice to low hoarseness he said, “Can’t be long now — just give her whatever she wants — don’t matter now except to keep her happy.”

“How long, Dr. Crabbe?”

“A month — two — maybe six — she’s got such a vitality — don’t tell her—” He was gone in a small cyclone of speed.

Joan, running upstairs with wine, with broth, with delicately seasoned milk soups, cried to herself fiercely. “She shall have all my strength. I’m strong! I’ll pour myself into her. I’ll make her live months, a year, maybe two years—”

She poured her huge vitality into her mother’s body. Tirelessly she washed her mother’s flesh and rubbed olive oil into the wasting muscles to nourish her. She centered her heart into her hands, willing her own strength into her strong hands, into her strong palms, pressing upon her mother’s flesh until she could almost believe a current passed, taking virtue out of her. She wheeled the bed to the window and uncovered her mother’s body to the sunlight and to the warmth of the noonday, standing watch in hand to force the last moment she dared of sun and wind. She wanted all the power from the sun and the warm wind to pour into her mother’s body. Food and sun and sweet air and her own steadily cheerful young strength she poured into her mother’s body, fighting that death in her. But that living death grew, too, upon all she did.

In the night there was no sun and it was hard to laugh in the night. Then everyone lay asleep and apart and the house was silent and she was alone with her mother in the darkness. Beyond the shadowy walls of the room was the universe, waiting in endless empty space. Soon, soon her mother would escape her and be lost in those empty spaces. She lay on her little cot by her mother’s bed, listening and watching for that escape. Out of the moment of her young exhausted sleep, she rose instantly if her mother moved. She heard her mother whisper, “Joan, am I to die?”

Passionately she cried in a loud strong voice, “I will not let you die!”

“Touch me — let me feel you—”

She seized her mother’s hand and held it, rubbing it, fondling it fiercely. From it, too, rose that faint stench. Her mother’s voice came small and far away out of the darkness. “I am always half asleep — Don’t let me slip away while I sleep—”

“No — no—” she said. “I have you hard—”

In the stillness she listened to her mother’s breathing. If it grew too faltering she must give a stimulant, but not unless she must, because there would be greater need at the end when the pain would be so great they must give it constantly. She had asked steady questions of Dr. Crabbe. She knew how each day must go. Curled against the bed in the darkness, kneeling upon the floor, holding her mother’s hand, her body strong and tense, she fought the universe.

Out of her sleep her mother woke again and again to clutch at life. She struggled against this insidious constant deathly sleeping. She forced her eyes open, frowning, thinking of something she wanted to do. “Tell Paul to come here,” she commanded in a strange loud voice. Her ears were dulled so that now she spoke loudly, to hear herself. “I have something on my mind to tell Paul.”

So Joan called her father and he came in timidly. He was very timid these days in the presence of this near-death. At many bedsides he had stood in triumph to speed a soul to God. But he could do nothing for this soul. This soul who knew him allowed him no special power, and without belief he had no power. He was troubled by this. Sometimes he said, “Mary, should we not speak of spiritual things? I am your pastor as well as your husband. I am responsible for you before God.” But now that she had separated herself from them all she had no respect for him. She did not even remember he was father to her children. She remembered him only as a man against whom she had a grievance deeper than her soul. She was fighting off the poisonous sleep to tell him what she had to say. “Be quiet!” she said in that strange harsh voice. “There is something — a hundred dollars—”

He stared at her, astonished. A hundred dollars! She was dreaming. “What hundred dollars?” he asked.

But sleep had come down on her. She straggled against it, moving her lips, forcing her heavy eyelids, but sleep came down upon her and her face settled into empty gravity.

Again and again it was so until Joan was broken by the struggle. “Let it be, Mother,” she begged. “Never mind — never mind—”

But her mother would not give up. “Tell Paul,” she said, and at last one day it was told. “A hundred dollars — in the attic — in the old trunk — Joan and Rose—”

“A hundred dollars — in the attic!” he echoed. “Where did you get it?” He forgot that she was ill. A hundred dollars! When he had needed money so sorely for his mission.

“I saved housekeeping money — dollar by dollar — Joan and Rose—” She was fighting the sleep. It was almost upon her again, stiffening her lips, pressing her eyelids down. Then he helped her. Then he woke her. He woke her with a lash, with a whip. He rose and shouted at her, “You stole it!”

Her eyes flew open. Her dimmed ears caught the shout and held it. She was awake because once more she was angry. He could still make her angry. “I stole it? Slaving for you and your church all these years? Never having anything for my own — never anything — anything — anything—?” She turned to Joan piteously, her face a child’s face, working with weeping. “Joan, he says — he says—”

Joan ran to her and gathered her up into her arms and soothed her. “Oh, darling, don’t mind, don’t mind, my darling—” She pressed her mother’s head to her shoulders, murmuring to her, soothing her. But the relentless sleep was there again, now mercifully there again, silencing everything. The tears were still wet upon the sleeping face. Above it Joan flashed upon her father a look. She hated him. But he did not catch the look. He was hastening away. She heard his footsteps hastening up the attic stairs.

… In the morning, unless it was Sunday, he was a little hungry after his hour in the study. When his soul was refreshed all his bodily impulses quickened and he felt light and at ease and he knew it was because he was right with God, and he was hungry. It was pleasant to come out into the cheerful dining room and begin a hot breakfast. Coffee on a chill morning was very nice. It was nice to come into the companionship of the others. Across this comfort, across the pleasure of the sweet creamy coffee he was stirring slowly and about to drink, Joan’s voice broke cruelly. He looked up, shocked at her hard voice. He was not accustomed to hardness from her. To Mary’s strange unreasoning angers, yes — he had taken her unevenness to God and God had said, “Bear thy cross.” So he had borne his cross, and he was rewarded, because as she grew older she had grown less stormy, less often angry with him, less demanding.

For when she was young Mary was always wanting something from him, something more. In the night he would hear her weeping because she had not something more. “What is it, Mary?” he had asked again and again patiently. At least now that she was dying he had nothing wherewith to reproach himself; he had always been patient with her. And always she had answered, “I thought there would be something more.” “I do not understand,” he replied, patient still. Indeed there was no understanding her, who was in so many ways a very good wife for him a minister, for the people loved her. With the people she was always pleasant and cheerful. But when he was a man with her alone, how changed and difficult a woman!

Now he said to Joan carefully, “You do not understand the circumstances. Your mother knew that for nearly a year I have been niggardly and thought that I must be robbing them of something of my services to them. And all the time your mother knew she did not need all I gave her — all the time your mother—”

“But she saved it bit by bit, out of what you gave her!” she cried at him. Her voice was like Mary’s voice, crying in the night.

She heard her own voice sound suddenly like the voice she heard crying behind the closed door. What made her think of night when it was broad day and the sun was across the table, shining on the silver molasses jug, shining on the white cloth and the blue plates? Hannah came in with a plate of toast and they waited until she was gone. Then her father began to speak patiently to her, his voice tranquil, reasoning, his voice that was always quiet in the night.

“I have always put first, above all, the Lord’s work. Let God’s work be done and He will see that I and mine are fed. To save for ourselves is to distrust Him, the giver of every good gift. And shall we save when others have nothing, not even a house where they may go to have their souls fed?” But suddenly while she stared at him she heard his voice take on a human angry passion. His priesthood dropped from him. “Besides Joan, it was hard of her. All this time — she knows I have not had where to turn for a little money and the work is just beginning to prosper and to let it go now would be to waste it all. She knew it — she heard me pray. At night when we prayed together she heard me ask God for money and she had all that money and she kept silence — there on her knees before God, beside me, she kept silence, knowing there was all that money in my own house — money that was really mine!”

Here was his hurt, too. She wavered, her eyes fell, and she sighed. He went on eagerly, his blue eyes pleading. “And now, what will she do with it? She has all she needs—” He had quite forgotten her mother’s voice, struggling against the deathly sleep.

“Joan and Rose — Joan and Rose—” her mother had said. She could not remind him. She poured his coffee in silence and let him have his way. After all, it was not for himself — it was for God. But now it seemed somehow the same thing.

Almost every day her mother had said, “Don’t tell Rose — don’t spoil anything because of me—” But now they could not listen to her, although Christmas was less than a month away. Dr. Crabbe hooked his thumb at Joan as he left the bedroom and when she followed him downstairs he whispered to her hoarsely, “Better have Rose come home. I can’t answer for these days. Like as not she’ll slip off in this sleep. It might be a month — it might be any day. Her whole body’s full of poison — everything’s giving way at once. Get Rose home — needn’t tell your mother — she don’t know one day from another now — let her think vacation’s begun.”

She nodded miserably and plodded upstairs in great weariness. It would be good to have Rose home. Maybe Rose could take a turn at night now. Dr. Crabbe had spoken of a trained nurse, but trained nurses cost a great deal and besides, the village would never understand the preacher’s having a trained nurse when there were two grown girls in the family. She went into her own room and sat down at the small desk and wrote to Rose, chewing the end of her pen, thinking how to spare Rose — Rose who had not seen the change, the nearing inexorable death which no vitality could push away more than a little while. She wrote carefully.

In the evening when the letter was mailed she told them. She told her father and he looked up from his book and the gravity upon his face settled into a somber depth. “I feared she was worse,” he said, and went back to his book. But he sighed again and again and soon he closed the book, putting the marker carefully in its place, and he went away.

“Does Dr. Crabbe — do they think she is going to die soon?” asked Francis as soon as his father was gone. He had said nothing at all. He had idled about the room, restless until now. But before she could speak he rushed on, “Don’t tell me — I won’t hear it—” and he burst into a loud sob that was like a hiccough. He coughed quickly and turned to a bookshelf and after a moment’s fumbling drew out a book and opened it and stared into it. “Rose ought to get here by Thursday night,” he said. “I’ll go and meet her — you needn’t bother.”

“Thank you, Francis,” Joan answered gratefully. She longed to touch him, to seize his hand, to lean on him a little, but she could feel him resisting her touch, fiercely demanding that he not be touched. He was so strange these days. But she had not time for him now, not time to think about him or even to ask him what was the matter and why he was so fierce and moody and easily angry with her and with them all. So she passed him quietly and went back to her mother.

Rose came and it was good to have her. Joan had not realized how good it would be until she came downstairs and saw her standing neat and compact in the hall, her gloves still on and her brown coat still buttoned about her. She ran down and threw her arm about her sister and put her face down into the furred collar and felt Rose’s smooth cold cheek against her own hot flesh. Rose stood sturdy and still under the embrace. It was good, it was good to have the family whole again.

“Here’s your bag, kid,” said Francis, coming in and throwing it down. They stood there an instant, the three of them, and looked at each other in a second’s silence, feeling themselves together. But it was a new sort of communion. It was without their parents, without the older ones. They were the strong ones, the able ones. The other two were old and ill. The other two were the ones to be cared for and protected. The study door opened and the father came out. He had been sleeping on the couch in his study and his thin white hair was pushed in spikes above his high brow.

“Well, Father,” said Rose quietly, “how are you?” She went forward and stood on tiptoe and met his pursed lips with her own soft red mouth. He always stood stiffly and pursed his lips and kissed as though it were a thing he had newly learned to do and so it was hard for him.

“Your mother is very badly,” he said directly.

“Yes, I know,” she said, unbuttoning her coat. With the father’s coming the moment between the children was not broken. They were tender to him secretly and embarrassed at their tenderness and a little impatient with him.

“I’ll take up the bag,” Francis said abruptly.

“Thank you, Frank,” said Joan, and she waited a moment for him to turn the landing and said to Rose, “You wouldn’t have believed how he has changed and grown up—”

“He certainly wouldn’t have offered to take a bag upstairs for one of us before,” Rose agreed, picking up her gloves and hat and pocketbook, and they started slowly upstairs.

Now Joan must tell Rose. Before they went into that room she must prepare Rose for the way death could look in a still living human face, and for the way death could look out of dark human eyes. In their mother’s body death sat, looking out of her eyes, breathing its stenchy breath out of her nostrils. She pushed the moment off frantically. She said lightly, “No, you wouldn’t know Frank at all. Why, he even cracks his own eggs at breakfast now!” She tried to laugh.

Rose was standing at the head of the stairs, her hands full of her things, looking at Joan two steps behind. She smiled a little at the idea of Frank, her small cool smile. Then she pulled the moment before them.

“Now tell me,” she said.

“Come into my room first,” said Joan.

Rose was strange. Rose was different from what Joan had thought. Rose did not need to be shielded, for all her soft looks and small gentle voice and mild slow ways. She looked steadily at Joan, listening. It was Joan who broke, not Rose. Joan flung her head into the pillows of her bed where they sat and Joan cried as she had not yet cried, even to herself. “She’s going to die — she has to die — I’ve told her again and again that I won’t let her die, but I’ve got to — we can’t do a thing!” She felt Rose’s smooth, very soft hand stroking her quietly. There was quiet in the touch but not warmth. So any kind stranger might touch her if she wept. She sat up abruptly and pushed back her rumpled hair. “I’m tired, I suppose—”

“Yes, of course you are,” said Rose. “Now I’ll help.” Her face was serious and kind, but there were no tears in her eyes. “Shall we go in?” she asked.

So they went into the mother’s room and Rose went straight to the bed. Joan had dressed her mother freshly and put on a new bed-jacket of shell-pink. Her mother had many pretty bedjackets now, for Joan had said boldly to Mrs. Winters, to Miss Kinney, to Mrs. Parsons, when they asked, “If you really want to give her something, give her a pretty bed-jacket. She loves pretty things.” So they made her pretty, extravagant things of lace and silk and Joan held them before her mother’s half-blinded eyes and they made a variety of it for the days.

“The new pink one for Rose to see,” her mother had clamored childishly. She had kept off the sleep a while, a long while, nearly fifteen minutes, when she was dressed, and Joan had plucked a pink geranium bloom from a pot in the window and put it in the snowy coil of her hair and had held a mirror for her to see it. She held the mirror high to show the lovely hair, the flower, the brow, the eyes; she held it high to hide the wasted cheeks, the withered lips.

“I look right nice,” her mother said with content, her eyelids dropping.

“You look lovely,” said Joan fervently.

But sleep had clutched her while she waited. She lay deeply asleep, the flower in her hair, and the two daughters stood looking at her, and Joan watching Rose. But Rose said nothing. She looked quietly at the face and said nothing, she breathed the faint vile odor and said nothing. Suddenly her mother’s eyes opened and recognition came up like a light breaking through dark deep water. “It’s Rose—”

“Yes, Mother dear.” Rose stooped and kissed her forehead.

“I’m all dressed up,” her mother began brightly. “New clothes — Joan put a flower in my hair—” She drowsed again and they stood silently while she slept.

“She’s sleeping her life away,” Joan whispered. “But if it were not this it would be pain, Dr. Crabbe says — better sleep than pain. Only it seems to take her so far away — already.”

Rose nodded and said nothing. Joan could not endure the silence. Would Rose never speak, never cry out “Oh, Joan — Joan — Joan—,” never weep? But Rose did not cry out nor weep.

“You’ll want to go and unpack,” said Joan at last, and Rose went docilely away.

Thus alone again Joan sat down in the old rocking chair and rocked softly to and fro while her mother slept. She looked out into the late winter’s afternoon. She could see only the stark black branches of trees against a pale orange sky, a sky orange with a band of apple-green above. The sun had already set and it was the sunset’s afterglow.

So after all, they were still alone together, Joan and her mother. Rose, careful, helpful, gentle Rose, could not join them. She came and went and fetched what was wanted and saved Joan in many ways, but in the end Joan must sleep by her mother and Joan must be near.

For now through the sleep came the deep waves of awaking pain and her mother cried for Joan. “Joan — Joan — where’s Joan? — pain, Joan—”

She forgot all her children except Joan, and she forgot that Joan was her child. Joan was her nurse, her mother, her one to lean upon. She forgot even Francis now. Sometimes when he came in she fixed her eyes upon him, her eyes small and shrunken in her face puffed with the poison in her. She said in her hoarse loud voice, “When Frank was little I made him red suits.”

“Sure, Mom,” shouted Frank. “I remember them — red with an anchor on the sleeves and stars on the collars.”

But she did not hear him. “Where’s Joan — Joan—”

“Here, dear.” She must always be there, there until the end. Dr. Crabbe said, “Got to have a trained nurse now, my dear. No reflection on you two girls, but there’ve got to be different hypodermics and things—”

So they had a trained nurse, but still Joan must be near, near to her mother and near to them all while they waited. Now her mother scarcely woke at all except when the father came in. However deeply she slept, she woke when he came in and cried out uneasily in her hoarse dry loud voice, “Who is it? Go away—”

“It’s Paul, Mary,” he said timidly. All of them could look at her and bear it, but he could not. He looked at this swollen misshapen creature and sweat stood on his white forehead. Once he forced himself and took her swollen hand in his. She cried aloud, and he dropped it. “Go away, Paul,” she muttered, opening her eyes suddenly. He went away, bewildered. Why did she hate him? He had been a good husband. He was a good husband now. He went away and poured out his soul to God, forgiving her.

“Lord!” said the trained nurse, smirking at Joan as she tucked in a hot-water bottle. “It’s plain there wasn’t much love lost between those two!”

But Joan would not answer.

No one of them could say the word death. Death was in the house; already death must be planned for, considered, but the word could not be spoken.

“What’ll you bury her in, Miss Joan?” Hannah began, moaning. She paused in her sweeping to stare mournfully at Joan. “Her lavender or—”

“Don’t!” said Joan sharply. “She’s still here.”

She went on her way upstairs. Cruel and wicked death, not to come swift and clean! Death should come clean by lightning, clean and sudden by sword, or swift by sea or by accident, not this long slow planned dying. The body should be consumed by immediate death, broken to atoms, burned to ashes, utterly destroyed. “I’ve got to get out,” cried Francis desperately. He stopped her in the hall, his face pale. “I’ve got to go away. I can’t stand this — this waiting. If it’s got to come why doesn’t it come? I hate waiting—”

She seized him by the arm and shook him. “You’ll stand what we all have to stand!” she shouted furiously. “I’m so tired I can’t sit down without falling asleep. But I must go on, and so must you—”

He rushed past her, out of the house and slammed the door. He was away somewhere all the time now. She strode still furious to her mother’s room. She was not anxious about him. He would fling himself off somewhere for the day, but at night he would be back.

She was so tired she was cross with Rose, willing earnest Rose, whose soft white pretty hands were so strangely clumsy, who dropped a hypodermic needle she was given to hold and grieved so much that she could not be scolded. But sometimes Joan was so tired she did scold. “Rose, how can you be so stupid!” But there was no satisfaction in it. The shallow gentle hazel eyes widened a little, and Rose said nothing. But soon she slipped away to her own room to pray. Joan knew. Once, contrite, she had followed Rose and opened the door. Rose was on her knees by the bed, her face in the curve of her arm, her eyes closed, her lips moving a little. Joan closed the door abruptly. Rose did not need her contrition. Rose had her comfort. Soon she came back, her eyes placid, her lips curved in tranquillity. “Shall I fill the hot-water bottle now, Joan?” Joan, wanting to cry out at her, “Why do you ask me — why don’t you feel it and find out?” said gently, “Yes, please, Rose.”

“She means well,” the trained nurse said, pug-nosed and cheerful, “but lots of people who mean well are all thumbs and fingers when it comes to doing something.” She seized the bottle when Rose came in. “I’ll put it in,” she said. “You’ll burn her feet — she can’t feel them now.”

In the end it was this stubby pug-nosed woman upon whom Joan leaned. The nurse clapped her shoulder heartily. “I’ll be having you as my patient next, if you don’t let down! Cheer up! When you know what’s got to come, take it!”

This cheerful stranger was good for them all. She skillfully warded the father away. “Here, Reverend,” she cried with much good nature, “you’re not wanted here. You go back to your preaching where you’ll be out of the way. Patient’s sleeping. I’ll tell you if you’re wanted.” She advised Joan in a hissing whisper while the dying woman slept, immaculate for death, “I’d let that young Frank have a rip if I were you when all this is over. Let him go away somewhere. He’s hit hard by this, or something. I can’t make him out. Rose is different. Nothing’s going to hit her hard, nor your pa. They’re all wrapped up in themselves somehow. I don’t understand it, but I’ve seen it before. Religion’s a selfish thing — they don’t feel if they’ve got religion. You let the boy have a fling and don’t worry about those two, but think of yourself for a bit. Got a feller or something to give you a little fun? This is an awful hole of a town. Can’t you get away to some real place where there’s something going on?”

Go away? She had forgotten there were places to which people could go. She shook her head. “I don’t know — I’ll have to take care of my father and the others.”

The nurse rocked back and forth, considering. She was health in this place of sickness. She made the fetid air wholesome and hearty as though a wind blew cleanly through the room and Joan welcomed her. It was good to have this forthrightness, this simple decision, this humorous comprehension. Her mother stirred and moaned in her deep sleep. The pain was coming again. The nurse jumped to her feet and in a second had thrust the needle deep into the swollen arm. “There, ducky,” she said cheerfully. “You always know the very minute, don’t you—”

Watching the compact thick figure move amiable and competent about the bed, Joan was made conscious of life beyond this room. From death to death this woman moved, always lively, always carrying with her the atmosphere of casual, bustling, outside life. By her very comfortable casualness she put death into its place and made it part of life. Despair melted before her cheerful commonplaceness. Beyond, beyond this sorrowful room, beyond this hour, there was a strong everyday life, which, forgetting death, proceeded heartily to work and pleasure. She must be brave for death, looking beyond.

But at the end she was not brave. She and Francis were not brave. Rose was brave, and the father was brave. They were all downstairs waiting. All day the nurse had said, “Any moment now.” She said, “Don’t come in — I can tend to things.” She ceased her joking for the day and put off for the day her ready smile. She was quiet and cool and without feeling and they all turned to her. Dr. Crabbe came and went, jamming his hat upon his head with fury and nodding at them speechlessly. “Can’t do a thing,” he muttered at last. “Fixed it so she won’t know. Nurse’ll do everything — tell you—”

So they waited, listening. But they could not wait together. When they were together the waiting grew intolerable. They must part to bear it, each knowing the other near, but not near enough to see a face. The father shut himself behind his study door and sat alone, listening, his head drooping, his hands folded upon his knees. Francis sat curled into the great old red leather chair in the sitting room, a book in his hands. He had pulled the chair to face the window and the high back hid him except for the crown of his black head and he sat listening. Rose sat quietly at their mother’s desk, writing in a little diary she kept, writing steadily in her small clear compact script, pausing to think and write again, pausing to listen.

But Joan went out into the garden. It was two days before Christmas. The air was warm and still but the garden was dying, was dead. She walked about in the sunshine, listening, waiting, her footsteps rustling in the fallen leaves. They had forgotten to clear the leaves away. In other years it was always her mother who said, “This week we must rake the leaves.” But this year they were not raked.

The garden was full of her mother. Here were the lemon lilies she had planted, years ago a solitary bulb, now a great undying clump. Next spring they would burst heartily into life and blossoming. Strange and sad that people alone could live but once, that human bodies alone must die and turn to dust, with only a single spring. There was a secret in those strong dark rooted bulbs living on and on to blossom every year. A belated bird called through the quiet air, and listening, Joan heard the faint monotonous cheeping of the last autumn cricket, awaking drowsily in the warmth of the winter sun.

Then the voice for which they had all been listening fell. The nurse called strongly to them all. “Now — she’s ready to go—” Joan’s feet ran to carry her to her mother. They ran with the habit of all those months. But her heart was frightened and crying out, “No — no — no, I don’t want to see—” Running past the dining room door she heard Rose calling to Francis, “Aren’t you coming, Francis?” She heard Francis crying back, his voice cracked and crying, “I can’t — Gee, I can’t—” He began to sob.

But she ran on. At the door she met her father and Rose. They passed her and went in together. She would follow them. Of course she would follow them. She leaped against the door frame, panting. In a moment she would follow them. Just now for this moment something blinded her — not tears. She was not weeping. Her throat was thick, her eyes fogged, her heart beating all over her body. She was afraid. She turned blindly to the window and stood looking out across to the church. Steady herself — she must steady herself, and then she would go in … They were coming now to decorate the church for Christmas, all the people. There they all were, laden with evergreens to make wreaths. The organ began to play. She could hear it rolling forth, deep faint enormous chords rolling out of the pipes. “Joy to the world!” the organ shouted. Joy — strange foreign word, meaningless word, false and lying word!

Rose’s voice broke across the moment. “She’s gone — Oh, Joan, why didn’t you come in?” She turned and looked at Rose. There were tears in Rose’s eyes and reproach in her voice. But Joan did not weep, not now. Relief swept through her. Now she need not go in because the moment was passed and it could never come again — never, never. Rose asked again, “Why didn’t you come in?” She wiped her eyes delicately and went on, “She never waked at all — just slept until the last second, smiled, and sighed. That was all. You should have seen her smile, Joan.”

But Joan cried out passionately, “I’m glad I didn’t!” She rushed to her own room and flung herself upon her bed and cried over and over into her pillow, “I don’t want to see her dead — I don’t want to see her dead!”

Yet they would not let her have her way. No, soon they took possession of the house where her mother had lived so long. The women came out of the village, crowding into the house, friendly, kindly, eager, curious, and the house must give up all its secrets to them. Mrs. Winters, dressed in an old noisy black taffeta, pushed them firmly away. She herded them together and cried at them, “Now you all go away. We are going to do everything necessary. Mr. Blum is here waiting. The Ladies’ Aid is going to see to the flowers and everything.”

Behind her Mr. Blum stood, short and fat and dark, trying not to be facetious. “Sure, we’ll do it all, folks,” he said loudly. “That’s our business, you know. I always say it may be a dead business, but—” He stopped and coughed, remembering he was in the presence of the bereaved. “Sure—” he ended weakly.

So they were together again in the sitting room. They had nowhere else to go except in this one room that had been kept for them. The house was not theirs. Even in the study there were women’s coats and hats piled on the table. Hannah was crying and hurrying in the kitchen to make coffee for everybody. Past the open door went wreaths and flower pieces. There was the sudden shadow of a great black box. “Easy there, boys,” Mr. Blum’s voice roared, “careful of the corners!” Francis, standing by the window, turned away from them, biting his nails, and leaped and banged the door behind him and ran though the kitchen into the backyard and down the south street.

Rose sat by the desk. The little diary was open before her. She began to write in it again, weeping silently, writing down the story of her mother’s death. She blotted it carefully and turned to Joan. “I wish you could have seen the smile at the end—” In the leather chair the father sat in his plum-colored sateen quilted robe. The sunshine of midafternoon shone searing across his face, withering it, making him white and old …

Joan sat on a stool before the wood fire Hannah had lit and stared into it. She spread out her hands to the blaze, for she was cold. Upstairs they were tending the body she had tended all these days. But all the tending had not been enough. She was tired to the heart and it was not enough. Death had not stayed for all her fighting. They were washing the flesh. Strangers were there at the end.

Her father’s melancholy voice broke across her agony, reflective, mournfully, surprised, “I think I am the first one of all my family to have been left a widower, Joan.”

“Yes, Father?” she answered. A little clear blue flame darted out of a log and flashed slender and upright as a dagger toward the chimney.

“Yes,” he continued in a sort of sad surprise. “John was younger than his wife Annie and he died before her, and Isaac never had his health after the war and he died of old wounds and David died of typhoid, and Frederick is still living—”

“Dearies,” said Mrs. Winters at the door, “come and see her! She’s so sweet — I never saw her look sweeter—” Somehow she herded them all together. “Where’s Francis? Oh, he’ll be too late. We do want to get all this sadness over before Christmas — I do think he might have stayed with the family this last hour — I wish he had listened to—”

She was pushing them upstairs. Rose and Joan and their father. The father tripped and Mrs. Winters caught his elbow and held it firmly, guiding him. “Now, Doctor, I don’t wonder you feel it, but the Lord giveth and taketh. Joan, we put on the orchid bed-jacket and a fresh — It was difficult to dress — you know — Well, she looks so sweet, her lovely hair all white and still so curly, and Mr. Blum just touched her up a little.”

“I can’t,” gasped Joan.

“Oh, honey, she’s so sweet to look at — your own mother — You’ll always regret it—” She was pushed into the room. Now it was a strange room, full of strangers. Mr. Blum was there, wiping his hands on a stiff linen towel. “One thing,” he whispered hoarsely. “I always ask the family, should we take off the wedding ring?”

Against her will Joan’s eyes searched in terror. She saw a tall stiff doll lying in the great box, dressed and tinted into the semblance of life. The strong shapely hands were folded upon the breast, the wedding ring was shining there. For days they could not have taken away the ring if they would. But now the hideous swelling was mysteriously gone. Her mother was her own self once more, but strangely her own self dead, dead, with her hands folded upon her breast as only the hands of the dead are folded.

“Let her alone!” Joan cried, her voice bursting from her, and to her own horror she burst into loud childish weeping before all these strangers.

So she lost the body of her mother. They took her from the hour of her death and she was no more for her children. Others had her. Even at the funeral she belonged to others. Only for a moment did Joan regain her. There was the moment when she spoke for her mother to them all and so for that moment regained her. The church, they said, perturbed, was decorated for Christmas. Holly and pine wreaths and a silver star were for Christmas. They all had loved her, of course they wanted everything right for their beloved pastor’s wife, but the wreaths were so hard to put up and take down.

“Leave them as they are!” she cried at them. There they were, the women of the Ladies’ Aid, crowded into the sitting room, heavy-bodied, anxious, kind. “We don’t want to seem lacking in respect,” they said, their faces solemn. But Joan flung out her arms and cried at them, “Don’t you remember how she loved Christmas? Why, on Christmas morning she used to run over to the church before breakfast to see it! She thought the church never so beautiful as on Christmas morning. Even when she’d spent days on the wreaths and even after she had hung the star herself and had seen it all the night before, she’d run over alone on Christmas morning. She wouldn’t want the wreaths taken down because of her, and not the star, especially.”

So, dubiously, they had left the wreaths and the great silver star shone above the chancel and they set her there under it.

But it was all strange and awry. It was strange for the father to be in the pew with them instead of the mother. He was out of place there, while the short stout Methodist minister stood in his pulpit to praise the dead.

He felt shorn and embarrassed. To hear these praises made even her memory unreal. “A good and faithful wife,” a strange voice said, “a shining light in the community, a friend to us all — we shall miss her.” It seemed indecent to hear his wife thus publicly commended. He shrank within himself. Mary — his mind was full of Mary, Mary going about the house at her little swift half-run, Mary at the table managing for them all, Mary — but he could not quite remember her face now. He had never been good at remembering faces. Her eyes had been brown, he knew. He remembered that because when they were alone in the night and she had got into bed first as she always did because she was so quick, she lay looking at him, her eyes strange and dark and quiet, and this look always made him uncomfortable although he did not know why. She was so strange when they were alone together — he wanted the light out because she was always less strange when he could not see her. Her warm and present body was familiar to him, but when the candle was lit her dark silent eyes made her strange again. They had argued about the candle lit in the night. She said, “Let me light the candle, Paul, I want the light. The darkness weighs me down.”

But he did not answer. He held her and hurried on. It was not only that her eyes were dark and strange, but the light made him ashamed of what he wanted to do. He argued it with himself in the daytime, in the study, working on his sermon, the Bible open before him. Why should he be ashamed when it was lawful wedlock? Why should he want the darkness to hide him? But if she prevailed, and sometimes she had, then desire went out of him and he felt himself injured and helpless, and he could not see why, because to put such things into words seemed shameful to him …

“So He giveth His beloved sleep,” the voice from the pulpit declared with unction.

But her mother did not want sleep, Joan cried passionately in her heart. She wanted to be awake, to live, to run and to work and to laugh. She begrudged even the sleep of night. She arose early every day, eager to be awake. She asked nothing except not to sleep. But God had given her only sleep, eternal sleep. A rush of anger rose up in Joan, anger against God, God was suddenly real and alive to her, a shape of force, definite and inexorable and powerful. They were all lost in that power, helpless in the reasonless tossing ocean of God’s power. Tears filled her eyes, furious tears. She looked at the family. She gathered them together in her heart, her father, Rose, Francis, and each was touching. They were forlorn and deserted. God had robbed them. Her father was very pale, even his lips were suddenly dry and pale. He was not listening. He had opened a hymnbook and he was reading a psalm in the back. Rose, pretty Rose, her little sister, was sitting quietly, her hands folded, sitting so still, her tongue moistening her lips now and then. And Francis was her mother’s love. She must be responsible now for Francis and for all he did. His face was twisted and set into sternness against weeping. He alone of the three was staring rigidly at what lay beneath the Christmas star.

… She had died, after all, his mother. Now he need never tell her. There would never come that moment when he would go into the house and see her face and know she knew. For nothing of him was hidden from her long. There was something between them so hot and close that when he tried to hide a thing from her she knew it. She caught it from him by sight and smell and touch. And he knew when she knew. He was helpless with her, loving her and hating her at the same time because she was so close. She had been too close sometimes so that he was rebellious and wanted to be free of her, flinging himself away from her, flinging himself against her will. He wanted to obey her because he wanted to please her. He was driven to disobey her because she was too close and he loved her more than he wanted to love her.

Now that she was gone, he was half dead too. He wanted her back, he wanted her close again. There was no one in him really except her. As soon as this damned preacher was done talking he’d go and find Fanny.

No, he couldn’t go and find Fanny on the very day of his mother’s funeral. That was worse even than he was. It had been bad enough to go when his mother was dying. But Fanny was the only one who could make him forget. He was trembling with the need to cry. Fanny was the only person to whom he could cry and not be ashamed. When he had put his head down on her breast and cried, “Fanny, she’s going to die!” Fanny had hushed him in her arms and murmured over him richly. “Sweet boy, cry and ease yourself — cry and cry, sweet boy. It’s no shame to cry on me—” He was trembling with the need to cry again …

Joan saw his hands, wet, trembling, twisting. She slipped her hand into his arm and held him. She must take care of them all now — her father, Rose, Frank. She gathered them all to her, they were hers, hers. She would care for them and defend them, comfort them and love them, protect them against everything, even against God.

The people rose and she rose too. The organ was playing quietly, “For all the saints who from their labors rest.” It was nothing to her that Martin was playing, nothing that people were singing softly and sadly to his playing. She would carry on her mother’s life. She would never rest. She would go on doing her mother’s work, working, working, making her mother’s life go on.

“Good-bye, Joan,” the nurse whispered to her as the singing slid to an amen. “I’m catching the train for my next case. I almost didn’t have time for the funeral. But I like to stay to the funerals if I can, especially if I get fond of the patient like I did. I’m lucky today — just got a telegram this morning there was an arthritis case waiting, and, they’re apt to last. Now remember what I said and look out for a little fun for yourself. She was sure a grand case, and I’m sorry she had to go. But don’t sit and grieve.”

“I’ll be very busy,” said Joan steadfastly. She grasped the thick strong hand gratefully and clung to it a little. It was something to cling to for a moment. But almost at once it was pulled heartily away and the ruddy round friendly face disappeared among the faces gathering around her. She lost the rough touch of the hand in many gentle touches of other hands. “Dear Joan, let us do anything we can.” “We’ll all miss her, sir.” “Francis, my boy, Ned says he’ll be over first thing tomorrow — wants you to go hiking if you feel like it. I said I didn’t know if it was the thing—”

Against her cheek Joan felt Mr. Billings’ gusty breath and he whispered windily in her ear, “She was a real lady, your mother was — never niggled over anything — bought it or didn’t buy it, but no complaining like some I know. I’ll be sending the meat up just the same, as nice a side of lamb as I ever had — I said to Mollie you wouldn’t be wanting turkey this Christmas.” There were tears in his small black eyes and they glittered on the insurmountable mounds of his cheeks, and then ran down by his ears. Joan’s heart flew to him. “Thank you — thank you for your feelings especially,” she said, and somehow for the first time was a little comforted.

Used as she was to leaping from her cot many times in a night, it was strange to lie quietly in her own bed again in her own room, so strange that for long she could not fall asleep. When at last she did sleep it was only for a little while. She woke to find herself standing in the blackness of the night, groping for her mother’s bed. “Yes, yes,” she was muttering, “here I am — here — here—”

But her hand fell on nothing and instantly in the darkness she was awake and she knew what had happened. She remembered that they had put her mother in the churchyard, there on the far side of the church, away from the house. Her mother was lying now in the utter closed darkness of the earth, forever sleeping. For an instant she, too, was in that narrow buried cell. She saw the somber intensely sleeping face. Her hands flew to her breast. Her mother would not be changed yet. Oh, somehow she must get her out and away, into the air again, into life again!

Then she heard the sound of a cough from the next room, her mother’s room. Her father was there. He had moved back again this very night. Into the same bed where he had been used to sleep he had gone, and now he lay alone. She listened. He was awake. She had heard him cough once more and felt a new pity for him. She forgot she had been angry with him. He was alone, too, and she must go to him. She opened the door softly, a small crack. He lay there in the bed, the candle lit beside him, the covers tucked beneath his arms. On his breast he held his large thin hands folded. He was staring ahead of him, but she was not sure he did not sleep. He had opened the windows wide and in the stir of the air the candle threw a moving shadow over his face.

“Father,” she said softly, tentatively. He turned and looked at her from afar off, solemnly.

“What is it?” he asked her.

“I heard you coughing — are you wanting anything?”

He hesitated. “No, nothing,” he replied quietly.

She waited, but he said no more, and she closed the door and went back to her own room, her pity in her still, but now somehow cold.

Ah, but she was cold, her body cold, her feet cold! The air had changed in the night to great cold, and she huddled into her bed, suddenly forlorn and chilled to the heart. And then the pity which was in her turned upon herself and for herself she wept and wept until sleep came at last.

But it was well to weep in the night and have it done. She woke in full dawn spent, with the quietness of one spent for a time, knowing that for a while she had wept her fill. She rose quietly, subdued, with no aching necessity for any weeping, and dressed herself and went downstairs and spoke to Hannah gently. “Good morning, Hannah.”

Hannah was late and untidy. She had not combed her hair and she was moving about slowly, sodden with weeping, ostentatious with grief.

“Let’s try and have everything as cheerful as we can this morning, Hannah,” she said quietly. “Mother would want us to.”

She found a clean tablecloth and put it on the table, and out of all the flowers in the house she found some red roses Miss Kinney had brought. “I bought them,” said Miss Kinney in a piercing whisper. She had not wiped away the tears running down her small withered face. But Mr. Blum had not been willing to use anything except white flowers.

She set the red roses on the table. The sun was careless and beautiful. It shone through the windows as it always did and poured empty cheerfulness into the room. She made everything ready and perfect for them all, postponing sorrow. Even Hannah’s trembling lips did not bring the tears again to her own eyes. She waited while Hannah dried her eyes upon her apron and listened when Hannah asked, “Do you want I should go over your mother’s things for you?”

But then she was struck with delayed remembrance. Of course there were her mother’s things, her dresses — oh, no one could touch them. “Rose and I must do that—”

She could not forget it, now that Hannah had spoken, and she could not bear to have it done. She would put it off a few days. It was still good to have her mother’s things in this house. Let them hang in the closets, lie in the drawers. Let as much as could be rest as her mother had left it. She clung to all of her mother.

Then one by one they came down to the breakfast table, Rose, Francis, and her father, carefully dressed, for it was his day for pastoral calls and it did not occur to him to delay duty. She took her mother’s place without question now. She served them in silence, and in silence they received her service.

The next day she and Rose together opened the drawers of the bureau in her mother’s room. They opened the closets, and took away everything that was her mother’s. There were not many things besides the gay bed-jackets — her few house-dresses, her brown suit, her best dress of a dark wine-brown silk, her black winter coat long worn, the brown velvet toque she had made herself. But because the garments were all long worn, because they had seen them so often, upon her, they were still part of her now.

And there were the gloves worn to the shape of her hands. And there were the shoes, mended at the heel, with here and there a small neat patch. Old Mr. Pegler, the cobbler, had used to mend them for nothing. He would not come to church, he said, for he followed Ingersoll. But he mended the shoes she had brought him and would not take payment. “Not, mind ye,” he said stoutly every time, his glasses pushed up on his bald head, “because you’re the minister’s wife. I do it because I want to.” And she, because she was proud, took him a cake now and then, for his wife was long dead and he did for himself, and he loved her dark chocolate cakes and her silvery angel food. “I can do everything for myself except the sweet stuff,” he told her, crinkling his little round meaty cheeks. “It takes a woman to do the sweet stuff.”

Sorting over the shoes Joan suddenly recognized among them pairs of her own, shoes she had thrown away because they were not fit to wear, or so she had thought. Her mother had said nothing. She had taken them to Mr. Pegler and he had mended them and she had worn them that she might add a little to the secretly saved money. It hurt her heart to see what her mother had done, and none of them had noticed it. She began to realize that none of them had noticed their mother. They all took from her, each took what he needed for his own life, without seeing that she also needed something from them for herself. But now it was too late—

Joan, looking at all these things, cried out to Rose, in a low voice, “What shall we do with them? I feel as if we buried her body, we should have buried these, too.”

Rose looked up. She was kneeling at a drawer. “We could give them to the mission at South End,” she said in her reasonable, practical way. “They would be doing good there.”

“No,” said Joan abruptly. “I couldn’t bear it. I couldn’t bear to think of her clothes, her dresses, the things she made and wore — put on that riffraff—”

She gathered them into her arms, all she could hold of her mother’s garments. “I’ll pack them away for now,” she said. “I’ll put them in that old round-topped trunk in the attic that she kept our baby things in. There will be room for these, too, there are so few—”

She mounted the attic stairs, her throat tight with tears, hugging her load. Inside her heart cried out, “Oh, Mother, Mother, Mother!” From the things came the smell of her mother. It was not scent. Her mother had never used scent. It was the odor of her mother’s body as it once was, the odor of clean and healthy flesh. She knew it, she remembered it. In her childhood, sitting upon her mother’s lap, wrapped in her mother’s arms, there was that fresh, slight odor. She loved it then, it added its comfort to the embrace. Once, when she was very small and her mother had been away a day and left her with Hannah, in intolerable loneliness she had run to the closet and opening it, she had buried her face in her mother’s dresses, and there was the odor of her mother and it comforted her.

It comforted her now. It brought back her mother’s health and her old vigor. She forgot that odor of death from the sickbed, and she remembered her mother as she had been, her open smooth forehead, her clear wide dark eyes, the brown of her face mingled with the red in her cheeks. She stood at the head of the attic stairs, remembering — staring, smiling at what she remembered—

Then she saw the round-topped trunk was open. She went to it and saw the baby clothes tossed this way and that. The tray was partly full of small socks and shoes and crocheted baby jackets, all in confusion. She understood instantly. Here her mother had kept her little store of money, and from here her father had taken it. But now it mattered no more. That, too, was over. Only she was glad her mother had not known the end, glad she had slept and not heard her father’s footsteps hastening up to the attic stairs. She put down her load upon a chair, and lifted the tray and set it on the floor and kneeling began to sort it. Here were Francis’ shoes, and here a red jacket he had had. She could remember it because her mother had made it and had loved it on him. Lifting it to fold it she saw something else — an envelope addressed to her in her mother’s writing. Joan Richards. There was her name, her mother’s writing. It was like hearing her mother’s voice. She tore it open, her heart throbbing in her throat—

“Dear Joan — my darling child—” That was like her mother to begin a little formally and then to rush to warmth.

I write this to you because you are the eldest. I have worried so because I have nothing to leave my children. It is so hard to begin life with nothing at all, and because of this several years ago I began to put by a little of the housekeeping money. There are always ways to cut down for something one wants very much. It has been a joy to do this. Now today you are graduated. I have been tempted to take this money — it is nearly a hundred dollars now — and use some of it for a nice present for you — a watch. I always think a lady’s gold watch is nice, perhaps because I have always wanted one. But something makes me feel I am not to live very long. I am tired much of the time. And I have nothing to leave my beloved children except this little heap of money. I leave it to you Joan, to use for yourself, for Rose, for Francis, as you must. I can trust you. You have always been a dear honest child. I shall tell your father it is for you.

Mother

So her mother spoke to her. But it was too late. She folded the letter and thrust it into her dress and went on sorting. In her bosom the letter lay like pain. Rose came upstairs, her arms full. “I think there are no more,” she said. “Shall we put them into the bottom?”

“Yes,” Joan answered. “Fold them and put them away.”

She would not tell Rose or Frank of the letter. They would not understand. Perhaps Frank would hate his father. And they must not hate each other — none of them must hate any of the others. She could understand. She would find a way to help the others if the need came. She must find some way.

She rose and packed her mother’s things steadily into the trunk, and when they were all put away she closed the lid and locked it fast. Their babyhood, their childhood, their mother’s life — all were locked away now, forever. It darted across her mind that there was nothing there of the man’s — nothing of their father at all. He had come and taken all he wanted and he had left nothing behind. There was no human thing he possessed which could have belonged there with the mother’s garments, with the little children’s garments. She turned away and looked at Rose and smiled, her heart hard with the pain of the letter.

“It is all over for her, isn’t it?” she said. “Let’s go now and put his things into the closets and the drawers.”