Time Is Noon

II

EVERY DAY NOW AT THE MEALS SHE SAT IN HER MOTHer’s place. Her own place was gone and she had her mother’s. Without knowing it she even began to use her mother’s words and ways, to do all those things her mother used to do. About the house she saw as her mother would have seen. It did not occur to her to take down the pictures she had once despised. She was so mingled with her mother that the house, the family, became her own. She found herself watching each one possessively, jealous for the good of each. She had no life of her own.

Her father gave to her each week the small sum he had been used to giving her mother and out of it she wrested fiercely their food and clothing. And then one night in her bed, lying awake in the light of the cold clear moon, she planned that she would do more. She would save still more fiercely and build again that small store of silver, bit by bit. She would do it for her mother.

She leaped out of her bed and went to her little desk and wrote to her mother. She wrote an answer to the letter she had found. Mother, I do not know if you can see this or not, she wrote. But I am going to go on with the fund, and if Rose or Francis needs it, it will be there. She went back to bed planning where she might save a penny or two from, the meat, from the butter. Her father would not notice. The next day she put the two letters together in a little box her mother had used for handkerchiefs, a small sandalwood box someone had once brought her from Italy, and she took out of her housekeeping money twenty-five cents. She would save it somehow during the week.

So bit by bit each week, some weeks only a penny, some weeks as much as a dollar, she added to what was in the sandalwood box, where her mother’s letter lay with her own letter. She kept the box in the attic in the tray of the round-topped trunk. He would not look there again, thinking he had taken everything. It came to be a secret comfort to her, the knowledge of that small, steadily growing store, as it had been a comfort to her mother.

But it was not easy to be her mother. She had not the years it had taken to temper her mother, to make her patient. She was eager, too eager, to do for them. Her young boundless strength rushed out to do for them more than they wanted. She straightened Francis’ drawers and he scowled at her. “I wish you’d leave my things alone.” It hurt her amazingly. He never had minded when his mother had done the same thing. “Leave my drawers alone, will you?” he demanded again. “I can’t find my things.”

“I only put your clean collars—”

“I can put my own things where I want them,” he said.

And there was Rose with her strange, soft obstinacy. When the long Christmas holiday was nearly over Joan said briskly, “Now we’ll have to be getting you ready to go back to college. We’ll need to look at your clothes.” She thought of the sandalwood box warmly. If Rose needed a new hat or some little thing there’d be enough. Or she could give her something of her own. In the village she needed very little. There was a blue evening dress. She needed no evening dress here in Middlehope, where the gayest evening was to go with her father and have supper with one of the families in the church, a plain home supper. They would not have known what to make of an evening dress. They would have thought she was putting on airs. There was really no place to wear pretty clothes.

“I want you to take my blue dress back to college with you, Rose. I don’t need it.”

“I’m not going back to college, Joan,” said Rose.

They were alone, making beds, now in Francis’ room. She paused, astonished. “Not going back?” she said stupidly, staring at Rose.

But Rose tucked in the corners carefully. She did not look up. Her face was quite composed.

“No,” she said, calmly. “I have other plans.”

“You’ve not told me, Rose,” said Joan. She was hurt. She longed to reproach Rose. Rose never would come near — Rose never told anything — her only sister, just the two of them, working about the house together and Rose had never told her what she was planning.

“Rob Winters and I are going to be married,” said Rose, her voice placid and certain. “He finished seminary in June and we shall be married and go as missionaries. He has been accepted for the service in China.”

Joan did not move. “You didn’t tell me,” she said hostilely.

Rose stood erect, her eyes innocent, candid, clear. “I’ve only just had the call, Joan,” she said. “Only yesterday I heard God’s voice plainly saying, ‘Go ye into all the world.’ I was not sure until yesterday, when I was sewing. I was by myself in my room, thinking about Rob, and I had my call. Then I knew I was to go, with Rob.”

“But — you’re marrying him — just to be a missionary? You’re a child — you don’t know—”

“I’ll be twenty in September,” said Rose. “And don’t put it that way, Joan. You’ve never understood — how I feel about my life. I want to obey God — I want to save souls—” She paused, and repeated softly, “‘Go ye into all the world.’”

“Do you want to marry Rob, Rose?” asked Joan. She thought of Rob, tall, thin, ascetic, his eyes alive in his set, pallid young face.

“If God tells me to,” said Rose. A slight, exquisite flush crept into her creamy cheeks. She went steadily on with her work, trying to make the corners of the bed square. But she never could get them quite as square as her mother used to do.

It was so hard to talk to Joan. Joan was always wanting to probe into her and find out things, the things she told nobody, things she could not put into words, feelings not to be put into words. It was all mixed up in her, this warm sweet need for devotion. She wanted to offer herself up. She had offered herself to Jesus, giving herself up, feeling herself swept into Him, into His being. She and Rob had talked about it, Rob knew what she meant. He had looked at her with such worship that suddenly she wanted to cry. “You are a saint, Rose,” he whispered. “I never knew there could be a girl like you, so pure, so … so holy.” When he took her hand, that same familiar sweet rush of feeling had swept through her and she knew it was right for her to love him. They had kept their love so beautiful. When they had kissed each other, she said, “Let’s keep our love pure and beautiful, always.” And Rob kissed her gently. When she was in his arms, when he was holding her so purely, she could think about Jesus, too, in all the lovely misty warmth inside her. It made her know it was right for her to marry Rob.

Joan said shortly, “I don’t understand it — I don’t see what it has to do with Rob.”

She fell to work again. Now they were silent. But Joan was in a turmoil of surprise and discomfort. What was the discomfort? She paused, searching. Was it that she would miss Rose? No — strange, strange, it had nothing to do with Rose. It was Martin. Here was Martin’s face suddenly in her mind, the memory of his lips on hers. But surely Martin had nothing to do with marriage. She put the brief memory away again.

So it became an accepted thing that Rose was to marry, was to go to China. Her father heard it and grew unexpectedly cheerful. In the evening as they sat about the fire he told them what they had never known. “When I was a young man,” he said diffidently, “I also planned to go to the foreign field. The call came to me when I had been married a year and you were an infant, Joan. It came very clearly. I remember. Dr. Peter Davidson of China had my pulpit that Sabbath evening, and I remember the congregation was very small, for even then my people were not interested as I have wished in saving souls. And while I was troubled about this, God’s voice came through the preacher. He leaned over the pulpit — a great tall thin man he was, burned nearly black by eastern sun, and he pointed his finger at me and said, ‘Why not you?’ And I knew it was God’s voice. I came home to Mary and told her.” His face looked suddenly withered as he spoke. He finished very quietly. “She would not go. She said God had to call her, too. I have regretted it all my life.”

He had never said so much to them before. They did not know what to answer. Francis, looking up from his book, closed it suddenly. “Going to bed,” he said gruffly, and slammed the door behind him. They did not notice him. Joan was sewing, mending the pile in her mother’s basket, and Rose was sitting, half dreaming, in the shadow, near the fire. Ah, but Joan must speak for her mother. “I suppose she thought of me — of us,” she began. But her father did not hear. He stared into the coals.

“God has punished me,” he said somberly. “I have labored here in this one small place all my years. Where I might have harvested my thousands, I have only a few score of souls saved. That is why now I turn so eagerly to the mission at South End. I did not heed God’s call, and he punished me. But now he has relented. Within these last few years people have come to me, unsaved and ignorant of God’s love. God is kind.”

His voice quieted. In their silence he went on a little more, revealing himself wistfully to them, compelled by a lifetime’s compulsion.

“All these years I have been waked in the night by the groans of those across the sea whom I never went to save. I should have gone. I have lain awake in the night, hearing them call.”

Joan looked up at him across her mending. This, then, was what he thought about when she saw him lying solitary upon his bed, his hands crossed upon his breast. He was listening to voices calling to him. All these years, when they had seen him lift his head and stare away from them, it had been to listen not to them, but to those others whom they had never seen. He had moved among ghosts.

Rose was already gone. Though she moved about the house during the spring, though her hands helped here and there, pretty hands, so strangely clumsy for all their shape and smoothness, though her soft voice made its even replies—“Yes, thank you, Joan, a little more bread — the white bread, please,” “The white meat, please, Father,” “I’ll dust the parlor clean, Hannah”—Rose was gone. She had withdrawn her life from this house, withdrawn it into waiting, into the years to come, into a life Joan could not imagine.

She could not imagine Rose’s life away from Middlehope, far from everyone they had known. Together they planned Rose’s clothes, the things she would need for her marriage. They said, looking at each other in sisterly, practical fashion, “There must be this, and this—” “Surely a white satin wedding dress?” said Joan, pleading. But Rose shook her head. “What would white satin be afterwards? Brown, a brown crepe—” So Joan let it be brown crepe, though how could it be a real marriage without white satin? … “Miss Joan Richards was married today to — to — her gown was white satin with a train—” … “A thin dark dress for travel,” said Rose, with pencil and paper, “a voile or two for the heat—”

But then it was not so much getting ready for a wedding as getting ready for what was after it. That Rob and Rose were to be married seemed nothing but a convenience before they went away together to be missionaries. What were missionaries? … Joan, standing tall and irresolute beside Rose in Mr. Winters’ general store, let Rose choose the plain striped voile, the dark brown silk crepe. These were not chosen for Rose the bride. They were chosen for someone else, for Rose the helpmeet, neat, subdued, standing beside the young missionary.

Mr. Winters waited on them fussily, urging one thing and another. “Here’s some pretty newfangled things,” he said, hurrying from one cardboard box to another. “Doggone, where are they? I had my hand right on ’em a minute ago — costoom jewelry they call it. It looks almost real.”

“No, thank you, Mr. Winters,” said Rose. She did not call Rob’s parents Mother and Father. She was no warmer to them than she ever had been.

They cut and sewed the stuffs together, quiet plodding sewing. It was like sewing under a gray sky. Her mother would have hated these dull colors. “Where is that flowered lawn Mother made you?” Joan asked suddenly. That day it had slipped over Rose’s head like a shower of plucked flowers.

“I still have it,” said Rose. “I haven’t really worn it much. It wasn’t a very practical dress,” she added after a moment.

Joan did not answer. Rebellion against this sewing, against this marriage, this life Rob had chosen, rushed up, a heat in her body. Her hands felt stiff with unwillingness. She stood up suddenly and the stuff and the spool and the scissors fell to the floor.

“I’ve just remembered something I forgot,” she said abruptly to Rose’s calm, upturned eyes, and whirled out of the room in long-legged haste. But before she could get to her own room she heard the front door downstairs open and a voice shot clearly up to her ears. “Where’s Rose? Rose — Rose!” it called loudly.

It was Mrs. Winters. But when Rose came out of her room, she cried at Joan, leaning over the balustrade, looking down. Mrs. Winters was slapping a letter she held in her right hand with her plump left hand. It was so plump her gold wedding ring was deeply imbedded in her finger. “Joan, what’s this about Rob and Rose? I don’t say anything about their marrying and I didn’t say a word about Rob’s being a minister — he’ll always be poor, and I’ve nothing to leave him — Mr. Winters and I — but to go to China’s something else! I don’t believe Rob’d have thought of it by himself — it’s Rose—” Her voice filled the hall, strident, sharp, rising up the stairs. In the kitchen the dishes Hannah was washing stopped rattling. Then the door of the study opened and the priest of God stayed her angry voice. He stood, sudden and tall, his hand uplifted against her to silence her. “Do you mean you are not willing for your son to follow his call?” he asked.

Across the strident heat of her voice, his voice fell like a sword of ice, silencing her. But she was not used to silence. “You’re a good man,” she retorted, “but you don’t understand. Rob’s my only boy. Rob’s always been too enthusiastic — emotional — his father’s emotional. If it hadn’t been for me, Mr. Winters would have been here, there and everywhere. He wanted to go out on a gold rush once when he was a boy not any older than Rob is now — Why, once he wanted to throw up his good general store and go into automobiles! Rob’s just like him. They hate to listen.”

“Take care that you are not a hypocrite,” said the priest of God with slow, deadly coldness. “You lead the missionary meetings in the church but you will not give your own son to God.”

“Oh, Father, don’t,” cried Joan. “Please come in, Mrs. Winters — Oh, Rose, I didn’t know Rob hadn’t told her—”

“He’s afraid of her,” Rose said breathlessly. “He’s always been afraid of her.”

She threw reproach at Rose in a look, then ran down the stairs, trembling in her large young haste. How she hated to see people hurt, even Mrs. Winters! She seized Mrs. Winters’ plump arm and drew her eagerly into the empty parlor and pushed her into a seat and closed the door. “Sit down — sit down — there — we can talk about it — not quarreling — I hate quarreling—”

She forgot how strong she was until Mrs. Winters fell into a chair under her strength. “Joan — I do declare,” she exclaimed breathlessly. Then she saw Joan’s moved, troubled face, and her lips trembled. “It’s awfully hard,” she whispered hoarsely, pulling her handkerchief from her belt. “Of course I believe in missions — I’ve been brought up to — I’ve been brought up a Christian — I can’t remember when I wasn’t a member of the Church. But I never thought it would happen to me. It was hard enough for my son to want to be a preacher — so poor preachers always are, and no help in the store — and Rob’s a sensible boy at heart. But he doesn’t listen to me — Still, I just don’t believe he’d have thought of such a thing himself. Rose’s always been a little queer. She’s had such an influence on him.” Her full purplish lips quivered beyond control and she put her handkerchief to them.

“I know,” breathed Joan. She towered over her, instantly understanding. “It’s terrible — it’s terrible for me too, letting Rose go.”

She hung over Mrs. Winters, yearning with comprehension. It would be like seeing them die on their wedding day, Rose and Rob. Her immense imagination leaped to the day, saw them upon the train, the train smaller and smaller in the distance until they were gone. In Mrs. Winters’ house there would be no child left, and in this house Rose would be no more. It was terrible as death, her mother gone in death and now Rose gone into life stranger than death. It was easier to understand death. Her eyes swam in tears. People ought to stay close, close together — families ought to cling together always until death came. They could not help death but they could help choosing in life to part. “Mrs. Winters,” she whispered, “Mrs. Winters, Mother wouldn’t have wanted Rose to go. I’m sure she wouldn’t.”

“Of course she wouldn’t,” Mrs. Winters whispered back, her fat cheeks shaking with the sobs in her throat. “Your dear mother — Joan, I’m not a hypocrite. I–I really did mean what I said in the missionary meetings, even though Chinese always did give me the creeps. I used to see them sometimes on the streets in New York when I went with Mr. Winters to get stock. But to put a nickel in the plate or even a dime once in a while — it isn’t the same thing as your only child wanting to go.”

“No — no,” said Joan. She knelt down and wrapped her long arms about Mrs. Winters’ large encased body, and Mrs. Winters leaned for a moment upon her shoulder and wept aloud.

“I haven’t done this — not since my little girl died before Rob could talk,” she gasped.

“There, there,” said Joan, patting her back gently. How could Rob be afraid of his mother? Under her hand she felt a hard full ridge of flesh above a corset. But it didn’t matter. She saw suddenly that this woman, this managing, bristling woman, was nothing but a child after all. Strange how nobody grew up — Her mother had died, really nothing but a little child, and she had never understood her mother wholly until she had seen she was a child. And now she would always really know Mrs. Winters. She would know her better than she did her own father, better than she did Rose, who never gave of themselves. Mrs. Winters sighed and sat up abruptly, and wiped her eyes.

“I don’t know when …” she said feebly.

“It doesn’t matter,” said Joan quickly. “I understand perfectly.”

“I know you do — I feel you do, though you’re only a girl and I’m sure — But I’ll always oppose it. Joan — so long as I draw breath. I’ve been a good woman and served the Lord and I oughtn’t to be asked to do this besides.”

Joan stood up, delicately conscious that Mrs. Winters was ashamed of her weeping.

“Yes, Mrs. Winters,” she said docilely. Mrs. Winters stood up also, and took out her side combs and combed up her pompadour and thrust the combs in again strongly on either side of the knob of hair on her crown. “But nobody listens to me,” she said. She scarcely looked now as though she had wept at all. “There — I’ve got to go — I left a cake in the oven. I don’t know what came over me. I shall write a good hot letter to Rob. And you speak to Rose, Joan. Tell her what your mother’d have told her. It’s that Kinney girl that’s started Rose, Joan, I’ll bet — a queer unnatural baby she was from the start. She had to be took, and I shouldn’t wonder if it made her a little queer. Well! I’m sure …” She moved toward the door and looked into the hall. It was empty.

Joan felt suddenly shy. “Good-bye,” she said gently. “I shan’t tell a soul how you’ve been feeling.”

Relief crept into Mrs. Winter’s small opaque gray eyes. She reached up her lips and kissed Joan under the ear. “You’re a good girl,” she said abruptly and went away. Joan, watching her, saw her march down the street, competent, determined. She saw her meet Francis, sauntering home from high school, swinging his books idly against the fence, and stop him a moment.

“What did she say?” Joan asked him as he came in, scorn upon his face.

“Said it wasn’t any way to treat my books,” he replied. “Old hen! Seems to think I’m a kid.”

But Joan went back upstairs smiling. Well, there it was — people! For she could understand that to speak so to Francis made Mrs. Winters whole again.

But no more than Joan could push away with her two hands her mother’s death could she push away this life Rose had chosen. Spring ended. The useful dark dresses were packed into the square trunk her mother had bought for her in college and which Rose had in turn. She had seen her mother kneeling before it — the last time to fold carefully the flowery dress. Now Joan knelt, feeling herself almost in her mother’s body, folding the useful clothes. She knelt, silent, taking the garments Rose piled ready on a newspaper on the floor. Where would these garments be unpacked again? She could not see — she could only feel that Rose was going very far, forever far away. She finished and stood looking down.

Rose called from her room. “Will there be room in the tray for a few more books?”

“There is a lot of room left,” Joan cried back. Yes, too much room — there was pitifully little in the trunk. Days before she had gone to the attic and taken out the few dollars she had saved to buy a wedding present for Rose. But it was so hard to give Rose a gift. She wanted nothing. “I want to buy you something pretty with it, darling,” Joan had pleaded. But Rose had been her soft, obdurate self. “It wouldn’t be suitable, Joan. Thank you ever so much, but it wouldn’t be really suitable.” So it had ended by her slipping the money into Rose’s hand. “Then here, darling — sometime you might want something — even something pretty.”

But now though all the little store was given, she could not close the somber trunk. She must put something in — something for her mother, if not for Rose. Her mother would not let a trunk go like that, full of nothing but useful things. Every year at college when she opened her trunk she found bits of surprise her mother had tucked in a corner, a lace-frilled sachet, a pair of silk stockings — but Rose had said no silk stockings, so they had bought lisle.

The door opened silently and her father stood there, a small solid, leather-bound volume in his hand. “Is there room for this?” he asked. He came to the trunk and stood hesitating above it. “I bought it small not to take up much room.” Joan took the book from him and put it into the tray. “It’s to start their life upon,” he said gravely. “‘Thy word is a lamp unto my feet.’”

But she did not answer. She left him and ran into her own room and began searching in her bottom drawer wildly, her throat tight. There she kept her few precious pretty things, the things she did not often wear, the few things she had too pretty to wear yet. There was a satin nightgown of palest peach. Mary Robey had given it to her at Commencement. “Wear it on your wedding night, Jo,” she had said, teasing her. Joan had put it away with the frilly sachet, half planning. Now she seized it and ran back to the trunk. From Rose’s room she heard her father’s voice talking to Rose. “In time of trouble …” he was saying. She lifted the dark useful traveling dress and thrust the peach-colored shining garment underneath. She ran back to her room and at her desk found a bit of paper and scrawled upon it, Wear this your wedding night, darling, darling Rose. She ran back and pinned the note upon the lace bosom of the folded gown.

It’s the prettiest thing I have, she thought, and covered it quickly with the dark dress, and suddenly she missed it intolerably.

But it was a comfort to her, even though she missed it. It was a comfort to her when the grave little wedding took place in the church. The church was full of the people gathered not so much to see the marriage as to see the leave-taking. They stared at this young man and this young woman, whom they had always known and not found worthy of wonder until now. They stared at the tall, pale, delicate-faced lad whose gray eyes seemed already too sunken in his face, and at the short, plump, composed girl beside him, brown as a wren in her plain dress. Marriage was not wonderful. But it was wonderful to stare at them and imagine them crossing seas and strange countries. Nobody in the village had crossed seas except Martin Bradley and Miss Kinney and they a long time ago. Besides, they had come back and stayed just as though they had never gone.

So from everywhere people gathered to the wedding. Let it be so, the priest of God said. Let the congregation see this dedication. God would move their hearts. Joan, entering the church with Rose, saw that everybody was there. People were here she did not know. Her eyes caught the direct stare of a tall, thick-necked, oafish young man, his eyes hot and small, fiery brown under rough red hair. She held Rose’s hand, hard, secretly, by her side. She mustn’t cry, not until after they were gone. There was Mrs. Winters, standing stout and stiff, staring out of a window. Joan understood at once that under that stare she also was saying she must wait to cry. The wedding march sounded delicately under Martin Bradley’s fingers, even perhaps a little scornful. He played it carefully, like an exercise, without expression, completing each phrase and flicking it from his fingers. She paused with Rose before their father, and Rob drew away from Francis, and Rose drew away from Joan, and Rob and Rose stood together. The father, priest of God, stood tall and solemn with his duty. But Joan, sensitive to him, could feel coming from him some force of ecstasy. It shone about him, electric in his face, in his silvery blue eyes, about his white hair. He was at sacrament. His voice rose, high and clear as light, above the two at whom he gazed. He drew them out of the world into the place where he stood and the three were alone.

He said, “We are gathered together this day before God to witness the dedication of these two …”

Joan looked at Rose, so staid, so sure. She doesn’t look like a bride at all, she thought sadly, and turning her head a little she gazed across the aisle out of the open window into a square of clear blue sky. It was June but Rose had wanted no flowers in the church, only the lighted candles, and against her brown dress she carried nothing but a stalk of lemon lilies Joan had picked for her at the last moment — the lemon lilies. She felt vaguely as though if her mother had been here it somehow could not have been like this — not grave like this. She thought passionately, I’m glad I put in my satin gown — I’m glad, I’m glad.

If this was dedication more than marriage then perhaps tonight alone when Rose lifted the gown and put it on, and when Rob saw her, in such a pretty gown, perhaps Rose would look a bride and Rob would see her so, and so it would be a wedding after all.

It was soon over, so soon over. They marched out to the music played perfectly without joy. The people crowded about the two. Here and there a little money was pressed into their hands. “Instead of a weddin’ present—” “Going so far you wouldn’t want glass or dishes—” Miss Kinney darted through them all and seized Rose and thrust a large album into Rose’s hands. “It’s my African pictures — not quite all, but many, many. I wanted to give you what I loved best — Oh, God bless you, dears! You lucky, lucky—” She kissed Rose upon the mouth, and tears streamed upon her cheeks, and suddenly standing on tiptoe she kissed Rob, and darted away. And the crowd, after a moment’s astonishment, remembered she was only Sarah Kinney and forgot her.

In the night, after it was all over, Joan woke suddenly, wide awake. What time was it? After midnight, for the setting moon hung low at her window. By now Rose would have found the gown and would have put it on. She shrank away from her sudden vision of Rose standing before Rob. What would then befall? She ought to have talked to Rose. But what could she have said? What had she to tell Rose, what did she know to tell except the few hot fruitless hours with Martin Bradley?

She remembered that as they were leaving the church she had seen Martin Bradley’s mother, talking to Mrs. Winters. She heard Martin’s mother say, “It’s a comfort to have a son like Martin. He loves his home and his mother.” Her little dried mouth had folded itself complacently. Mrs. Winters had opened her lips and closed them again. She hurried forward to Rob and Rose, forcing her face into a smile at last as they stepped into the old Ford car to go to the station. They had all gone to the station. And then Rose went away with Rob, the train growing smaller and smaller until it disappeared in the west. Joan had watched it until it seemed to enter the sky. She could almost imagine a little hole in the sky where the train was gone, dragging them with it. She and Rob’s mother and father had stood waiting, gazing down the small empty hole. Then they had walked home together.

“I’m sure I don’t know,” Mrs. Winters had said at last, sighing. She usually talked a great deal, but she had walked in silence, not seeming to notice Joan’s hand slipped into her arm. “Well! I’m sure I never looked ahead to this when I bore Rob and nursed him through a delicate childhood.” She paused by the steps of her house and looked accusingly at Rob’s father. “He always took after you.”

The man looked at her palely. He had said nothing all afternoon, not even when Rob took his hand to say goodbye. “Good-bye, Father. Write and tell me how things do at the store.” He had only nodded.

“You come in and get an eggnog,” said Mrs. Winters.

They had both forgotten Joan. She watched them go into the house together and shut the door. Then she turned and walked down the quiet street, bright in the late sun, full of empty brightness. She who wanted everything out of life, what had she after all to tell Rose, she who was left behind in the village?

But I ought to have bought her some sort of book, she thought in the darkness, aching vaguely with heaviness of duty undone for her own. I ought to have, she blamed herself, I ought to have done more for Rose.

The old rich deep sense of family, of need to sacrifice for her own, welled up in her. “I can’t ever do enough for them — not as much as Mother would have done.” And now Rose was gone. She had thought only death could take away, but now life had taken as inexorably. Out of the five of them two were taken, one by death and one by life. I must do everything now for Frank and for Father, she thought, passionately, to comfort herself in the darkness before dawn. And the walls of this house were still safely about her.

Of these two, Francis surely needed her the more. Her father had God. If he were fed the food he liked — and she saw now what she had not seen before, that he loved his food and that even when his hand refused it, his eyes clung to the dish — if no one disturbed his papers, if no one came into his study when he was alone, if his garments were put in accustomed places where he could find them, there was nothing left that human heart could do for him. He missed no one or so it seemed.

… And indeed he missed no one. For now Mary was nearer to him than she had ever been. Her restless changeful body was not here to tempt and disturb him and make him want and deny together, and wonder, troubled, what a man chosen of God ought to do. St. Paul had said clearly in the Epistles, “It is better to marry than to burn,” but there was the scornful overtone that to burn was ignoble. And he did not burn. It was not in him to think of women. He desired to look on no woman’s face as woman. But Mary, alive, lying beside him, kept him at war with himself — the old war in his members. So now when Mary was not there he could think of her happily and peacefully. God had seen fit to afflict him — blessed be God’s will.

And Joan, his daughter, ministered to his needs in the home, almost as Mary had done. Sometimes he almost forgot Mary was dead. He looked up from his plate to speak to Mary, but it was Joan, so he remained silent. Nothing now stood between him and the work. He could pursue secret mysteries. And he could preach the gospel to the unsaved, now that the chapel at South End was repaired — Dear Mary, who had done more good than she knew with the money she had saved for him. He had forgotten long since that there was any quarrel — Mary in heaven understood him as Mary on earth could not. Mary’s hands in heaven were cool with blessing, Mary’s voice in heaven quiet with approval. He could see her there, tranquil as she often was not tranquil here. Now she understood. “For now we see in a glass, darkly, but then face to face … We shall know as we are known.” He withdrew happily more and more. He moved about the house, a contented ghost. Only in the pulpit did he become real to any human creature. Then the people were his people, to whom he gave again what God had told him. God, who in the Beginning—

He was growing daily into the likeness of what he longed to be. It was daily easier now for him to deny the flesh. He had almost conquered his hungry body. He could take a dish of steaming prepared food into his hand and he could put it steadily down and rise hungry from the table.

“Your pa looks to need red meat,” Mr. Billings panted one Saturday morning in July. He held out a slab of bloody steak to Joan, who had answered the clatter of his wagon at the door. “Veal’s too weak for him, though it’s summer. I looked at him in church last Sunday when he was in his thirdly in the nature of the Holy Ghost, and I says, ‘It’s red beef he needs.’ Here ’tis!”

“I do thank you — you are the kindest man,” said Joan gratefully.

“Leave it red in cooking,” ordered Mr. Billings from his seat in the wagon. “Red’s the thing—”

But after all it was Francis who had eaten largely of the steak. Her father had cut a brown edge from it and that was all, though Joan said, “Mr. Billings brought that steak especially for you, Father — he thought you looked pale last Sunday in church.”

He smiled faintly. “I’d look better doubtless if Mr. Billings would come to prayer meetings sometimes — I never see him on a Wednesday evening.”

“I’ll have more of it, thank Mr. Billings,” said Francis, pushing his plate. “Gee, I like it red, Jo! Hannah always makes it too dry — but this is swell!”

His father kept his eyes steadily upon his own half-empty plate. He won’t eat himself, and he doesn’t like to see other people eat, Francis thought, hating him … “I’ll have some more,” he said loudly.

But then Hannah complained that you couldn’t fill Frank up these days. He was growing beyond all his clothes. Joan could see that, when she reproached him for wearing his dark blue Sunday trousers on a weekday. “I can’t sit down in those old striped pants,” he complained. “Gosh, Joan, I haven’t had a new suit since — since—”

He would not say “since Mother died.” He never mentioned his mother, and if she were talked of in his presence, he went away.

Joan looked at him carefully. He was as tall as she, and broader. In this year he was in body a man, a great, handsome, dark, male creature. Across his lip, along his jaw, the shadow of his constantly shaven beard lay black. He was not an instant still. His body moved, full of grace. When he spoke, his face changed as his mother’s had always done. He had her every look. But he was secret as she had never been secret. There was no knowing him.

For now Joan yearned to know him. For her own sake she yearned to care for him, to perceive his needs, that she might know him, and in knowing him find a sort of companionship. It was lonely to be the only woman in the house except old Hannah, who worked best if she were solitary. “Get out of my kitchen, Joan — your ma never cluttered under my feet the way you do. You’re so big there’s no gettin’ around when you’re here.”

And all she had of Francis were the small things she could do for him, making his bed, mending his clothes, putting them into his drawers, for he was always away. He was away because of school and now because of vacation. At night if he stayed at home he fidgeted and took one book after another and went upstairs early. Bit by bit he had taken his freedom until now he went out of the house as carelessly as though no one were left behind him. But his father did not question him because on Sundays he still came of his own accord to church. If his mother had lived he would long since have cried out at her, “I’m sick of coming to church with you—” But because she was not there for him to cry against he went once a week and sat where she had been used to sit, and because his father saw him there he let him be, serene in the surety that his son was safe and saved. “I am glad Francis is settling down,” he said to Joan.

Francis, sitting in the church, did not listen to anything his father said. He came to church not to listen to his father or to hear about God, but only blindly to find his mother. He often tried to remember what were the things she wanted him to do, and he could think of no command she had ever laid upon him except the wish that he come to church with her. It was the only rebellion against her that he now remembered, and he still rebelled against it and hated it, but because it was yet alive he could seem to see her more clearly in the church than anywhere else. In the home she had been so much his atmosphere that already her face was beginning to be blurred in his mind. But in church he could still see her very clearly as she used to sit, her little brown toque upon her head. For a long time she had worn a bunch of violets on her toque, at the edge on the side toward him where they lay against her curly hair. He loved the look of violets against her dark graying curly hair.

One night in the woods in early spring Fanny had picked a bunch of violets and put them against her black curls and he could not bear it. There could be nothing alike between Fanny and his mother. He would not even think of Fanny in church, where his mother was. They had nothing to do with each other. His mother was real, solid as life itself. Though she was dead, she was real, insofar as she had lived. His life was built on her life. Anything he might do was on that foundation, and where there was something, like this thing between Fanny and him, that could have no relation to the foundation of his mother, he knew it was not real and so it could not last.

But then he did not want it to last. He was wild to get away from it. If only he had some money — He had nothing at all except his bicycle, and if he sold that he might not be able to get away. He would go away without a word to Fanny. He had never promised Fanny anything at all. She burrowed her wild black head under his arm and whispered, “Sweet boy, you aren’t going to leave me ever! If you leave me, I’ll find you and drag you down — down — down. Promise me you won’t leave me!” But he never promised. He never promised anybody anything, because he hated lies. He pulled Fanny’s head back by her short curly hair, and he kissed her, but he never promised her. Women were always wanting promises — his mother, and now Fanny.

And Joan was wanting something from him, too, nowadays — talking to him, asking him questions — wanting to know things he did not know himself. How could he tell her where he was going after supper? When he ran out of the house he didn’t know where he was going. Maybe he was only going down to Winters’ store to see if any of the fellows were there. How could he tell her where he was going? Later, if he were restless, he’d go down to the woods at the south of the town and meet Fanny.

But he was wild to leave Middlehope. He must get away because he must get away from Fanny. When he had gone to South End that Sunday afternoon with Jack Weeks he had never dreamed of getting himself in a mess — not like this. He’d only thought of having a little fun and forgetting that his mother had to die. The house was so different and empty when she lay upstairs. He could not stay in it. There was nothing to do after church and after dinner, and Jack had said, “Gosh, there’s a swell joint down at South End.” So they had gone and Fanny was there dancing. She was dancing when he came in and he couldn’t be sure she was not white, her color was so fair. Her skin was as light as the cream-colored rose his mother had by the porch, that same creamy yellow, and when he had touched her cheek it had the smooth firm feel of the smooth closed bud. Sometimes when his mother fixed flowers for the table he had sat watching her and playing with the roses. He knew the feel, the color … He hadn’t meant anything except fun. But Fanny had meant everything right from the start. She had danced at him, danced toward him, danced for him. Jack Weeks had joshed him. She came up to the table and leaned over him.

“Sweet boy, what’s your name? I gotta know your name.” Her voice was black. No white woman had a voice like that, deep, soft, black. He could see her breasts as she leaned over him. He had never seen a woman’s breasts. She wanted him to look at her. As soon as Jack had gone into the next room to play pool she had taken his arm and coaxed him. He wanted to go and watch Jack. He had no money and he couldn’t play, but she was there … He knew enough not to go to her room. He shook his head when she wanted that. So she said, “Let’s take a little walk, sweet boy. Don’t you love the woods and the river? I know where there’s a pool, so quiet and pretty—” So they had gone down to the wood … But you could hardly tell what she was. Her skin was as white as his, whiter than he was where the sun had burned him.

He hadn’t ever really loved her. He loved his mother and so he knew what he felt for Fanny was not love. He wanted her and hated her, and he longed to be where he could not find her when he wanted her. But she was like earth in him. She was a sediment in him, a clay. If he could run away he would be like clear water, escaping from a muddied pool. Sometimes when he was with her, though he was deep in her, he wished he could rise straight up into the dark sky. At such times when he came home, even after he had bathed and was lying clean in his bed, he thought not of her but of flying in the sky, the clean, clean sky. To rise out of the dark, hot, close earth, away, away, into the emptiness where even big clouds had space enough to pass each other, not touching — Why did he want to be close to Fanny, touched by her hands, to touch her, to bury himself in her, and then come forth himself, loathing her touch, longing to be miles above her, above them all, in the sky?

He could not forget his mother. He wanted to forget her. But out of the darkness in the wood, out of the deep hot darkness, he saw her face, not angry, not even knowing he saw her, but simply as she had been when she was alive and everyday. And the moment her face came out of the darkness he wanted to get away, up, up, into the clear coolness of the sky, to leave everything he had ever known.

Joan drew the words out of him. She was always planning, now that Rose had gone away. She couldn’t plan anymore about Rose’s wedding and clothes, and now she was beginning to want to plan for him. She ought to have about six kids to keep her busy. The other night she was sitting on the porch when he came in — that was a night he’d met Fanny — and the old man was in bed. She didn’t ask him where he had been, but she began talking suddenly out of the dark when he sat down on the step to get cool, and because he didn’t want to go to bed yet. He had sworn to himself he would not meet Fanny again, and yet suddenly when he was with the fellows he had to go to her, even though his head cried prudently, “Better not go anymore, now while nobody knows! This is the time to stop, now when nobody knows.”

But Fanny had her dark hands on him. He could feel the dark deep hold of her in him, and he went. Now it was over. He was back, and as he sat down he saw Joan.

“You not in bed yet?” he asked making his voice gruff. If he were gruff enough she would not begin asking him anything. He had learned that trick with his mother.

“It’s hot upstairs,” Joan answered.

And then suddenly she began talking and her voice changed and sounded just like their mother’s. Queer, he had never noticed it before. But now, not seeing her in the shadow behind the rose vine, it frightened him to hear what seemed his mother’s voice.

“What do you plan for yourself, Frank? What are you doing with yourself?”

It was like his mother to throw a clear, direct question at him. He could almost hear the overtone of other words. “What are you doing with yourself — oh, my son!” His palms grew suddenly damp. Gosh, if it were true, what the old man was always saying, that the dead live and know! They had talked about that tonight down at the store. “Way I figure it,” Mr. Pegler said, “we got no call to think that when the chemical combination we call the ‘human body’ is broken up that there’s anything left. It’s all chemistry, that’s what I say.” While they talked he scarcely listened. He was saying he never would go near Fanny again, but already his blood was plotting. He could feel it stirring about his heart. There was something about the still close heat of a summer night that made him think of Fanny. Outside the door of the store he could see the heat dancing above the road. A cicada called. In the back of his brain, underneath his attention to their talk, he felt the shapes that Fanny took, rising, writhing, secret in him, waiting. He had been glad — glad that the dead did not know, because only his mother could have discerned in him that dark stir. Maybe she did know? He had again that instant desire to spring from the earth, to rise, to leap into the sky, away, away.

“The only thing I really want to do,” he answered Joan passionately out of the dark, “is to be an aviator. I want to fly.”

“To fly?” Joan repeated, astonished. “But how could we ever get you to where you could?”

To his relief it was her own voice again. His mother would have answered strongly, “Nonsense! Frank!” And when he persisted she would have said, “Want it bad enough, and you’ll get it.”

But he had not really thought of being an aviator until this moment. He had only dreamed of being in the cool pure lonely upper air, freed from the earth like a bird. But now he planned instantly. What he had not thought of before came quick and complete in his mind.

“We could ask Martin Bradley. He was in the air service in the war. He dropped bombs.”

Joan did not answer for a moment, and when she did her voice came differently again, another voice, small, breathless. “I shouldn’t like to ask anything from him.”

“Why? I thought you were running around with him. Gosh, I heard fellows laughing about it at Winters’.”

“You let them laugh at me?” Joan asked, angrily.

“They didn’t before me,” he answered. “But I heard ’em snickerin’. Town like this everybody knows everything.”

She did not answer. He rose at length, yawned loudly, and said in the aggrieved way he used to have for his mother, “Well, if you won’t, you won’t.”

He went indoors and to his room and undressed. The longer he brooded, the more likely it seemed that there was no one to help him except Martin Bradley. And Joan would not ask — changeable, like all women. He thought for a while about women and how changeable they were. Even his mother had been changeable, and he learned to watch her when he wanted something so that he might know whether today were a day in which she was willing or unwilling. Only Fanny did not change — Fanny, steadily there in the wood at night, down by the small pool, down by the fallen tree, where the branches made a tent to cover them. “Sweet boy, don’t you ever leave me. I’ll hunt you everywhere. I’ll drag you down — if ever you go away from me.” He heard her voice always mingled with the rush of the stream, a soft, thick, singing voice. He broke into a sweat. He threw himself upon his face in his bed and felt himself sinking, sinking, into a black abyss. He was lost, he was lost. There was nobody to save him, no one to help him get away.

Joan, walking alone the next afternoon along the south road, passed the small stone house where Mrs. Mark lived, and heard her name called shrilly from the window.

She had always liked this little stone house. It stood apart from the village and it had a steady, aged look, its small-paned windows close against wind and storm. There used, Mr. Pegler said, to be several stone houses in Middlehope. All the oldest houses were stone, but in the boom times in the late nineties people got town notions and tore down the good old houses their grandfathers had made and built red brick contraptions. That was when the Bradleys built their big square brick house. The factory was going then and business was good. But Mrs. Mark had paid no attention to red brick and her house stood as it had for over a hundred years. Joan always stopped to look at it, and then to wave at Mrs. Mark’s face at the window and maybe to turn in a minute. Now, hearing her name, she turned into the weedy patch and opened the door. She remembered not to greet Mrs. Mark, since everybody knew Mrs. Mark hated what she called “words withouten meanings to ’em.” “Say what’s to be said and be done with it,” she always replied to a “good morning” or a “good-bye.”

Now she began abruptly.

“I’ve waited to make sure and I’m sure. That great big young fellow that’s your brother went down past this house last night and he met a girl same as I was pretty sure he did, but it was none of my business, or so I didn’t hold it to be, until last night he came home late by the moon and it was hot and I had my curtain up and I could see the girl was colored truck. I’ve seen such before, but I don’t hold with white and black mixing. I don’t hold with your pa going down to preach to them nor with his son goin’ to make up with them. Leave them alone!”

Joan, staring at Mrs. Mark, could not for the moment understand. Mrs. Mark’s dry voice was harsh in her ears, but she was staring at the lashless lids, at the bony sharpness of the jaw and cheekbones. It was not Mrs. Mark’s face at all, but a strange combination of lines, angles, shadows, planes, and the ears stood out transparent flanges.

“No use not seeing what’s going on. Then you can handle it. I’ve seen plenty of them go by to South End — grandfather, father, son. They all go. South End is a vessel for this town of Middlehope. I won’t name you no names. But I liked your mother. Get that boy out of this town. You look like your mother, only big as a house, aren’t you? It’s hard on a woman to be as big as you. Well, you’re what you’re born.”

The angles and planes suddenly resolved themselves into Mrs. Mark’s face again.

“Are you sure it was Francis?” Joan asked.

“Don’t I know him since he was a baby?” Mrs. Mark retorted. “Get along now.” She lay back and closed her eyes. “These legs of mine — I’m dead to the hips — inch and a quarter a year dies — I can tell to the month of the year what it’s to be — Dead reckoning, I call it!” She chuckled, her eyes grim, and cut it off and said sharply, “Get along, child! You’ve got your job set out, haven’t you?”

“Yes,” said Joan.

Down the long road she walked in great steps, her big feet leaving prints like a man’s in the deep dust. The late heat of the August sun beat down upon her, and her face was red. She could feel the heat shimmering about her flesh. But it did not matter. What could her mother have done for Francis? What was she to do for Francis? Her body shrank, and imagination withdrew … She drew near home, and then turned away again. She could not see Francis — not yet — not until she had thought of something to do for him. He must go away, of course. He said he wanted to fly and she had said she could ask nothing of Martin Bradley.

She strode westward and turned at the railroad station, where the street was a dead end. The late afternoon train had come and gone, and ahead of her she saw a slight, tall figure. She recognized Martin. What was she doing here? She had turned westward, the thought of his name had carried her feet in the old way. She slackened her steps, panting softly. Francis had said Martin Bradley could help him — only Martin could help him.

“Martin!” she called loudly. “Martin! Martin Bradley!”

He stopped, turned, and waited for her, elegant and still. When she came up to him she saw he was smiling a little, and instantly she knew herself dusty and hot. She rushed on with determination. What did it matter how she looked?

“I — it’s nothing about me. My brother Francis — was wondering if you could tell us how to get him into aviation?”

He stared at her, surprised. “One never knows what to expect of you, Joan.” His voice was cool, tolerating, a little disdainful. But it did not matter. How did a man work in a city all day and come home without a particle of dust upon his neat dark blue shoulders? Her hands were dirty.

“It’s not me,” she said doggedly.

“Not you,” he repeated, slowly. She felt him remembering her, and a sickness rushed upon her. But she stood sturdily, waiting.

… He had not, he thought, looking at Joan, remembered aviation in a long time. Even when he was in the clouds above the enemy fields, he did not think of flying. He thought only of the machine which he must move with precision, delicately, instantaneously when the moment came, to release those darts of death. Bair in his squadron was always groaning for rain. “God, I can’t see them when there are clouds — I can’t see where they go,” Bair used to cry every day. But he himself had never allowed himself to think beyond that moment of aim, of release. Did the bomb strike the spot he had chosen? Then it was a bull’s-eye. He had no more concern with it. It was like striking a note rightly upon the organ. One struck, heard the proper resonance, and passed on, at once to the next note.

… “Aviation?” he repeated. “I don’t know anything about aviation now.”

“You were in the war,” Joan urged. She passionately put from her the picture of herself kissing this man, kissing his hands, his lips, the white sides of his hair. If she thought of this she would be sick. And she did not matter now. It was Francis that mattered. This man looked old, smaller, shrunken. She was taller than he, though surely she had not been. She had not stooped to him. She must have grown. But perhaps she had stooped.

“But if you knew someone,” she said, “you must know a pilot.”

“I knew Bair, of course,” he said, considering. “Roger Bair — I flew with him — I don’t know — I believe he’s still flying. But we don’t keep up. Of course I could—”

“Where could Frank find him?”

“I don’t know — perhaps—”

“Where does he fly?”

“From a field outside New York.”

“Give me a note to him — for Frank.” She pressed him, ruthless with his diffidence. “He’d remember you — he couldn’t forget. Have you a card? If you’d say, ‘Introducing Francis Richards.’ Couldn’t you say ‘For old times’ sake, anything you do for him would be appreciated?”

Now that she had asked a little, she could ask much. She compelled him by her asking, her eyes compelling him, her urgent voice, the rush and vigor of her big body. She opened her bag swiftly and found a pencil, short and stubby because she chewed her pencils. It offended him at once.

“I have a pen, thanks,” he said coldly, and drew from an inner pocket a black fountain pen, bound properly in gold. The pen in his hand moved him to write. He took out his pocketbook, and from it drew a small neat business card. Upon it he wrote in fine script, Introducing Francis Richards. He hesitated. “I don’t like to presume on former acquaintances,” he said.

But now Joan would have dug out his vitals — let him give her something! He never gave her anything—

“You can put down ‘highly recommended,’ can’t you? He’s my brother and he’s a very bright boy. Put it down.”

She was breathing hard over his shoulder. He felt her there, large, implacable in her demand. He wanted to get home, to get away from her, to get home to his supper. She was distasteful to him. He shrank from remembering her. After a moment he wrote down carefully, Recommended. Why had he ever thought her like a lovely boy?

She was only a woman and he hated women, especially when they had long hair. Besides, she was taller than he.

She snatched the card from him and ran home. It was in her hand, Frank’s escape. She ran up the steps, shouting for him.

“He’s in his room, I reckon!” cried Hannah from the kitchen. She ran upstairs and into his room. He was on his bed, staring up at the ceiling, his hands under his head, his face flushed and sullen, slack with despair. He turned his eyes toward her.

“Here,” she cried. “I have it — introduction to Roger Bair, aviator! You can go right away — now!”

He sat up on the edge of the bed, his whole body lifted up, his face breaking into light. “I can go?”

“Yes,” she whispered. She was suddenly exhausted. She sat down.

“I haven’t any money,” he said frightened.

“I have — nearly eighteen dollars. I’ll give it to you—”

She looked at him and instantly the tears rushed thick into her throat. If she had not found out, what would have happened to him?

“What’s the matter?” he asked. “You’re white as a sheet.”

She stood up, shaking her head. No, she couldn’t tell him she knew. She couldn’t speak. They were too near to speak.

“Pack your things,” she said. “I want you to go tonight. His plane maybe starts early in the morning. I hear them in the sky in the morning before I get up. I’ll get the money.”

She climbed the attic stairs quickly and opened the round-topped trunk and found the sandalwood box. It was half full of pennies and nickels and a few dimes, but there was a handful of quarters. The quarters were what she had not put into the missionary collection. Her father had given them to her each month on the day of the meeting. “Your mother used to give twenty-five cents each month at the ladies’ foreign missionary society. I would like you to continue it.”

“Yes, Father,” she had replied.

But she had put the quarters in the box. Six of them had gone for Rose. The rest were now to go for Francis. She saw her mother’s eyes twinkle from the grave.

What she could do for Francis was not done until he was away. For his sake she must send him as far as she could. He must not stay a night more, not if she could help it. She packed his garments feverishly into her own bag — fresh shirts, his ties, the dark red tie his mother loved, his garments. He came and went, his black hair tumbled, his eyes shining. But he was not gay. He was silent. His face was grave, tense, tightened. The loose sullenness of his red mouth, still full-lipped as a child’s mouth, was gone, changed to some inner determined control. They did not speak. How could she speak, lest she cry out, “How could you do what you have done?” He did not speak because there was no one but himself in his mind. Everyone in the world was below the horizon of his mind. He moved alone in his life, to take his chance of freedom. If she had spoken he would have shouted at her to leave him alone. He was sore with sickness at the tangle he was in. He felt himself sweeping out of it upon wide silver wings, into the sky.

“There,” said Joan, rising from her knees. “Everything’s in but your toothbrush. Eat your supper and brush your teeth before you go. You can catch the nine o’clock and be in New York at eleven. You go straight to a Y.M.C.A. Tomorrow morning you can go out to the field and find him. You write me a letter how things go — write soon, Frank — tomorrow night.”

“Yeah, sure,” he muttered. It did not seem possible he was really leaving this room. In this room he had lived so long that it did not seem possible he could sleep in another bed. But this very night he must sleep in some strange unknown bed in the city he had never seen. He’d never even once seen New York and now suddenly tonight he was going to sleep there.

“You sell my bicycle,” he said suddenly. “Jack Weeks wants it. He’ll give you fifteen dollars for it, maybe. But be sure you have the money before you give it to him. He’ll cheat you if he can.”

“I’ll sell it and send you the money,” she said steadily.

“If I don’t get the job—” he said.

“If you don’t get one job, you’ll get another,” she replied in the same even tone. “You don’t come back — you’ll get the job, though — I feel you will.”

He looked at her deeply from under his black brows, questioning her. Did she know something? Who could know when he told nothing? Even at the store when other fellows boasted of the girls they knew, he was silent. No one ever saw him with any girl. He was never with any girl. He never walked with any girl. He and Fanny met and parted in the darkness of the wood beyond old Mrs. Mark’s house. Fanny went south and he went north. He withdrew into deeper silence. Silence was safe — never tell, and no one could know.

“Supper’s ready, and your pa’s waiting,” Hannah’s voice shouted from downstairs.

“I’ll go and tell him,” said Joan. “He won’t understand, but he’ll have to be told.”

She went downstairs to the dining room. The table was set for three. Soon it would be set for only two. She had an instant of terror. How swift was change, how insecure was life! This home had seemed for many years as permanent as her own body. Her mother, her father, Rose, Frank, herself, these five, had seemed as safe as the setting and rising of the sun. Her father came in at Hannah’s call and she saw him freshly, sharply, in the power of the moment. He was a frail old man, and he was all that was left to her of what was the safety of her childhood.

He looked vaguely about. “Where’s Francis? I’ll sit down. I’m tired today.” He took his seat at the head of the table, clinging to the sides of the chair as he sat.

“He’s coming,” she replied, and sat down. She would tell him quickly, now, before Frank came down. “Father,” she said, “Frank’s got a job. At least, probably, and he’s going to New York.”

He had begun to dip up the thick soup in the bowl before him in haste for its heat and warmth. When she said this he looked up at her, the spoon poised above the bowl.

“A job?” he repeated. “He isn’t finished school. What’s it mean? Isn’t he going to college? It’s strange if my son doesn’t go to college. And I thought he’d begun to give weight to God. He’s been so regular in his attendance at church I thought he was—”

“He has a job,” said Joan, raising her voice and shaping each word plainly. “He wants to go. He’s going tonight.”

“Tonight!” the old man repeated, astonished. He paused and said at last, “I wasn’t told.”

“He didn’t know until tonight,” said Joan. “You have to take a job when you get it.”

“What job?” he asked.

“Martin Bradley’s helping him,” she answered.

He went on with his soup in silence. He would talk to Francis, he thought to himself. He would not talk to Joan. Women knew very little. Francis would not tell her, but he would tell his father. He waited until Francis came in, and looking up saw his son unwontedly. The boy’s cheeks were very red and his eyes looked like Mary’s eyes. He came in quickly, and sat down quickly and began to eat, and he said nothing, after all, to his father.

The old man felt cut off from these two young creatures. They told him nothing. They were full of plans of which they said nothing to him. He wiped his mouth and began, gently, “Joan tells me you are going away.”

“Tonight,” said Francis. “Hannah, bring me some raisin bread.” He was in sudden high excitement. “Hurry, old girl! It’s your last chance — I’m going away.”

“You’re not!” she retorted, pausing at the door, and disappearing.

But he shouted after her. “I’m going away this very night — going to get a job in the big town!”

“No such thing — who’d have you?” she replied amiably, bringing in the raisin bread and plumping it down before him.

“He really is, Hannah,” said Joan.

“Not to New York!” said Hannah. Her scraggy face puckered as though a thread had been suddenly drawn about the lips.

“Yes,” said Joan.

“Your ma,” said Hannah mournfully, “wouldn’t have heard to it. She said Frank was to go to school till he was twenty-two. I mind, because she was counting the years until you’d be through, the three of you.”

“I’m going to be an aviator,” Francis boasted, his cheeks full of raisin bread.

“You’ll break your neck,” replied Hannah, unbelieving. “You can’t walk downstairs without a tumble.”

“An aviator!” said the old man suddenly. “I wasn’t told.” It came to him vaguely that they even told the servant more than they told him. Yet he had always done his best for them. He had prayed for them greatly. He had gone into deep agonies of prayer for their souls. “O, God, my Father, save my children’s souls and bring them into the knowledge of Thee.” They sat there, young and intolerably hard, not knowing of his yearning after them. They were always making jokes about things he did not understand. There was Francis now, his thumb to his nose, grimacing absurdly at the servant. He was not answered and he sighed. “I suppose,” he said patiently, “you must do as you think best.”

For the first time he definitely missed Mary. Mary would have spoken to Francis. But he could not think of anything to say. He sat over his tea until Francis had finished his dessert and rushed to his room for his things. When he saw him carrying his suitcase, he half rose from the table to help him, to show his son that he felt his going. But Hannah was ahead of him. She had perceived that this was no joke, and had rushed to pack some sandwiches.

“Give me that bag,” she said sharply. “You’ll be hungry riding. It always makes you hungry to ride on the train. But your ma wouldn’t have let this be. There’s been no managing you since your ma went. There now — get away. I’ll carry it myself. I’ve carried Joan’s bag to go to college, and Rose’s bag to go to heathendom — I’ll carry it myself—”

“Father,” said Joan, tucking on her hat, “don’t hurry. Sit and finish your tea. I’ll drive him to the train and be back — After all, it’s only New York — it’s not far.”

“New York’s only the place I hop off from,” laughed Francis. He was free, he was free! Fanny maybe was waiting this very moment in the wood, down by the brook in the warm dark summer night, but he was escaping her. He need not come back. He would never come back.

“Good-bye, Hannah — send me cookies once in a while.” He gave her a great kiss.

She was crying a little, but she retorted in pretense of anger, “And where I’ll send them to you, I’d like to know, and New York as big as all get out?”

“I’d smell ’em coming,” he replied gaily. “Good-bye, Dad.” He felt the cool dry old hand cling for a moment in his own hot palm and he dropped it quickly. “I’ll write.”

The old man rose and followed them wistfully to the door.

“You’ll go to church, won’t you?” he begged. “You’ve been so steady in attendance.”

“Good-bye — good-bye,” cried Francis.

The old man heard the flying gravel in the darkness and they were gone.

… “Good-bye, Frank,” Joan said brusquely. The train stood ready to move. The steam blew back out of the darkness, white in the night. She looked at him, his eyes level with hers. He was as tall as she now, and his shoulders were broad as a man’s. His face was a man’s face in the shadows, angular, dark. There was knowledge in his eyes. She shrank away from the knowledge in his eyes. She did not want to kiss him. But suddenly he changed. There in a moment he changed. He threw his arm about her and put his head upon her shoulder and she could feel his cheek against her bare neck.

“Joan—” he said in a small voice. Why, he was afraid, she felt him afraid! How foolish she was to think he was grown up! He was only a little boy. Whatever he had done, he was only a little boy. She put her arm about his big young body and held him hard. But in a moment he had straightened himself and smiled, his eyes wet.

“It’s very — it’s funny to be leaving home.”

“I know,” she said, releasing him. She must always know exactly when to release him, that he might not feel he had given away anything of himself and so suffer.

“I’m glad to go, really,” he said.

“I know,” she said steadily.

The train whistle blew and he stepped upon the first step.

“All aboard,” said the conductor.

“Remember,” she whispered, longing to do everything for him, “remember — I’m here — always — like — like Mother was—”

For a second his face stared hard at her, then the train tore him away before she heard his answer.

Now she must find some sort of life in this empty house. It had seemed so small and crowded when they were all there. She had been used to going to her room that she might be alone to dream, to read, to write her music. It used to be so noisy a house. Her mother liked noise and took no pains for quiet. “I like to hear footsteps,” she used to say. “I like to hear your footsteps everywhere — I like to think, that’s Joan — there’s Rose — here’s my boy coming.” She had complained against the father. “Why do you creep up the stairs, Paul? Why do you wear those slippers all the time? I like to hear a man’s step ring hard and clear!” Once she said to Joan, out of a long silence as she sewed, “Your father’s a good man, but I wish he would whistle or sing. I like to hear a man. I’m glad Frank’s always making a noise in the house.”

But now there was no need to go to her own room for solitude. In any room she could sit down and be alone. No one would come in, no voice call, unless it were Hannah’s voice from the kitchen. “I declare, Joan, we’d better tell Mr. Billings not to send so much meat, even if he does give it. It’s tedious eating at one hunk o’ beef or pork the whole week long!”

“Yes, it is,” she called back. Their voices echoed through the silent house.

There were fewer people from the church who came to see them. She seemed to remember that when her mother was there people were always coming, people asking her mother questions, running in and out. “Oh, Mrs. Richards, I did just want to ask you one more thing — would you have strawberry ice cream at the supper, or apple pie? I think men like pie, but—” “Mrs. Richards, Mother says could you come over a minute and look at Danny’s throat and see if you think she’d ought to send for the doctor?” “Mrs. Richards, can you remember if the choir sang ‘Lift up your heads, ye gates’ last Easter or the time before?”

But few came in now. Sometimes if she were in the garden cutting flowers, one would stop. Mrs. Winters might say, “Did you hear from them this week, Joan? I had a letter last week. They’ve reached their station. I can’t pronounce it. Rob says it’s awful hot and lots of flies and mosquitoes. He’s all worked up over the blind people. What does Rose say?” And she would answer, “I haven’t heard lately from Rose, Mrs. Winters. Rose never was good at writing letters.”

“Well,” said Mrs. Winters, “I don’t know, I’m sure.” She sighed, hesitated, and then said sharply, “Those lemon lilies’d ought to been cut before they seed like that, Joan. It uses up the bulbs to let them seed.”

“I’ll cut them,” Joan promised.

She watched Mrs. Winters down the street. Mrs. Winters had resigned from the missionary society. She did not even come to meetings. To Joan she said privately, “What I have to give’ll go to Rob straight. I can’t afford to drop my money for everybody anymore. We’ve got to do what we can for our own.” Sometimes she worried. “I don’t know, but I’ve a notion Rob isn’t using what we send for himself. He keeps writing about the poor. I’ve said to him that the poor we have always with us, and what I send is for him. But nobody listens to me. What does Rose say?”

What did Rose say, indeed? There was so little in her letters. Her large even handwriting covered the pages and left them almost as empty as before. “The Lord blessed us this morning in the baptism of seven more, four women and three men. The work is prospering in spite of the opposition of many against us. But we remember ‘Blessed are ye when men shall persecute you and—’”

She cried to Rose across the sea, “Rose, where is your home, and how does it look? Did you wear the satin gown? Are you and Rob in love with each other? Do you walk in your garden in the evening hand in hand, do you eat together and make little jokes together and forget sometimes the blind, the maimed, the poor?” But there was nothing in Rose’s letters which could not be read aloud in the missionary meetings. They listened seriously, politely, at last indifferently. They were not real people, the converts. She could not see their faces. Still they were doubtless saved, those distant brown creatures.

“Things seem to be going so well,” Mrs. Parsons said kindly. She was the president now, but they had always to prod her and correct her. They called out half-a-dozen times in the meeting. “We can’t pass a motion without a second, Mrs. Parsons — Madame President, I mean—” “Oh, yes,” murmured Mrs. Parsons, blushing, recalling her wandering thought. She had been happily dreaming while they were talking, dreaming about the story she was writing, a dear story about a young girl and a man — perhaps this time, surely this time … When Rose’s letters were read she thought to herself that it would make a sweet story, the two brave young missionaries — her mind was full of their images, going hither and thither, two white and cloudlike shapes, blessing the dark, bound multitudes bending in devotion before them. Maybe if she could write it just as she saw it, this time somebody would want to publish it.

There was a murmur of assent over the little roomful of women, knitting, sewing, crocheting. Mrs. Billings always darned. “I’ve got such a’ lot of boys,” she said with laughter. “They’ve got legs like centipedes, I think. I call ’em my thousand-leggers.” Their minds were full of their handiwork. “Knit one — purl two — turn and knit two, purl one—” Mrs. Weeks whispered steadily to herself. “It’s nice they’re so ready to hear the Gospel,” she called aloud. “Knit one, purl two — and turn—” Only Miss Kinney had no handiwork. She sat, smiling, her eyes large and shining, plucking at her lips with one hand.

“When I was in Africa,” she would often begin, but almost immediately one of the women would interrupt vigorously, “Madame President, don’t you think we ought to take up the matter of the next bazaar? Our budget—” To a neighbor she would whisper, “You’ve got to shut Sarah Kinney off, or we’d never get through.”

And on the old, comfortable, married faces there was the same expression, “Poor thing — but you’ve got to shut her off — she’s getting so queer!”

Yes, Rose’s letters read beautifully at the missionary meetings. But they broke no silence, in the house. Francis had scrawled his first letter.

DEAR JOAN.

I got a job, but no flying yet. I’m an errand boy and I have to do anything they tell me, but yesterday they let me help clean a plane. If I keep on right I’ll maybe learn to fly some day. They tell me everybody starts like this at the bottom. Send the bicycle money to me here. I have a room across the street with a fellow I know here. I am okay.

The silence in the house grew deeper. What was there now for her to do in this house? She polished the tables and the chairs and changed the flowers every day, and learned to be troubled by the shadow of dust. It became important to her if a curtain hung awry or if a book were not straightly placed. But no hand except the wind’s displaced a curtain, and no hand except her own touched anything. Her father moved from study to dining room and thence to sleep. If he went for an instant into the parlor, it was never to remain. It was to wait while she found his hat, to rest a moment when he returned, and his coming and going left nothing.

Once or twice Ned Parsons called. “Joan, want to go to the picnic Thursday?” Did she want to go? That first summer she had gone to everything. So she went once. But they were all younger than she, they seemed far, far younger. In this short time new boys and girls had grown up and she was too old for them. She felt very old. They came to her politely. “Miss Richards, will you have potato salad?” “Miss Richards, do you mind if we climb the mountain?” She might have cried back at them, “But I’ll go with you — I love climbing.” But there was Netta Weeks to warn her, poor ghastly Netta Weeks, trying to be one of them, trying to be noisy and gay, refusing to sit among the older folks, insisting on playing games and following the young couples about. Joan, watching, was stabbed with their contempt, their helpless toleration. Behind their cold tolerating young faces they were gnashing their teeth to cry to each other, “The silly old maid — why doesn’t she leave us alone?”

“No, of course I don’t mind,” said Joan smoothly. “I’d rather stay and talk to your mothers anyway.”

She would not walk with Ned Parsons. Ned would not do — not any longer. She wanted now to hear the authentic voice of love. His pale knobby clerk’s face, his protruding eyes and weak romantic gaze — no, not Ned — not Ned, who barely reached her shoulder.

“I’m tired, Ned,” she said quietly. “Why don’t you ask Netta? Netta!” she called with determination. Let her deliver the children at least, “Netta, come and walk with Ned for me! I’m tired.”

Netta came instantly, her round foolish spectacled face coy with smiles and seeming reluctance.

“Oh, I don’t want to take your young man, I’m sure,” she cried, laughing loudly.

She had been shy of Joan ever since that night in the darkness. Now they called often to each other at a distance: “Hello, Netta!” “Oh, hello, Joan — come and see me sometime.” And Joan said, “You come over, too!” But they had never come to any meeting. She looked at Netta quietly and gravely as she laughed her foolish laughter.

“He’s not mine,” she said simply. She watched them go away. Netta already clinging to Ned’s arm.

Why not? she thought. They’re both searching for it.

She went home alone. Searching — everybody was searching for it. She entered the empty house in the late afternoon. It was intolerably empty, intolerably silent. There was no life anywhere — no life, except in her own body. She came upon herself suddenly in the long mirror at the end of the hall. There she was, big, strong, ruddy with maturity, ready.

I’ve never had even one proposal, she thought, staring at her body. She was heavier than she had been, her breasts were round, her mouth was full and red. I don’t even know a man. How could he ever find her here? But here she must stay, here in this house, so long as her father lived. She must take care of his old body, feed and clothe him and keep him warm, while he took care of his soul. It was all the life she had. She was tied to him. She went to her room and took off her coat and her hat and dress and lay down upon her bed and fell into a terror of longing.

Staring up at the blank ceiling, in the blank silence of the house, she felt her body strain against her. It clamored against her, hot with lonely desire.

I’d marry, she thought desperately, I believe I’d marry almost anybody — except Ned Parsons. I want my children.

Now the silent and empty house became full with her own longing and restlessness. It was no longer important to her that a curtain was blown askew or that flowers faded in a certain bowl. Who saw these things except herself, and what activity was this for her clamoring body? She was burned by a hundred small irritations.

“I don’t care what we eat, Hannah!” she cried into Hannah’s astonished face.

“You needn’t bite my head off,” Hannah said coldly.

“Oh, Hannah, I’m sorry!” she begged wildly. “I don’t know what’s the matter with me these days!”

“Well, I’m sure—” muttered Hannah, stabbing a hairpin through the knot on top of her head. “You never did have Rose’s disposition,” she added.

“Father, let’s go somewhere — let’s take a vacation!” she begged.

He was walking quietly up and down the porch. On rainy days like this, when it was not parish day, he walked up and down sixty times for exercise. He disliked the rain as intensely as a cat. He disliked to feel the soles of his feet damp. If it were his day for chapel, he went steadfastly out, carrying his large black umbrella. It was his duty. But it was pleasant if the rain did not fall on such a day. He mentioned it with gratitude in his solitary morning prayer if God sent rain on a home day.

Joan was sitting on the balustrade under the deep eaves, staring into the rain. He paused at her cry and noted mentally that he was on twenty-three. “A vacation?” he repeated. “I’ve never had a vacation.”

“I know,” she said, “so let’s have one.”

Twenty-three — twenty-three … “From what?” he asked.

“Work,” she answered gaily.

“What would I do?” he asked.

“Oh, walk, talk, see something different!”

He began on twenty-four. “I’d have to pay for a supply,” he said when he passed her again. “Besides, I feel no need for change. My work provides me with all I need.” He began twenty-five. When he passed again she was gone.

She was gone, and when she came down she had on her mackintosh and her old blue hat. She strode off into the rain. It was raining so hard that in a moment she was sheeted with silver and the water ran into her shoes and little separate streams beat against her face. She pressed her body against the rain steadily, lifting her face against it. It tingled upon her lips, stinging like a kiss hard upon them. She fought against wind and rain gladly, wearing her body out, wild with restlessness. She was too restless to think. She could not think. She could only feel. Striding through the rain, her feet upon the wet grass of the fields, upon the moss under the trees shining in rain, her mind was full of pictures. Francis and that girl — Martin meeting her in the dell — the shapes of love. She drove herself until in fatigue her mind grew empty and then in the wet twilight she turned toward home.

When she came in, her father was waiting for her in the dining room. The night had turned cool and Hannah had built a fire and set the table. He sat by the fire, his large pale hands held to the warmth, transparent in the blaze. He looked up at her solemnly.

“You’re very wet,” he said.

“Yes — I’ll only take a moment to change. Don’t wait.”

She was so tired she could be patient with him again. For of course he would wait without a word, inexorably, stubbornly gentle, until she was in her place. He held her by his uncomprehending gentleness. When she was in her place, when everything was as usual, he would be satisfied. Then he would bow his head and give his usual thanks to God.

Oh, but there was nothing now anywhere, she cried in her fresh impatience. For weariness would not last in her great strong body. Sleep came, deep, healthy, and she was hungry and ate heartily and her body was restless again and her mind hot with restlessness.

In the church on Sunday morning she held herself desperately in her seat. But she wanted to spring up, to dance, to sing, to run, to be mad and foolish, to rush down the road and find a companion, to cry to any strange man she saw, “It’s a heavenly day, the trees are gold, the air is wine — come, come with me!” They’d run, they’d walk, they’d shout. She tent her head over her folded hands and smiled. Her father was praying, “Descend upon Thy people, God.” She smiled, flaunting God — not God, not God this morning! She stood quickly when the hymn was announced, leaping to her feet.

“There is a fountain filled with blood,” she sang carelessly, letting her big voice ring out, hurrying them all a little, hurrying Martin Bradley. She could see him glance at her in the mirror above his head. He clung with steadiness to the tempo, annoyed with her. But she was full of wild mischief. She wanted to burst from her skin, she wanted to tease, to harass, to be madly willful. She let out her voice with laughter, hurrying him, throwing them all a little askew between the organ and her rollicking voice. They sang bewildered, not knowing exactly what was wrong. She sat down and shut the book quickly and bowed her head for the benediction, her heart dancing down a sunny road. Oh, something must happen, she’d make something happen! She rose from the pew and turned about and stood waiting, smiling a little, staring at them all as they gathered their books, their coats. She’d make something happen.

Across the aisle her eyes fell upon a thick, tall young man. It was the oafish young farmer she had seen at Rose’s wedding. She smiled at him suddenly, brilliantly, wickedly, straight into his small hot brown eyes. He flushed red under his red hair. His huge hands twisted his stiff straw hat around and around upon his bosom. His mouth hung a little open. He moved toward her.

“I’ve wanted to speak to you,” he said. He had a slow thick voice and the words came quickly from his big mouth. His lips were stiff and thick and pale.

“Why don’t you then?” she said willfully. Oh, she wanted to tease, to harass, to vent herself upon someone!

“I didn’t know if you wanted it,” he answered after a moment, staring at her.

“I don’t seem to mind,” she replied, still smiling. At once she hated his thickness, she immediately disliked the raw redness of his skin. But she went on smiling recklessly into his hot brown eyes. She wanted something, anything, to happen.

He took another step toward her. He muttered at her, “If I should come to your house tonight after milking, would you sit a while with me out on the porch?”

“I might,” she replied, laughing.

He nodded and stalked into the aisle. She watched his broad back, his thick upper arms bursting out of the cheap blue suit. Above a stiff white collar his neck was red as beef and his head was straight and unshaped, like a block upon his square huge shoulders. His ears were close to his head. They were thick and rather small. She felt a little sick. But she thought rebelliously, Oh, well — it will be something to do tonight, at least. She was full of willfulness against everything as it was.

To this empty ordered house Bart Pounder brought himself solidly.

She had, without knowing it, come to live in the smoldering stillness, in feeling thought, in long hours alone when she sat with a book in her hands, not reading. The old man lived his angelic, attenuated life alone and she lived her life alone in aborted moods. She lived out of one mood into another, none fully understood. She was not discontented so much as stopped in herself. There was no completion in her. Nothing seemed worth doing for its own sake. Surely everything she had to do ought to lead into some larger reason. But nothing led on. Even though she swept the house and filled the vases, though she filled the old silver sugar bowl with the late red roses and set it upon the hall table before the long mirror, for whom was it done? She had her own instant of ecstasy, cut off and unfulfilled. It was not enough. It was not enough to compel Hannah.

“Hannah, see what I’ve done! Look at the roses!”

“They’ll be dropping before the day’s done — those red roses never have held together — quick to blow and soon to die, always.”

It was not enough to compel her father. “Father, the roses—” His pale eyes searched patiently. “Here, Father, by the mirror—”

“Yes, yes — they are very pretty,” his pale eyes drifting away again.

It was not enough.

To this newcomer she was saying eagerly, “The roses have been lovely, lovely — Only the rose beetles were so troublesome.” He listened, staring at her hard.

“I’ll spray them for you next spring,” he said.

He was staring at her hands, at her throat, her breasts. She felt his hot simple stare and pulled her skirt lower over her knees, not knowing she did, and folded her arms across her bosom.

How did one talk to an oaf? “Have we ever met?” she asked brightly. “Where do you live?”

“Up the road a-ways, west,” he answered. His voice was hard, brassy, and it seemed to come from him ungoverned. He paused between phrases, waiting for the next phrase to shape itself. His lips were stiff and hard, not used to forming words, dry and thick, except when he spoke and then moisture gathered at the corners slightly. He did not wipe it away. “We’ve not met — that is, not spoken. I come to church to see you, though. I’ve come a long time.” He paused, tried to thrust his hands into the pockets of his cheap dark Sunday suit and failed. His thick thighs strained at the seams of the cloth. “Folks go to church over to Chipping Corners. I changed after I seen you once — saw you once when I was driving through town to sell a yearling bull calf.”

“Did you?” She laughed, a little amused. Imagine his coming to church Sunday after Sunday to see her! A wisp of warmth curled into her amusement, a flicker of coquetry. This huge, simple creature was a man, after his sort. He caught the brief laugh and drew nearer to her upon the step where they sat. He fixed his small deep-set eyes upon her hands, clasped about her knees. He moved his own hand and let it lie, as if carelessly, upon the step between them. She could feel his thought — his simple, one thought. Soon he would lay his hand upon hers. Why would he have planned, come to see a girl, except for some simple and direct satisfaction? She warded him off. She did not move, but she threw gaiety into her voice, she let mockery fly into her eyes, bitterness in her laughter. “And I didn’t know! All that faithfulness — wasted!”

He waited, immovable while she laughed, and when she was silent, he said, “I figure it wasn’t wasted. It was only the beginning of something I’d set myself to do. I figured someday I’d sit on the porch like this with you. And here I am.”

He sat in vast waiting. She looked at him now, afraid. “I figured,” he went on in his slow stiff-lipped way, “the day would be when I’d lay my hand on your hands — like this.” She watched his enormous hand move and motionless she watched it descend and cover her two clasped hands. “Like this,” he said again.

She felt his hand hard and stiff against her tender flesh. She looked at his hand. It was broad and thick, the fingers thick to their tips, the palm meaty. The little finger was sharply bent as though it had been broken.

“Did you break your little finger?” she asked aloud. Why did she ask when she did not care? The hand filled her with repulsion.

“No,” he said. He did not remove his hand. He held it there, thickly covering her hands, heavy as a stone upon her two hands. “It’s work that’s done it — nothing but work. This other one’s the same.” He held up his other hand to show her and she saw it in its hugeness. She could see even in the dim light the large freckles upon the forearm, where his sleeve was too short, the rough red hair upon the flesh. Upon the back of his hand there was this wild red hair. She shrank under the cover of his hand and tried to shake it off. But there it clung, pressing down.

“Take your hand away,” she said violently. “I don’t like to be touched.” He waited an instant, and then he took it away without reply. She felt him waiting. He took it away, but he was waiting. He would surely put it there again. She stood up abruptly. “I must go in now,” she said quickly. “I have some things to do.”

He rose clumsily, his body huge and thick, taller even than she was. He stared at her stubbornly, and for a moment again she was afraid of him. But he said calmly enough, “Good night, then. I’ll come again — if you say so.”

“Good night,” she said, already at the door. “Good night—”

She ran to her room without looking back. She would never say he was to come back, never! It was good to be back in the house, in this lonely house. Where was her father? She ran downstairs again and knocked at his door.

“Yes?” he called. “Come in.”

She went in quickly. “Father?”

“Yes,” he replied. He was sitting in his old Morris chair by a small dying wood fire, his hands folded in his lap. He had on his old patched plum-colored study gown, and above his thin face his white hair stood a little disordered, so that she knew he had just finished his evening prayer. He turned his mystic eyes toward her.

“Father,” she said, “I just — I suddenly felt a little lonely.”

She had never said such a thing before and he looked at her uncomfortably. … She looked like her mother, he thought in alarm. Mary had been used, when she was younger, to come running into his study like this at night after he supposed she was in bed and asleep. “Paul, Paul — I’m so lonely.” “Lonely? But I am here, Mary.” “I can’t feel you near me, Paul. You seem somewhere else. You live away from me so.” “I must be about my Father’s business, Mary.” … He felt his daughter’s hand on his arm and he was very uncomfortable. It was a light touch, but it had the hot shaking quality that Mary’s had sometimes — especially when she was young.

“Are you ill, Joan?”

To his horror she fell upon her knees and placed her face upon his arm. He did not move. He felt her shake her head. “Lonely, lonely,” he heard her whisper. He must, he felt, do something. Diffidently he put up his other hand and touched her hair once. It sprang warm and curled about his fingers and he took his hand away quickly. He must think of something to say.

“Would you — do you think you’d like to help me at the mission? It would give you something to do.”

But who could ever understand women? She lifted her head sharply and gave him a long look, and then she began to laugh, so long, so loud, until tears were in her eyes. He waited, pained. He had wanted to help her. At last she stopped laughing and wiped her eyes.

“I’ll help you,” she said. “Yes, perhaps it will give me something to do. … Good night, poor dear.”

She bent and kissed him, a touch upon his pale high forehead, and went away. She was better, he felt happily. The laughter had done her good, though he could not understand it. But it had done her good — he believed he had once heard a doctor say that laughter was medicinal. But why “poor dear”?

What was it Martin had promised and never given, what had he touched in her and not taken from her, what stirred in her and was not completed? Something now bloomed in her, lonely as a vivid flower in a field, solitary of its kind. She came to a sort of maturity, and this man who beset her doggedly had no more to do with it than a bee, stumbling upon a vivid flower, forcing its petals into a troubled readiness, because the hour was come. For he made no secret of why he came. He came each Sunday, doggedly, now without asking. Each Sunday, she perceived, he came with his plan of one more step he would take toward her. Having touched her hands at first, he took her hand the next time and held it. This, his way said, he had a right to do. Having held her hand, the next time he put his hand upon her waist. She drew away, sick, yet stirred by each fresh movement.

If she grew angry at him, and she was always angry at him for each fresh outrage of her, he waited or he made his answer through stiff, unmoving lips. “Don’t touch me like that, Bart Pounder!” she cried at him, her voice low. Of course her father would not hear in the study, who never heard anything.

“No?” Bart answered, and did not move. Then she would seize his great hand and throw his arm from her as though it were a snake. He let her throw it, but before he went away it would be about her again. And then, feeling the heavy dogged clasp, she might be silent, she might sit shuddering and stirred within the clasp. So one night he would touch her breast. So one night he would kiss her lips. She knew the way, but not the end. When he had kissed her, then what was the end?

In the night when he was gone she awoke, cold and hot, to ask herself the end. She was afraid in the night, in the empty house, with only the old man lying lightly asleep, to be near. Rose and Francis and her mother — they were all as though they had never been. She was alone and there was no one near — no one to whom heart could cling. She wanted her own. Oh, where were her own? Around her life was deep, tremendous, remote, silent. She moved alone in all the silence, she who loved warmth and nearness and the safety of human closeness. She would grow older and older, like Miss Kinney, waiting … waiting. Old people lived forever while the young waited. She was wicked. She was not waiting for her father to die. She loved this house, the village, the people she had always known. Oh, but they had never known her. They had seen her growing up, a tall child. “How you grow, Joan! My, you’re going to be a big girl!” Yes, she had grown and grown beyond them all. They knew her no more. They lived on in their little houses contentedly but she wanted everything. What could be the end?

Then came November. She could not stay within the confines of the house. The house was full of herself. In whatever room she sat, it became full and bursting with herself, and she could not stay for her restlessness. The dreaming of the autumn was over. The dying heat of Indian summer was finished in the still evenings.

And she could not stay in the confines of the garden. The garden she had cultivated was dead and finished and in the November sunshine the shadow of the church steeple, fell sharp across the frost-gray grass. But abroad in the woods along the road, there was wild beauty. There was madness in the woods, there was fullness in the red apples and in the dark wild grapes upon the stone walls, and in falling nuts and late yellow pears. In the energy of every color edged in the sharp clear cold she was whipped into intense restlessness.

She went to her father. “Give me the work you wanted me to have. I’m ready. I want something to do.” She seized the excuse to get away into the fields, to walk miles along the dusty gorgeous roadsides to South End. “I need help with the young people,” her father said. He spoke with gentle excitement. …

He would not of course tell Joan, but this was an answer to prayer. He would not tell her because once when his son Francis was little more than a child, and he had said when he did something — he had forgotten now what it was—“It is an answer to prayer,” the child had answered violently, “Then I won’t do it.” The young were so difficult to understand. And they had been such a problem to him at the mission — those large dark young men and the dark painted girls. He was helpless before their singing. They could take a hymn straight away from him, as they did “Oh, Beulah Land” the other day, and so with the singing of it that it ceased to be a hymn. They became stamping feet and clapping hands. There was one girl especially who snapped her fingers like a horsewhip at every intensified beat. Once she had leaped to her feet and had begun to sing alone a song he had not announced or had not even heard of. “Singin’ with a sword in mah hand, Oh, Lawd.” She sang it with her hands on her hips, swaying as though she were dancing. He had pronounced the benediction hastily and come away. “The Lord is not pleased.” But perhaps if Joan came, God would use her. He looked toward her with sudden dependence. She was so large, so strong. The young were so strong. He felt he would like to put out his hand and touch her arm. But he had never done that sort of thing and so he did not. He merely smiled delicately, without quite meeting her eyes.

“You will see what is needed,” he murmured. “When you get there you will see what is to be done — I feel sure you will be guided.” He gazed wistfully into space.

Upon a glowing afternoon she walked to South End. She wanted to walk, to walk along the rough road, searching passionately for every beauty. There was an immense dead oak once struck by lightning wrapped like a blazing tower in crimson woodbine. Here upon a rock a tiny flat vine crawled like a small scarlet serpent. The sunshine poured down from a golden heaven. The far hills were blue. In the streets of South End the sunshine glittered on every tin can and bit of broken glass and red ray of dress. They loved red here. The babies wore red slips and the young girls wore red blouses and red ribbons in their tightly braided hair. Red geraniums bloomed in rusty cans, and late zinnias shone cerise and scarlet from careless seeds.

Into the chapel they crowded, dark skins, red ribbons, rolling restless black eyes. They gathered, black skin, brown skin, skin of amber. They called zestfully to one another. They did not quiet until her father began to speak. Then they listened in a stillness that was not quiet. It was silent as a storm is silent before wind breaks. When her father announced the hymn, a small brassy organ began to throb and instantly the singing burst forth, loud, syncopated, full of wild music. “Like a river glorious is God’s perfect peace,” they sang, swaying, moving, surging.

… But there was no peace — they wanted no peace. Oh, who wanted peace? She caught the excitement in her own blood — no peace, no peace — how could there be peace if one were alive? Only let life flow in upon her — let all life come, O God! She flung out her heart in the cry. Suddenly she thought of Francis. Was that life, too? He had found a sort of life here. She looked over the crowd quickly. No, she was glad she knew no one among them all. Suddenly she felt she could do nothing for them — nothing for any of them. Let them live — let them live — let all life go on. She did not listen to anything her father said.

When he sat down she rose and went out quickly. Behind her the people crowded out of the chapel, hurrying to laugh and to talk. They overtook her and she saw that they had taken off their shoes and were walking barefoot down the dusty road, carrying their tied shoes in their hands. They were laughing, and bursting into fragments of singing, and by twos and threes they stopped at cheap ruined houses. She went on out of the town and into the country road. On her way home Mrs. Mark tapped on the windowpane and she went in.

“Where’ve you been?” said Mrs. Mark from the bed.

“I told Father I’d help him at the mission — but I think I just can’t,” she said. She couldn’t keep from answering Mrs. Mark straightly.

“What you want to help for?” said Mrs. Mark. “They don’t need help — they have a grand time. Go on home and find something to make you half as happy as they are.”

She looked at Joan crossly. She could no longer move her right leg. Now, before she could get onto her crutches, she must shift her leg like a log with both hands.

“Get along and do as I say,” she said.

“Yes, Mrs. Mark,” said Joan.

She hesitated, hating as she always did to leave a creature so helpless. “Go along,” said Mrs. Mark. “I’ve got to get up and stir up my supper.” No one ever saw Mrs. Mark get up. And so Joan went away. She went away down the road, the sun smoldering crimson among the vivid trees.

The air was completely still, cold without chill. Next Sunday, she thought suddenly, it would surely be too cold to sit upon the porch. She would have to light the fire in the square sitting room and let him come in. She had not wanted him to come in. One excuse after another she had made to keep him waiting.

She did not want to open the door of the house to him. But since it was so cold now, if he came into the front sitting room, and if she said to her father, “Come in to the fire, where we are,” if her father sat there, then the man could not touch her lips. He would have planned to touch her lips. She withdrew from the imagination of his thick pale mouth, wind-cracked, dry. She felt again the hard coarse pressure of his great arms about her. That was last time. … But if her father were there, she would be safe. But perhaps she did not really want to be safe. She pushed away decision, recklessly. Whatever came, let it come.

Yes, Mrs. Mark was right. She must tell her father that she could not help him — not at the mission. The people were stronger than she. They would sweep her into themselves, as they absorbed into their own richer rhythm the tunes of the hymns. If she stayed among them, if she were often near them, hearing them sing, soon she would be singing with them and not against them. She laughed softly, remembering, walking down the road alone, with what determination her father had held to time and tune, his look absorbed, his thin, high voice steadfast against the rush of throbbing other voices. Through the deep November dusk she heard again the beat and rhythm, the beat and crying, of the dark crowd. Her body fell into the measure of the beat and movement as she walked, and in her ears her blood pulsed — no use, no use for her to try to save someone when she could not save herself. She wanted earth, not heaven; life, not salvation from it. Her feet stepped the dusty country road to the tune of old desire. She was as light as air, striding through the potent windless night.

… She became aware of a horse’s cantering step, and she paused and stood aside among the weeds and the rhythm paused a moment in her, waiting. She looked through the dusk and saw an awkward sturdy man astride a thick-boned farm beast. She knew at once who it was.

“Well, look who’s here!”

It was the phrase he used every time he saw her. She drew back a little farther from his path.

“Good evening, Bart!” she answered. She was the more fastidious in her own speech because his speech repelled her. But he did not notice her withdrawal. He leaped down from his horse and came near. In the twilight she noticed suddenly, unwillingly, upon the open roadway, the fields about them, that he looked better than she had ever seen him. He wore his work clothes, blue jeans and a coarse blue shirt open at the collar, the sleeves rolled above his elbows. The twilight hid his stiff dry lips, his thick nose, squat along the bridge. There was only his outline — his square shoulders, his thighs, his limbs. He looked huge, magnificent as a bull. The turn of his head was set well upon his strong thick neck. Here, where he belonged, he was a handsome man, a fine animal. When he came near her she could smell an odor of hay and earth — a clean, hearty smell. She leaned away from him, breathless.

“Where you been?” he cried at her. “It’s luck, meeting up with you like this!”

She felt his instinctive movement to touch her, to put his arms around her waist. She felt his arms about her waist. Now his hand was creeping toward her breast. He had not touched her breast before. She stood still, despising herself, and unwillingly longing for his hand to touch her breast. Yet when the touch came, she sprang away from it.

“I must go home,” she said, her voice stifled, her blood roaring in her ears. “I must go home. Let me go!”

“Well, well, well!” he exclaimed in mock surprise. “Who’s holding you?”

“You are,” she answered desperately. But she had not moved.

“Who — me?” He pressed her breast slowly.

“Yes,” she whispered, sick, and longing.

He dropped his hand suddenly.

“Who — me?” he said again and laughed.

She turned her look on him and unwillingly she saw him, a big handsome man, handsome in his own place. Without a word she started to run into the dusk, desperately, home.

Inside the front door she stood motionless, her hand upon the door she had just closed. The house was utterly silent about her. The familiar rooms, the furniture, the clock in the hall, everything was as she had always known it. It was intolerably still, intolerably shabby, empty, hopeless. Under her stare the familiar rooms grew strange and aloof from her.

“How could I let him touch me?” she asked herself wildly. The house remained silent about her. She was shut off from all of life in this house.

“Hannah!” she screamed suddenly. “Hannah — Hannah!”

From the attic Hannah’s voice dropped down thin and distant. “What you want?”

“Where’s Father? Isn’t he home yet?” She had no one else left.

“No, not yet.”

“I’m going to find him,” she cried.

She darted from the house again, and at the instant his old car drew up at the door and he stepped backward out of it in his absurd careful way. He was never quite used to the car.

“Father — Father,” she cried at him.

He turned his head. “Yes, what is it, Joan?” He began collecting his books.

She wanted to go to him and lean against him. She wanted to feel someone near her. She had never so leaned against him, but being now impelled by need she took his hand. “I’m glad you’re home. I was worrying a little.”

“But I am not beyond my usual hour.” he said mildly, in surprise. “I am not usually home before six. I remained to speak to the people.”

His hand hung in hers, delicate, bloodless, cool.

“Anyway, you’re home now,” she said breathlessly. “Come in to supper. I’ll open a jar of the red cherries. Let’s light the fire. Maybe there’s a letter from Rose or maybe even Frank.”

He did not reply. He wanted to take his hand away, but he did not wish to be unkind. He let it lie one instant uncomfortably and then withdrew it. She did not prevent him. It was impossible to cling to that hand.

In the night she woke. It was raining. The night had turned warm and wet and still. There was only the soft downward rush of rain. Suddenly she felt safe again, safe and secure, after all, in this house where she had been born. The rain shut her in, the rain held her safe against intrusion. She slept deeply, and in the morning she woke, quieted. The day was slumberous with rain and quiet, and day after day the week passed. She sat by her window, sewing. She looked over all her dresses one by one. She still needed nothing new — there was no reason yet for buying anything new.

She woke on Saturday morning to sunshine, to scold herself and to laugh with relief. Tomorrow she would tell Bart never to come again. She did not want anything from him. She had so much. She was very silly. For they all needed her as much as ever. Rose had said in her very last letter:

Please buy me two pairs of black stockings and a paper of pins and three spools of white cotton thread and some needles. Such little things we cannot buy here. We are now wearing native garments, but the needles are blunt and short and hard to hold. You will rejoice with us that on Sunday four more, three women and one man, were received—

She would buy the things today. She would find Rob’s father in the store and say, “They go all the way to China, Mr. Winters, to Rob and to Rose.” He would want to put in something — he was so kind and gentle and always wanting to do nice things, even if they were rather silly things. He kept giving Mrs. Winters bottles of perfume, or when he went to New York to get his stock he would bring her home a flashy ring or a glass necklace. Mrs. Winters grew so provoked with him. If the jewelry cost too much she would say plainly, “I’m going to send it right back, Henry Winters. Me with earrings!” Sometimes she could only get credit, and then she had to buy whatever she could, so she bought flat silver. She had a great deal of flat silver.

But certainly Mr. Winters would want to put in a gift for Rose. Joan’s mind ran over the big one-room store. What would be nice? Rose had never mentioned the peach nightgown. Joan, remembering, had a pang of missing it still. It was so pretty. She would probably never have another so pretty.

She leaped from her bed and was suddenly gay. The house was itself again. Rose and Francis were alive, needing her — her dear old father. She was gay with him at breakfast and laughed when he looked at her in bewilderment.

“I’m only making fun,” she cried, and dropped a light kiss upon the ends of his white hair. “The rain’s over!”

“Your mother used to have days,” he remarked with mild patience.

Her heart shadowed. “There — I’ll stop teasing you,” she said remorsefully.

Well, it didn’t matter. She must get the things for Rose. She would buy a little gift, too, to put in. She had several dollars saved. She could get some ribbon — but there they wore native dress. Why didn’t Rose tell her how they looked? Or perhaps a pair of silk stockings. It was impossible to believe that Rose did not secretly adore silk stockings. She put on her hat and her old brown coat and went down the street, singing under her breath.

In the store at the far end, among the cotton stuffs, she saw Ned Parsons and turned her head. She did not want to bother with him today, but probably she would have to — he’d call or come bustling up. But he did not. When she glanced toward him he seemed to be absorbed in a list he was checking. He did not seem to see her. She searched for Mr. Winters, and found him at last in the stock room, surrounded by half-opened packages and boxes. He stood tall and narrow, his too narrow shoulders drooping about his narrow chest. It was known that he was “consumptive” and only Mrs. Winters’ constancy and determination had kept him alive. Left to himself he would not have touched milk or butter or eggs. But twice a day she came to the store with a tumbler of eggnog and stood watching him while he drank it. Everybody knew that once, when he was young, in desperation he had poured it into a bale of new white cotton sheeting while she was looking about, but she had caught him because he had poured it too quickly. The stuff had slipped down the sized cloth in trickles of yellow. She had never forgotten it. “The wicked waste!” she had cried hundreds of times in remembering it. Hundreds upon hundreds of times she had stood watching him drink the eggnog down, never trusting him. Once goaded by the smiles of clerks he had muttered, “You don’t need to stand there — seems as if all the times I’ve drunk it would count.”

But she had retorted, “I’ve never felt I knew exactly what you’d do next, Henry Winters! If it wasn’t for me, you’d be in your grave.” His life, saved thus daily, belonged to her.

“Mr. Winters!” Joan called across an aisle, beaming at him. “I’ve come to get some things for Rose. I thought you’d be interested.”

His face cracked into wrinkles, and she warmed to see him. He was so kind!

“Well now, come along and let’s see.” He was all excitement at once, his bony body moving in all convulsive darts of overflow. “I’m just unpacking some perfume. It so becomes a lady — like a flower scented, I always think.”

“But to send so far? A bottle might break.”

“Yes — yes — stupid of me. Well now, let me think. A brooch? I have some nice costume jewelry.” Why did Mr. Winters seem so excited today? He fumbled in a package and brought out a pasteboard box and opened it. His hands were trembling, and he did not quite meet her eyes. “Look, it’s pretty stuff, isn’t it? See, here’s a garnet set. I’m partial to garnet. This is amethyst — glass, but it looks real, doesn’t it? This is pretty, isn’t it — and these blue beads.” He touched the glass beads with a long, delicate forefinger, the nail blunt and broken.

“Well,” said Joan, hesitating. It was so hard to tell him Rose never wore jewelry. “I think,” she said warmly, not to hurt his feelings, “if we chose some silk stockings — They’re easy to send.”

He closed the box at once. “You’re right,” he said quickly, and hurried ahead of her.

In the store, people were beginning to come for their day’s shopping. Since it was Saturday, wives were in from the country, the older ones in calico waists and dark skirts and little stiff hats, and the young women in wash dresses, the sort Mr. Winters hung on a rack and sold for a dollar. Three or four of them stood by the rack, turning the dresses eagerly. She could hear them. “There — that’s real pretty.” “I don’t care for checks, though — looks like apron stuff.” One of them, a plump squat woman who had a coarse pretty face, said, “Yes, when I’m dressed up I like to feel dressed up. Joe likes something fancy on Sunday, too — he’s partial to lace.” She listened, watching them, smiling yet feeling them strange to her. They would be shy of her because she was educated, because she was the minister’s daughter. She said impulsively to Mr. Winters, “Wait on them first — I’m in no hurry.”

“No indeed,” he said heartily, although any other day he would have obeyed her. What was the matter with him today? She smiled at them when he went back unwillingly toward them. But they did not smile back. Their eyes met hers blankly and they took her courtesy, not recognizing it. She waited, foolishly hurt.

… Perhaps, she told herself afterward, it was because she was already hurt that it seemed to her that when Mrs. Bradley came in a moment later she thought her cool. What did it matter whether Mrs. Bradley was cool or not? What if Mrs. Bradley only gave her a little nod and held her tight lips without a smile? Had someone told her perhaps after all this long time that Martin had once — Mrs. Bradley always hated any girl whom Martin liked — people laughed at her about it. But then Netta came in and Netta was not cool. She was too warm, too pitying. Netta waved to her and then came near and whispered to her, “I want you to know that I shall always stand by you!”

“What do you mean, Netta?” she said aloud. She had always the instinct to answer Netta’s whispers very loudly.

But Netta turned now with fresh warmth to Mrs. Bradley, who was listening. “Oh, Mrs. Bradley, I want to tell you I think the way Martin played last Sunday was just wonderful! It’s so sweet of him to want to keep on playing in this little old village when we all know he could — I said to Ned last night—” She drifted away with Mrs. Bradley, laughing coquettishly. “And Ned said—” She glanced at Ned at the far corner and waved. “There he is — he’s calling me.”

… “Now let’s see,” said Mr. Winters. He had been arguing mildly over the dresses. “Wouldn’t you care for the blue instead, ma’am? It seems to me blue favors you more than pink — and the blue is a little bigger.” He shook his head to Joan and ruffled his gray spiky hair that stood high and stiff above his narrow, veined forehead. “She took the pink,” he whispered to her with pain a moment later. “A fat woman will always choose pink. I’ve seen them do it for twenty years. Now then—” He was so kind, so very kind.

When she had the little heap ready he ran into the stock room in the funny jogging trot he had when he saw customers filling the store, and came back holding the blue beads out to her. “I want you to have them,” he said. “They favor you.”

“Oh, no,” she said, amused. “I couldn’t.”

Then to her surprise he became suddenly incoherent. He was staring across the store and she followed his eyes. There was Mrs. Winters, her back to them.

“You take them,” he said, and stumbled on. “What I say is it’s not the old man’s fault. Whatever they say, you remember that. We all grow old, I guess.”

He plunged away from her and she was left, holding the blue beads. She picked up her package and quietly went home … So something was wrong about her father.

She entered the house softly, every sense sharpened. While she had sat brooding over her own restlessness, dwelling upon her loneliness, her father had been needing her and she had not known. When would she learn not to think of herself? While she was playing through a summer her mother sickened, saying nothing. In the silence of this house her father was suffering without speaking.

She took off her hat and went straight into his study without knocking. On Saturday morning he would be writing his sermon. He wrote out all his sermons in an even large hand, whose lines were now becoming a little trembling. Upon his shelves lay piles of manuscript, dated neatly. He never repeated a sermon. It would have seemed dishonest to him.

But he was not writing. He was sitting as he always did in his old Morris chair, drawn close to a small, neatly piled fire in the grate. He was as close to the flickering blaze as he could be, his pale hands outspread above it. He turned his head slowly when she came in and stared at her as though he did not recognize her. She realized suddenly that now he often looked at her like this. Seeing him sharply in the sunny room she saw how pale he was. He had always been pale, his skin white, his pale reddish hair changing imperceptibly to whiteness, but now he was as white as a figure of snow, his eyes scarcely deepening into silvery blue. She longed to run to him, to enfold him, to tell him he was not alone because she was there, young and alive. But she knew that it would frighten him. She made her voice casual.

“See, Father, what I am sending to Rose. And I oughtn’t to interrupt you, but I thought perhaps if you had something you would like to put in it, too? It would be so nice for them.”

He stirred himself slightly, moistening his white lips. “Yes,” he murmured. “Of course. I gave them a copy of the Old and New Testaments, revised.”

He rose, lifting himself out of his chair by his hands pressing upon the arms. “Yes,” he said helplessly. He stood a moment and put his hand to his head. “What was it? Yes — yes—” He opened a drawer in the table where he kept his small supply of writing paper and took out a fresh pad and a new pencil. After a moment’s thought he drew out another pencil. “They would find these useful.” He held them a moment jealously. There was something precious to him about fresh paper and pencils. “When I was a boy,” he said suddenly, “we were very poor and I had difficulty in procuring writing supplies. I used to write upon the brown paper wrapped about the food. But raw meat always ruined the paper.”

“They’ll be easy to send,” Joan said. She could see the little serious boy, wanting paper and pencils. He gave them to her reluctantly and that she might watch him, she wrapped the package there and addressed it. “Think how far this has to go over land and sea!” she said, forcing her voice to brightness. He had sat down again and was putting the half-burned bits of wood together, and he did not answer.

“There,” she said, “it’s ready. And you’ll want to go on with your sermon.” When still he did not answer, she touched his shoulder. “Won’t you, Father?”

He looked up at her with a sudden nervous gesture.

“Yes, of course,” he said quickly. “Of course — of course—”

Yes, surely there was something wrong. She could feel it in the church. In the church there was restlessness. The choir loft was half empty. There had been two new people in the choir lately, a youngish man and a woman, newly come to the village. Today they were not in their places. There was whispering and rustling, and at last Mrs. Parsons, looking frightened, sang the same solo she had sung last Sunday.

Joan glanced sharply about the church. She knew them all so well that now when Mr. Parker was not there, when Mr. and Mrs. Weeks were not there, when the Jameses and the Newtons were not there, it was as though holes gaped suddenly in sound familiar fabric. Why, a lot of people were not there. But Netta was there, and Mr. and Mrs. Billings, stout, red, and all their three sons. Mr. Billings looked belligerently ahead and Mrs. Billings nodded a little beside him, struggling against sleep, as she usually did. It was comforting to see her, so usual, as though nothing could be wrong. Her fat red hands lay clasped in her lap. She always said with a laugh, “As soon as my hands lay, I go to sleep. Mr. Billings teases me dreadfully about it — but then!”

In the back, Bart Pounder sat solidly. She caught his eye and looked away. But there was Dr. Crabbe! Why had Dr. Crabbe come to church today, when he never came?

Then her father stood up, tall and white. He seemed not to see the empty pews. He closed his eyes and over his face there came the old unconscious reverent ecstasy. “Let us pray. O God, our rock in time of storm—” His grave voice floated about the high and shadowy chancel.

He opened his eyes and began to preach, and she was somewhat reassured. Then he had, written his sermon yesterday after she left him … There was a slight rustling in the church. Martin Bradley turned his music at the organ. Across the aisle, Netta took a hymnbook from the rack and read it ostentatiously. Joan felt the angry blood rush to her cheeks. She wanted to shout at Martin, to snatch the book from Netta’s hand. But she did not. She sat very straight, her eyes fixed upon her father’s face, listening intently. He read his sermon carefully from beginning to end without once looking up, without lifting or lowering his voice. She did not hear a word of it.

Once she saw, how blind not to have seen before! But they had all been so known to her, the familiar people, the well known, the people who had been like a fringe of family, an outer wall of safety. She had grown up secure in their friendliness. They had their little ways. Had they not all laughed at the breakfast table when their mother begged their father, “Don’t preach about foreign missions too often — remember the Kinney’s!” Or she had said, “Mrs. Winters didn’t like your quoting St. Paul about women last Sunday — that is an irritating verse, Paul!”

But these were dear faults, the whim of people loved and known. Then how, suddenly, could people become hostile? How could walls fall and safety fail when one had nothing?

She listened day after day at the study door and heard her father’s footsteps, walking to and fro, soft, and all but soundless. Sometimes they stopped and she heard a deep murmuring, a sighing that was almost a moan.

But when he came out he was himself, very still, very composed. He came and went to his tasks. And she would not ask Hannah anything, although Hannah always knew the village gossip. Hannah was cross in the kitchen because she was making desserts which were usually too much trouble, and because he was still steadfast against temptation. He put aside even her chocolate pudding which he loved.

She would, she decided, walking about the garden, thinking swiftly, go and ask Ned Parsons. Ned, who had loved her — surely he had almost loved her? — would tell her. She would not give him the time to put her off. She would say straightly, “What is the matter with my father?”

She put on her hat and went to the store. It was nearly noon and women would be at home cooking their dinners. He was there, checking piles of gingham at the back counter, his pencil behind his large ear, his coat off and his dark vest unbuttoned.

“Oh, hello, Joan!” He scarcely paused. Once he would have rushed to greet her! The store was empty. Even Mr. Winters had gone to lunch. “What can I do for you?”—Ned, the clerk. She remembered his face, mooning at her above his guitar.

“Do you still play the guitar?” she asked suddenly.

He looked at her above a pile of flowered stuff, his eyes round. He laughed, embarrassed.

“Yes — I do.” He coughed and swallowed and fumbled at his ear for his pencil. “Say, I have to thank you a lot for something, Joan. I guess you didn’t know what you did when you told Netta and me to go off that time. We — I guess I saw she was a kid, too. But she was a little older — not enough to amount to anything now, but when you’re kids—” He laughed his high silly laugh.

“I’m very glad,” she said. She looked at him clearly and fully, but he was fumbling over the folds of the garish gingham.

“Yes — well—” He glanced at her furtively and grew very red and went on fumbling busily. “We’ve always expected great things of you, Joan. I always thought you were too good for us — your education and all — and your music writing.”

“Ned Parsons,” she said suddenly, “tell me what’s the matter with my father.”

He looked up at her then, startled by her suddenness. “Well, now—”

“Straight!” she commanded him.

“Oh, nothing, but some folks think he’s too old,” he blurted. She gazed at him intently, taking each word. “Then there’s some says he pays more attention to the niggers down at South End — they say that you have to be a nigger or a heathen or he has no interest in any body.” He began shifting piles of cloth.

“Then what?” she demanded, despising him.

“Oh, well — you know how people are in a little town. They want a young fellow — up-to-date and all that. There’s a fellow over to Lawtonville they’re talking about.”

“I see,” she said clearly. “Thank you, Ned.”

She turned, and he called after her, “Not that there isn’t a good strong handful that don’t want him turned out. I’m one of them — Netta and I both are, Joan!”

“Thank you, Ned,” she called back.

So now she knew what it was. She was like a child, bereft. Grown people, those whom she had trusted, had turned and left her. They stood alone, she and this old man.

People were tired of them. They had grown tired of the same face in the pulpit, saying the same things, the same eternal things. They wanted something brighter and more amusing. She began thinking of them one by one. Which of them would stand by her father, which of them would not? But when she began thinking and remembering how they had last looked, how they had last spoken, she could not be sure of any of them, not even of Miss Kinney, who would be swayed by the last person she heard. There was Dr. Crabbe, Mr. Pegler, Mrs. Mark. But they were not the church, and Mrs. Mark had her legs. There was no one of whom she could be sure.

She entered the house and went quietly to her room. Then it came to her that there was no more shelter in this room, no more safety in this house. All that she had thought was safety forever about her was gone, unreasonably gone and not to be regained. This house in which they had all made a home belonged to their enemies. It belonged to the church. It could not be a home, this house given and taken away at the whim of a crowd. They had built a home under foreign shelter.

She stood by the window, staring across the wintry garden. All these flowers her mother had planted in foreign soil, the lemon lilies, the ferns they had dug from woods and streams. Her mother had wandered through woods in spring with a trowel and a basket, crying aloud over bloodroot and trillium and feathery mosses. Before she went, Joan thought savagely, she would dig them all up and throw them away. She would chop the roses at the roots and hack the lily bulbs. Who could help growing old? They were all growing old. They were old — old — the church was nothing but old people. Yet who turned Mr. Parker out of his house because he was old, and who took bread away from Mrs. Kinney because she was over eighty years old? Then she was suddenly afraid. What did people do when the roof was taken from over them and wage was stopped and there was no more bread? What would she do with this old man? She had no one.

But they helped her to be proud. On Sundays before their strangeness she could pretend she knew nothing. She could receive coldly their meaningless friendliness. She sat in the pew where once they had all sat to hear a proud priest, listening fiercely now to an old mumbling man.

For it was impossible not to see that he was now nothing but an old man. He mounted the pulpit steps wearily and he clutched the handrail when he descended. Only for a moment, that first moment when he faced his failing congregation, did he throw up his head and straighten his shoulders. Soon he forgot. Soon he was poring aloud over his manuscript, reading strange dreamy stuff to which the few listened, bewildered or scornful.

“And I dreamed I saw as though the heavens were rolled away, a fair land, through which flowed serene a river. The name of the river was Peace, and there was room for everyone there on its banks, the young and the old, and they lived together safely. Dreams are not meaningless, not vagrant. Dreams—”

“I must take him away,” she planned passionately. She wanted to run up now and lead him away and shelter him.

Yet he would not be sheltered. In the house when they were alone it was necessary to pretend with him that everything was well. He came home from a meeting of his vestry, stricken and bewildered, muttering replies to himself. Waiting for him, standing at the dining room window watching for him, she wept when she saw him dragging himself across the gray frost-bitten lawn. His lips were moving and he made angry, futile gestures that were like weak blows.

But when, anguished with tenderness, she ran to the door, he pushed her feebly away, panting a little. “Is — is supper ready?” he asked. “I feel — a little faint”

“Oh, what has happened?”

“Nothing — nothing,” he replied with unusual irritation. “I’m just a little tired. I’d like to have supper right away — as soon as I wash—”

He went slowly upstairs. Standing at the foot, she heard him moan softly at the top step. “O, God—” But after a moment he went on and he did not call her. She must, she perceived, allow him to remain what he had always been. He must remain a priest or he would die. But a little later, out of the absolute silence in which they sat at the table, she asked again, “Father — can’t you tell me? Couldn’t you talk it over with me?” He answered, “Women do not understand these things. There is nothing in which you could help me. I trust in God.” She smiled at him, pitifully, and let him be. At night, lying awake, she could hear praying, in long stretches of monotone. He was still putting his trust in God …

And if he gave up his trust in God he would have nothing left. People had drawn away and left him. One by one they had all gone. Mary was gone. She used to lie here in this bed and in the night when he awoke to a strange aching loneliness he could look over and see her dark head or put out his hand and touch her warm breathing body. Now his own feeble warmth could scarcely change in a whole night the chill of the sheets. And in the night they all seemed to mock him. The members of his spiritual family! In the night he even wondered if what they said was true. Perhaps he was getting old. But if he was too old to preach, what could he do? There was the little insurance he had all these years in the Ministers’ Relief Fund. Mary had made him take it when Joan was born. It had seemed not trusting in God, but she kept at him. And he could draw it out in another two years. It would all be his, then. He planned in the darkness that he might rent a little room in South End and go and preach to the unsaved. “And the common people heard him gladly.” “For so persecuted they the saints before you.” He began murmuring the strong resolute words and after a while they helped him. He began to feel the old arrogant determination to make his people do God’s will. No, he would not retreat before his people. The Lord had appointed him — the Lord alone could dismiss him. He would not speak to anyone. He put his trust in God. He slept fitfully before dawn …

But if he would not tell her, she must know otherwise how to take care of him. She went to Mr. Weeks, who was the church treasurer. She remembered Netta’s father as a poor man, a mechanic who had moved to the village from elsewhere and opened a small grocery store. Soon he was unaccountably prosperous, enough so to buy the shirt factory at South End, though he had not opened it yet. But they had never bought of him because her mother said they were used to Mr. Winters’ general store. She did not like Peter Weeks because he asked outright what Winters was selling for, and twisted his tight small mouth to say, “I’ll let you have it two cents under his price — anything you want.”

“No, thank you,” she replied coldly. When Mr. Weeks had joined the church and Hannah said, “Reckon we’d oughta buy a little of him now and then,” her mother had replied proudly, “We don’t do that sort of thing.”

She entered the grocery shop, her head high and her heart water within her.

Netta’s father hastened toward her. “Well, well,” he cried, but she would not answer his meager joviality. “Mr. Weeks,” she said directly over the counter, “I’ve come to ask one thing — when does my father have to go?”

“Well, now,” he considered, taken aback. His angular wizened colorless face fell into his conventional shopman’s smile. “You and Netta are old friends — I want to do all I can.”

“It’s not necessary,” she said steadily. “I’ll take care of my father.”

“The fact is,” Mr. Weeks said, moving a cud of tobacco in his cheek, “the old man’s kind of stubborn. Won’t give his resignation.”

“I see,” said Joan.

“We’re waiting for that. Can’t technically close him out before then. The fact is, we’d want to get a new man started as soon as we can, but I’m treasurer and I know we can’t afford any overlapping. Finances in bad shape, but I’m getting things in order—”

“I see,” said Joan. “Then the sooner we go the better.”

“He’d better hand in his resignation, you see, Joan.” He moved his quid. “I don’t want to be hard on him — you and Netta — Say, hear Netta’s going to splice up with Ned Parsons? She was a long time going off, Netta was, but she did well in the end. Ned takes after his pa, I’m glad to say, instead of his ma. He works steady. I’m thinking some of starting up the factory, and if I do I’m going to put Ned in charge — that is, if he goes ahead with Netta.”

“I’m very glad for Netta. Will you tell her? Good-bye.” She forgot Ned and Netta at once.

Across the table at supper when Hannah was gone she said, “Father, let’s do proudly what has to be done. We’ll go to the city — I’ll find a job. And Francis can help. We’ll start again.”

He had been eating rapidly and hungrily. Of late, with all the worry, he had let himself eat more. He often felt faint and he needed strength. Tonight the stew had been unusually good, and the steamed pudding. But Joan was so quick. He stared at her and put his hand to his mouth, and she saw he was sick. She ran to him, but he fended her off with his arm and rose and went out. When after a long time he did not call her, she went to find him. He was in his room and when she called he cried feebly that he was undressing and she could not come. She sat down on a little stool by the door and waited. But the door did not open, and at last she opened it softly. He lay on his back, his folded hands on his breast. His eyes were closed and he was drawing deep breaths, snoring now and then. He had crept into bed without calling her and gone to sleep. She closed the door and went to her own room. He did not want her.

For her there was no sleep. She could not sleep in such uncertainty, in such loneliness. Rose was far away and Francis had written only once. But she remembered Francis, how he had leaped from his bed and dashed for Dr. Crabbe that day. She went to her desk and began to write to Francis. “We must go. You see how it is,” she ended. “We had better come to New York and I could get a job. At any rate, we must get out of this house.”

She sat a while and added, “I have no one to count on but you. And he is your father, too.”

She sealed and stamped the letter and lay down in her bed, listening, to fall at last into sleep.

She woke with the feeling of a strange sound just heard. She had heard it in deep sleep and waked instantly from old habit with her mother. She lay awake, taut, listening. What was it? The house was very silent. The night was still. Then it came again, a loud choke, a snore, a voice struggling and stifled. She leaped out of bed and ran to the door between his room and hers. But he had locked it. Sometime, without her knowing it, he had locked it so that he might be quite alone. She cried through the panel, “Father — I’m coming—” But he did not answer. There was the door from the hall. She ran down the hall, calling upward to the attic for Hannah as she ran. This door was not locked, thank God! She pushed it open. The room was dark. There was no moon and even through the open window only darkness streamed.

But out of that darkness she heard his strange breathing. She fumbled for the light and heard on the stair Hannah’s stumbling and muttering against the darkness.

“Hannah!” she cried. “Go and get Dr. Crabbe. Something’s wrong with Father!”

Hannah’s voice grated through the darkness. “He’s overeaten. He’s always held back, but last night he kind of let go and ate. I noticed him on the pudding.” She reached the door as Joan found the switch. The light flashed down upon the bed, upon him. They stared at him in the instant together. He lay stiffly, his arms flung into a shape of agony. His mouth was twisted, across his jaws and pinned there; held by invisibly crooked muscles. His eyes were dim, half-open. His usually snow-pale face was strained with purple—

“My soul and body!” whispered Hannah. “It’s a stroke!” She turned and padded away …

This figure on the bed did not stir. She was afraid of him — so strange, so twisted. She lifted his hand to place it nearer his body in a more easy pose and the arm was stiff. She could not move it. A dribble of saliva ran from the loose corner of his mouth and she lifted the sheet and wiped it away, sickened. “Father, Father!” she cried. But he neither saw nor heard. He was absorbed in the heavy breath he drew.

And then, as she stood there alone with him, the breathing stopped. At one instant the breath came, deep and thick, roughened, grating, like something dragging harshly over a rocky road. Then it stopped. Even as she stood, crying to him, it stopped. She waited, in terror, for it to begin again. But the strange purple faded out of his face, gravity fell upon his crooked mouth, and the twisting left his flung limbs. The body seemed to relax, to curl, to shrink. The breath was finished. She turned away and ran — ran down the stairs, calling, “Hannah, Hannah!”

The front door opened and Dr. Crabbe was there, his overcoat over his striped pajamas, his hair a fringe of tangle about his baldness. “Father’s gone — he’s gone!” She shrieked at him as though she were a little girl. “Oh, Dr. Crabbe — oh, what shall I do!” She began suddenly to cry aloud.

He lumbered up the stairs, and she followed behind him, and Hannah behind her, a frenzied procession. She could not keep from sobbing, every breath arose a sob. She felt weak with sobbing. They were by him but he had not moved. There he lay, just as she had left him, Dr. Crabbe lifted his arm. It lay limp in his grasp and he put it down gently. Hannah began to sniffle. “It was a stroke, wasn’t it, Doctor? He always kept himself starved and last night he took three helpings of my dried fig pudding and the hard sauce. I was that surprised, beside all else he’d eaten—”

Dr. Crabbe did not answer her. He did not say to Joan, “Stop sobbing, child.” He looked down into the proud dead face, seeming not to hear her. It was a proud high face, even though dead. “The old son of God,” he murmured, smiling. “He stood up in the vestry last Sunday and told them God called him, not man, and that he would die before he resigned. He was lucky — not everybody can die when life is ended.” He bent and with gentleness he touched the eyelids and closed them and laid the hands upon the breast.

But she kept on sobbing. She could not stop her sobbing.

They were all very kind, of course. They sent a great many flowers. The house was full of flowers, and on the floral pieces were little notes speaking of his “wonderful service.” “So many years,” they all chorused. Now that he had, in a manner, resigned, they were eager to praise, to appreciate. Mr. Weeks came to see her and to say uncomfortably, “I didn’t mean any harm, you know. It was just business — things getting sorta rundown — if I’d had any idea—”

She heard him listlessly, hating him. She had to watch herself all the time or she began that foolish sobbing. She wept the instant she was alone — not for him — not for him—“It doesn’t matter, Mr. Weeks—”

Dr. Crabbe telegraphed for her to Francis. He said, looking at her sharply, “You need to have someone here with you — there’s no one else.” She said, “Maybe he can’t come — he’s just new at a job — I don’t know—” She desperately wanted him to come. She needed the sense of her own beside her. But he did not come. There was no answer even to the telegram. They wouldn’t let him off, she thought dully when it was the hour for the funeral and he had not come.

She went with Hannah to the church quietly. Mrs. Winters was there first, just to see everything was right. “Wait a little, dearie,” she said. “Wait till they’re all seated.” She was so kind. But even she had said when they stood looking at him in his coffin, “If he hadn’t been so set on that South End—”

Yes, they were all kind now, when it was too late. She sat in the pew quite alone, and the preacher from Lawtonville mounted the pulpit, and before him lay the casket. He mounted eagerly and then remembered and slowed himself. But it was difficult to walk slowly today. The eagerness crept out of him, his eyes, his voice, the nervous quickness of his hands. Would he please the people, his eagerness was asking? And across the dead the people were looking at him closely, intensely. Would he please them? He began praising the dead man eagerly, fully, remembering to round his sentences, to use the metaphors he had planned. When he prayed he had a small sheet of notes before him upon the pulpit and he opened his eyes now and then to glance at them. He must make a good prayer. It was so necessary for Minnie to—

“And may we so live, O God,” he prayed fluently, glancing secretly at the bit of paper, “that at the end—”

After it was over, Netta wanted to come home with her, and Mrs. Winters said, “Now don’t stay there alone — come over to us.” They all said, “Let us know if we can do anything.” She smiled and thanked them, knowing there was nothing.

She was alone, wherever she was. It did not matter. She wanted to go away from them because underneath all their kindness she could feel their relief. Before her they were decent and grave. But they would go to their homes and look at each other and murmur, “After all, it was best — for everybody concerned.” So she went back to the house quite alone. She must not begin that sobbing again. She had begun to be sick with sobbing.

They were all very kind. Dr. Crabbe came to see her and worried her with his insistent kindness. “What are you going to do, Joan? You’ve got to do something, child!”

She had answered at first quite eagerly. “Yes, of course, Dr. Crabbe, I thought I’d go to New York and be with Frank. He has a job, and I could find something, I know.”

“Hm,” said Dr. Crabbe, staring at her with dissatisfaction. “Looks to me like you better take a good dose of castor oil. Stomach’s probably stopped working with all this — only natural. You look yellow. Have you any money?”

“Oh, yes, Dr. Crabbe,” she said hastily. She wouldn’t take money. She was proud with all her mother’s pride … “Just because my husband’s a minister is no reason why my children should wear other people’s old clothes. Never take gifts, Joan!” … Besides, she had a few dollars again in the sandalwood box, and in her father’s old purse she had found a dollar. His salary had been due next week, but of course now—“Plenty, Dr. Crabbe,” she said brightly. “Honest!” He glanced at her. “How much?” “Oh, lots! Besides, Francis is earning.” “Hm,” he said grudgingly and went away.

They had not ceased to be kind. They said, “Take your time, Joan.” But the third day the new minister and his wife came to see the parsonage. “Not to hurry you at all, Miss Richards,” he said. He was very happy in this new call. His salary would be nearly two hundred a year more. With two hundred — then his red-haired young wife called to him sharply, “George! We’ll have to ask them to repaper the dining room anyway — and do over the floors.” Joan followed them about. “Yes, there is the pantry — that door is the cellar steps — it opens the other way.” All the familiar corners of the house she had always known as instinctively as her own body she was revealing to strangers.

“Don’t know if I’ll like her,” said Hannah, grumbling when they were gone. “She looks the kind that would skimp on butter and count the eggs.” She clattered the pans in the kitchen. “Said she didn’t know if she wanted help at all except this place is bigger’n she’s used to — I’ll lay it is — she don’t look used to much in my opinion.”

“Don’t hurry,” they all said, but she was in a fever of hurry. Pack up his few things — send the clothes to the mission. She had said to the new minister when they were looking at the bedroom, “Would you take a few clothes of his to the mission? He’d want the—”

The young man pursed his full lips. “I’m not sure just when I’ll be going — I’ve not decided about going on with that work — the people in the church—”

“Never mind,” she said quickly. “I’ll take them myself.”

She was going away, just as soon as she could get things packed. She was glad there was so little — glad nearly everything had to be left because it belonged to the people. Even the dishes from which she had eaten bread and milk and the cakes her mother had made and meat and vegetables and deep pies — old familiar precious dishes—“Run and get me the tall cake dish, darling!” “Where’s the bowl we put fruit in, Hannah!”—even the dishes were not theirs. Nothing had been really theirs. She would take the round-topped trunk — her clothes, the books of course, her mother’s own linen and silver. Perhaps she’d better not take anything at first, just pack and store them somewhere and find Francis. Strange of Frank not even to write!

Then nearly a week after the death, there was Francis’ letter. She came from the study where she had been sorting her father’s books and there was the letter in the hall. “Looks like Frank’s writing, but the postmark isn’t New York. I can’t make it out,” Hannah had called.

She went at once and opened the letter quickly. No, it was not from New York. It was from a place in Michigan, but it was Frank’s letter.

DEAR JOAN—

I lost my job and here I am with a couple of fellows. I’m looking for work here. They say there is a lot of work at General Motors. I expect I’ll get a job. As I am a little short, please send me anything you can.

He did not even know. He had not heard. She tore the letter into small pieces and left the heap upon the table.

… So what could she do? The house stretched about her, empty, inexorable, waiting for her to go, waiting to begin another life. It was through with her. She was terrified of this house. She ran out into the garden. It was nearly Thanksgiving. She had not thought how nearly Thanksgiving it was. But now a load of cornstalks was being drawn to the church door, the cornstalks they always used as a background for pumpkins and fruits. There was a loud shout from the wagon as it drew near, and the horses stopped in front of her, breathing out steam. A strong bulky figure leaped down from the wagon and came near her. It was Bart. She smelled the odor of the dry stalks upon him, clean and earthy. Suddenly she began sobbing again, the sobs that jerked at her very entrails. “Oh, Bart,” she sobbed. “Oh, Bart, Bart!”

He came toward her, smiling, steady, sure, safe. He had his arm about her and she clung to him and he led her into the empty house. There in the empty sitting room she felt his lips upon hers at last. She was still for a moment, feeling. His lips were stiff and hard upon her mouth. Deep within her body her heart drew back in strange dismay. But she clung to him, sobbing. He was strong as a rock, his arms about her were like the walls of a house.