Time Is Noon

III

THIS RING UPON HER finger was new and stiff. She had never worn a ring before, because it soon irked her. Someone had given her a ring once when she was a little girl and she wanted to wear it because it was so pretty, a red bit of glass set in a loop of silver-washed metal, but she could not. In a little while it made her restless and she took it off. But this ring she must not take off. She must learn to wear it. She had set it herself upon her hand, a wide band of gold, old-fashioned and heavy. Bart had searched among the rings upon the counter in the little jeweler’s shop in Clarktown while she stood waiting until he had found a ring like his mother’s. “It’s got to last a long time,” he said. When the clerk had fitted it to her finger and given it to them, Bart had tried it on his own hand. But it would go over no finger except the little one, and there it stuck upon the crooked joint.

There was no need to wait. There was no one to consider. Why should she consider those who had not considered her? She would slip out of that old life. It could be nothing to any of them what she did. She did not want to tell anybody she was going to marry Bart Pounder. She did not want to see that surprised look—“Bart Pounder?” She silenced her own heart savagely. “Yes — Bart Pounder — who else is there?”

She went to Mr. Winters, who was an elder, in the evening after store hours. He was there alone, searching over his shelves for something someone had wanted in the day and he could not find. It was his usual evening occupation. “If you can just wait till tomorrow, I can find it,” he said a dozen times a day. Upon bits of paper he scrawled, “Mrs. Parsons — ink eraser”—“a spool of sixty white for Mrs. Bradley”—“Billings a chipping knife.” When she came in tonight she could hear him muttering mildly, “Now where in tuck did I put that?”

“Mr. Winters, will you please tell them I shall be leaving the manse right away?”

He left off muttering and turned to her, kind, protesting. “Now don’t you let them hurry you.”

“No, but I have made my plans.”

“Going away?”

“Yes, I’m going away.”

Next morning Mrs. Winters came bustling up the steps. “Joan, I came right over. Mr. Winters told me. What are you going to do?”

“I’m going away, Mrs. Winters.”

“Yes, but—”

“I’m not a child, you know. I’m grown up. I have my plans. I’ll write you.”

Mrs. Winters could not help. No one could really help. It was better to be silent, to make her own life. She would not forget that only by death was her father saved from these people.

But when she said good-bye to Hannah, she clung to her a moment. Hannah said, patting her back briskly, “Did you write me that little letter, Joan, so’s if I don’t make it with this new minister’s wife, I could go and try some of the summer folks over at Piney Cove?” Joan released her instantly. “Yes, Hannah.” She opened her bag and took out the letter. This is to introduce Hannah Jackson, our general servant for more than twenty years. We have always found her clean, honest—

“It’s hard on a body,” said Hannah fretfully, “at this age to be having to find a new place and I haven’t chick nor child.”

“Yes, it’s hard,” said Joan quietly. “It’s hard at any age.”

There could not be, of course, any white satin nor any of that dreaming. White satin would have sat strangely upon her with Bart standing by her in his bursting blue suit. So she put on her old orange wool dress and her brown coat and the small brown felt hat and she and Bart stood before the county clerk, repeating his words. He was a small, wry-faced man with big loose lips in a wizened face. The day was cold with November and his thin-curved nose was damp and red, and he wiped his hand across it often. “You can sign there,” he said, pointing with his nail-bitten forefinger.

She signed her name steadily, “Joan Pounder.” Steadily she forced her hand to the name she had taken for her own, shaping its unfamiliar letters for the first time. She stood and watched Bart hold the pen clumsily like a farm tool in his great hand. He wrote his name in a childish angular scrawl beside her neat small script. She stood for an instant looking at the two names. Then she said, “Take me home, Bart.”

“Giddap there!” he shouted at his two horses. He clacked the reins across their backs and they began to trot briskly, their rustbrown coats shining in the wintry sun.

“I’ll get a car one of these days,” he said. “But I’ve got to get ahead a little. And a car’s no good for plowing. Got to have horses on a farm, car or no car.” He turned to grin at her. A look she was beginning to know came over his face. His nostrils thickened a little, his lips parted and loosened. “I don’t know if we could sit so close in a car though, my girl,” he whispered heavily. He had small yellowish soft-looking teeth set in gums too wide and pale. She looked away quickly.

They were moving out of the country she knew into a rugged hilly land, whose valleys were dark with woods. Between the rough fields were stone walls piled of the stones from the land. Everywhere the last colors of autumn were subsiding into dun and gray. Only the oak trees still burned dully red, but a few more nights of frost would strip them, too. Then it would be winter. She was glad for Bart, she told herself, gazing straightly into the dying landscape. If it had not been for Bart she would have been quite alone and winter was coming. In so short a time had she been left quite alone.

Then at a bend of the narrow earth road rose a big frame house with green blinds, an oblong of white against the land. A few great maple trees stood about it, their skeleton limbs not hiding it.

“There’s the house,” said Bart, pointing with his whip. “The folks will be expecting us. Don’t you mind my mother.”

He had never mentioned his home before except to say shortly, “I live with my folks. I’m to have the place if I stay with them — so I’m staying.”

They drew up and the door opened and now she was near enough to see them, his father, his mother, his brother. They came out, one by one, his mother last, and stood waiting for her. Her heart rushed eagerly toward them; she peered through the dusk to see them — father, mother, brother. But she liked the house, so cleanly white and green, she liked the maples. Under their bare limbs the unraked leaves lay in a carpet of ashy gold.

She wanted to like everything. Here was to be her home. She was glad they were all to live together. She did not want to live alone with Bart. A tag end of Scripture flew into her mind: “And the lonely he hath set into families.”

She jumped out of the buggy and ran across the dry frostbitten grass and through the rustling fallen leaves toward the three waiting figures. She ran toward the woman, holding out her hands. She put her arms about the stiff body, and smelled a faint soapy cleanness upon the cheek beneath her lips. “I’m Joan,” she said. She wanted very much to have them love her. She would make them love her.

“Well!” said Bart’s mother. “Well, I’m sure—” Under her lips Joan felt the passive plump cold cheek.

“Here’s the old man,” said Bart. “And this here’s Sam — my kid brother.”

She put out her hand quickly and felt it taken twice by huge stiff hands, the same except that the old man’s hand was cold and the young man’s hot and damp in the palm, and did not quickly let hers drop. The old man did not speak. “Pleased,” Sam muttered. He had small hot brown eyes like Bart’s, under rough hedgy red brows. They stood staring at her, unblinking, out of the twilight, and she stared back at them until the silence was heavy enough to crush her. She must speak and break this deep silence.

“It’s a lovely house,” she said at last.

“Won’t you come in?” said Bart’s mother.

“We’d better go in,” said Bart.

They turned and tramped in silence into the house, and she followed them into a small square hall from which a staircase rose steeply. There was a hesitation she did not understand. Then the mother said, “Well, use the front stairs for once.” But the two men went through the hall to the kitchen, and Bart said, “Reckon I’ll wash up in the kitchen, too.”

“Come on up and I’ll show you the room,” said the mother. She mounted the stairs, not touching the rail, stepping carefully, and Joan followed, her bag in her hand. The stairs turned sharply into a narrow hall encircled by closed doors.

“Here,” said the mother. She opened a door and went in first and Joan followed her. “You’ll find everything handy, I hope.”

“Oh, yes,” said Joan eagerly, staring about her. There was a maple bureau, a washstand with a pitcher and basin, a rocking chair, a double bed. Upon the bare clean painted floor were bits of old flowered carpet, neatly hemmed.

“We have a bathroom,” she heard Bart’s mother say. “It’s down the hall. But the men don’t use it. They take the tub to the woodshed when they need to wash. I can’t have the smell of stable in the house. But you can use the bathroom with me, I reckon.”

Joan did not hear her. There was only this double bed. There she must sleep this night with Bart, this night that was already come down upon her. She had not wanted to think of it. But now the night was here.

“Well, we’ll be ready to eat as soon as you come down,” continued Bart’s mother. “I’ll just go and stir up the potatoes.” She went out, closing the door, but Joan did not hear her footsteps on the stairs.

In the dusky room she sat down. She felt as though she had been running too quickly for a long time and now motion was stopped forever. Silence was deep about her. Through the window she saw the endless rolling twilight hills, the dark trees, the faint pale lines of dividing stone walls, the empty shorn fields. There was no other house to be seen. She ran, half afraid, close to the window, but there were no other houses. A great gray barn loomed directly in front of the house. She could see the shadowy figure of Bart’s father moving in the light of the oil lantern he carried. His head was lost in the early darkness but she saw clearly his shapeless legs in overalls, the clump of his hand grasping the handle of the lantern. He slid the barn doors shut and came toward the house, his shadow warped and monstrous upon the dry ground. She stood in the chill darkness, afraid to live. For the moment she passionately envied her mother, safe in her grave, having no more to face the fall of night, the dawn of day. She was afraid of night, afraid of day.

Then she felt the ring upon her finger. She had forgotten it for a while in her excitement, but now she felt it, strange and stiff upon her flesh. She turned resolutely and found matches beside the oil lamp on the mantelpiece and struck a light and lit the lamp. It was very clean and the chimney shone. The flame licked about the cleanly wiped wick and there was a streak of smoke. She turned it down quickly — but there the black was.

It didn’t matter — she was relieved with light. She took off her hat and then lifted the pitcher and poured out water to wash her hands. The faint clink of the pitcher was like a crack in the silence. The house was full of silence, the same silence that hung over the hills and the woods. She found herself moving carefully that she might not break the silence again. She opened the door and tiptoed down the carpeted stairs, down the dark narrow hall. There was no voice to guide her, nothing except a vein of light under a door at the end. She opened, it and there they all sat at the table, waiting for her. They did not speak when she came in. She took the empty chair by Bart, trying to smile. No one spoke, but Sam was watching her from under his bushy brows. Bart’s mother rose and went into the kitchen and came back with a dish of smoking boiled potatoes.

“We’ll eat now,” she said.

She had known silence before. After her mother’s death there had been silence of a voice no longer heard. There was the increasing silence in the house after Rose had gone and then Francis. There was the silence in which she had lived with her father and in which he had died. There was the silence into which Bart had come, from which he had taken her, the silence of herself, bereft.

But none of it had been like this silence. They sat down and suddenly in the stillness, in the stillness of field and wood and tree and night sky about the solitary house, Bart’s father said shortly, “We’ll have the blessing — God, for what we are about to receive, make us truly thankful. Amen.”

But the prayer did not break the silence. They were crowded about the table in the small crowded room. Beside her sat Bart’s father, his elbows squared. In the silence she could hear him breathing as he ate, helping himself to potatoes, to bread, to cold meat, pouring out skim milk to swallow it down in gulps. Across the table Sam sat, eating, watching her incessantly. Beside her was Bart, beyond, his mother. She did not look at their faces. She kept her eyes on her plate, but around the plate was a circle of hands, their hands, great, warped, clumsy hands, thick and brutal with animal work. She thought suddenly that she never wanted to touch them and pressed the thought down instantly. She must not think such things. They were good people, honest, hardworking. Their faces were decent, honest faces. She belonged to them now. This was the home which was to give her food and shelter the rest of her life — the home she had chosen. She gathered her reasoning thoughts. Her mother would have talked cheerfully, quietly, making friends, and she herself must try. Perhaps they were shy of her, too. She looked up brightly. “I’ve never lived on a farm before,” she said. “I know I’ll like it — I love the country.”

No one answered. Bart’s father reached for the bread. “Got anything else to eat coming?” he asked his wife.

“There’s some apples stewed up,” she answered. “Or I could open a can of raspberries.”

He thought a moment. “Apples,” he said.

She rose and brought back a bowl and set it on the table. It passed from hand to hand in silence.

After the meal was over they sat in the small crowded room. She had tried to help clear away, taking out the dishes, searching for the dishpan. “I’ll wash the dishes,” she said. But Bart’s mother poured the water into the pan and tied on an apron. “You can wipe,” she replied. So Joan wiped, and Bart sat in the other room with the men. Now that the men were alone a little talk went on. She could hear the flat toneless voices.

“You finish that cornfield today, Sam?”

“Pretty near — tomorrow anyway.”

“You aiming to take tomorrow off, Bart?”

“No, I guess not.”

“Apples ought to be sorted. Shaler’s comin’ for them the day after.”

“All right.”

In the kitchen she searched herself desperately for something to say. What would Bart’s mother like her to say? “This is a nice kitchen — I like a big kitchen.”

There was no answer for a moment. Bart’s mother swept the cloth about the greasy edge of the pan. “It makes work when you have everything to do yourself,” she answered. Her face did not change its dull worried look.

“I’ll help you now,” said Joan eagerly. “I want to help all I can.”

She opened the dish closet and began to put away the dishes she had just finished wiping. “Let me see — the plates here — and these spoons—”

“They don’t go there — the good spoons I put in the drawer. Those are kitchen things — you’d better let me put them right.”

She pushed Joan aside and began to sort the dishes and silver.

“There—”

“I’ll know tomorrow,” said Joan humbly. She went into the other room. The three men fell silent at once. They sat about the table, set for the next meal and shrouded with a gray-white cloth. She sat down on one of the straight chairs, wondering what was beyond the closed doors. There must be many rooms in this big house. But it was as though there was only this room where they ate, the kitchen, the rooms for sleep upstairs. She sat, afraid to go upstairs, although she was very tired, too tired to try again to talk. Tomorrow in the morning, when the night was over — There was yet the night.

The father yawned suddenly and enormously. “Got to get to sleep,” he muttered.

He rose, and opening the cupboard beside the sealed fireplace, he brought out a squarely bound Bible and his spectacles. “Mother!” he called, and Bart’s mother came in, untying her apron as she came. She sat with it across her knees, her hands limply clasped upon it. He opened the Bible and searched slowly for a mark, moving his callused finger from page to page.

“The thirtieth chapter of Isaiah,” he announced, and began to read slowly, hesitating over the long words, “Woe to the rebellious children, saith the Lord.” It was a long chapter, but he read it to the end. They sat, motionless as stone. Were they listening? She looked from face to face, but she did not know. The mother sat with utter emptiness upon her face, lax with the habit of weariness. It was not possible she heard. Bart sat staring at his great hands. She saw his eyelids droop — he was almost asleep. Sam’s eyes were upon her ankles. She drew them quickly under her chair.

“Let us pray,” Bart’s father said, closing the book, and they knelt. Now forced to speak sentence upon sentence, the old man’s voice dropped into a mumble. He repeated bits of Scripture, made half-formed petitions, accepted ill fortune with a strange heavy patience. “We know that whatever comes it is from God. We plant but we may not reap. Man soweth but the harvest is with God. Help us to take what comes to us and work at whatever our hand finds to do. Amen.”

They rose into silence again. Bart’s mother tied her apron about her waist and went back to the kitchen. The father put the book and his spectacles back into the closet and sighed deeply. He turned with heavy abruptness and went to the kitchen. She heard a basin clatter in the zinc-lined sink and heard him dip and pour water. There was the hiss of lather, the dry stroke of a razor against the stubble of his beard. There was the clash of water flowing and of water emptied. Then he walked heavily through the room and up a small back staircase she had not seen.

“Well,” said Sam, rising, “I guess I’ll go to bed.” He rubbed his great hand through his red hair. She saw him staring at her, at Bart, avid. Secrecy, hot and fierce, was in his eyes. She looked away quickly and he went into the kitchen. His mother was still in the kitchen, moving about, wiping off the top of the stove, putting away pots, filling the kettle.

“Sam, you get me some wood first thing in the morning,” she said.

“All right. Where are the apples?”

“Don’t leave the cores under your bed for me to pick up the way you did this morning.”

He did not answer. He came into the room where she and Bart sat, and grinned at them. “Well, sweet dreams, you two!” he said, and went up the small back stairs.

She did not answer. One by one they were forcing the night upon her. The mother was waiting for them to go. In the kitchen she was sitting now on the reed-bottomed chair by the stove, waiting.

Bart got up suddenly. “Ma always comes up last. We’d better go.”

“All right, Bart,” she said faintly. She turned to go into the hall to the stairs down which she had come. But he called her abruptly. “Come this way — we use the back stairs every day.”

“All right, Bart,” she said, and followed him up the steep dark stairway.

It was dawn. When she opened her eyes the low ceiling seemed close, like a dim sky. The small room was full of pale quiet light. She raised her head and leaned upon her arm and looked out of the window.

Bart had said, brusque with embarrassment, “What side you want to sleep on?” and she answered quickly, “Outside — next the window, please.” He was ready before she was and he had rolled heavily to the wall. She had looked at the window all the time she was getting ready. It was a window away from this room, a window toward the hills.

There the hills were now, dark and still under the faintly coloring sky. She looked at them with a quiet wintry sadness. This was the way old people must feel, as she felt this morning, very old people, from whom everything had been taken away, or who knew that now nothing more was to be theirs. Nothing more now was to be hers except the things old people may have, a roof for shelter from rain, a fire for warmth, food, sleep, and within their hearts the emptiness of no more to come. All the emptiness in life was inside her, nothing but emptiness. She was a hollow figure, standing alone in a great silent empty plain. No one was near — no ear to hear her, no voice which she could hear. Behind her she heard the rasping steady breathing of Bart. Now that he was at last asleep he slept thickly, lumpishly. She must not look at him, must not imagine how he looked. Here was the window through which she could see the hills.

She crept carefully out of the bed and into her clothes. When she was dressed she knelt beside the window and watched the changing light. Let her not think, let her not remember anything. But she remembered suddenly one thing. Once when she was a little girl and she heard that quarreling in the room next to hers — were they quarreling? — she had got up out of bed, troubled, quivering, to listen at the door, to know what was wrong. She heard her mother say in a small, death-like voice, almost a whisper, “Is this all? Paul, is there nothing more than this?” And her father had answered more sharply than she had ever heard him speak, “I don’t know what you mean, Mary.”

But she knew what her mother had meant. This morning she knew.

“You up already?” Bart’s sleepy voice came suddenly from the wall.

“Yes, I’m up, Bart.”

He yawned loudly. “I’m awful sleepy this morning. Guess I’ll take another nap.”

“All right, Bart.”

… What could she pour into such emptiness to fill it? There was nothing deep enough to fill it to the bottom. Everything she did was so small it only floated on the surface of the fathomless emptiness. She watched the dawn brighten, and slowly the hills turned blue and over their rim the edge of the red sun rose and swelled into roundness and light poured over the land. Day was here again. Her frantic body was nothing in the hugeness of the day and night. This shell of walls and roof were all she had for shelter from the moons and suns and roaring winds or racing million stars, and from all the carelessness of people passing by. She turned from the window and began to unpack her bag and put her clothes away into the drawers.

In the days, she learned to work as she never had. She wasted no time on talk. Words echoed too hollowly in that void. She learned to be as silent as the others were, as chary of unnecessary speech.

“Bart, what time are you getting up to plow the wheatfield?”

“Half past four.”

No use to say more than that. Half past four meant breakfast at five. And before breakfast there must be the praying and Bible reading. She sat in stillness, dawn after dawn, staring out of the dusky windowpane while Bart’s father read the Bible, one verse after the other, following the lines with his thick cracked fingertip. She dreaded the deepest winter when the window would be black and she could not see the hills lightening with morning. But deepest winter came and then all she could see in the window was only a mirror. In it she saw five people sitting about a shrouded table, their heads patiently inclined. She saw herself one of them and she turned her head away.

Setting the cold skim milk on the table, the cold bread, the pat of pale milky butter, she watched the window, watched for the dawn. It seemed sometimes it would never come. Sometimes they had eaten what there was to eat — eggs were not to be eaten because they could be sold, and coffee was an indulgence, a strong drink with which to indulge the flesh — and she was washing the dishes, before that light began to break, streaming over the hills like music.

… Music! She had forgotten there was music. Behind one of the closed doors there was an old upright piano. She touched it once, softly. But its faint notes jangled and twanged out of tune and she closed it. Sometimes Bart’s father came into the kitchen on a Saturday night where she and Bart’s mother sat in silence mending the clothes the men wanted to put on after their weekly baths.

“Here,” he said gruffly, “see if you can pick out that tune.” He had a shining red hymnbook open to his hand. He had to choose hymns because he was superintendent of the Sunday school, as he had been for thirty years. The mother rose, sighing, and took the book and went to the piano. Behind her he stomped, stocking-footed, grumbling. “Since they went and got these new hymnbooks I can’t go by the old words anymore.”

She heard the warped tune wavering in the cold other room, a treble picked out with one finger. She waited for silence or for a shout: “Never heard such a heathenish dancy tune!” But if it was what he wanted, there was only silence. Silence was his thanks for anything, and his only praise.

… Once she had tried to be gay, for she was so made that she could not keep from growing a little fond of what she must care for, and once she said to the mother on a Sunday morning, “You look nice in that brown coat.”

The mother looked half-frightened and shy to sickness, and Joan smiled, still trying to be gay. “Didn’t anyone ever say you looked nice before — not even him?” She nodded toward the father.

But he stared at her, his mouth a grim, wide line across his jaw, bewildered by her gaiety.

“I hate polite talk,” he said. “It’s not honest. I expect my wife to look right. If she doesn’t, I tell her so.”

On that day they had gone to the church as they did every Sunday. Through snow and rain and wind they went as steadily as through sunshine, and Bart’s father whipped up the horses, worried that he must, because it was the Sabbath and these were his beasts. Once, reading in a chill dawn, he came to the Commandments. “Thou and thy beast,” he read, and suddenly he paused and whipped off his spectacles and looked about at them. “I wish it had gone on and said how to rest the beast on Sunday when you have to go to church.” He stared at them, one after the other, and the light from the oil lamp fell on his lined anxious face. Joan saw in that moment’s light the troubled puzzling of many years spring into his deep-set grayish eyes. Every Sunday morning he had waked to it.

Sam mumbled, his small red eyes lighting under the clownish thatch of his hair, “Pity it doesn’t mention a car!”

But his father glared at him. “You and your making jokes of everything,” he shouted suddenly.

Sam bristled feebly. “Well, a joke’s no harm that I can see. Anybody’d think a joke in this house was a sin!”

“Shut up,” his father bellowed.

“Abram, Abram,” the mother broke in, “and you with God’s word open on your knee!”

In the silence he began to read again, his burden still upon him. He fretted constantly because he could not find ways of literally obeying what he read.

And none of these things filled the emptiness within her. Now she knew where every dish and spoon belonged and where the rooms must be brushed and wiped and she knew the secret of every room, the parlor where they never sat, unless some relative came to see them. …

“This is my son’s wife Joan, this is Bart’s Aunt Emma.”

“Uh-huh, well, I heard Bart was married, but I didn’t get invited to the wedding.”

Aunt Emma’s black eyes stared at her out of an enormous fat face, as expressionless as the underside of a pie. “You’re a right hefty somebody, aren’t you? Almost as tall as Bart! Is she a good cook, Minna?”

“I do the cooking.” Bart’s mother said stiffly, and added unwillingly, “She’s handy, though, about the house.”

“Who were her folks?”

Her folks! Had she once had people of her own, who had been hers and whose she was?

Bart, called in from the stable to see his Aunt Emma, said shortly. “Her father was the old preacher over at Middlehope.”

“I heard tell of him,” said Aunt Emma. “Folks said he was a little off.”

“My father?” Joan gasped.

“Nothing but his age and all, I reckon,” said Aunt Emma placatingly, and Joan saw this woman did not mean to be unkind. But still she was stabbed. So people had spoken of her father!

There was the dark parlor, where they never went, not even on Christmas Day. … But then, what was Christmas in this house of silence? There was a tree at the Sunday school in Chipping Corners on Christmas Eve. Christmas fell that year on a Sunday and the horses must take them, Bart’s father said, to what was no better than a merrymaking on the Sabbath. But it was not so very merry. The tree was a slightly crooked pine, sparsely scattered with tinsel from a ten-cent store. But there was a star, a white paper star, stitched around the edges with tinsel, and Bart’s father read the story of the star, and the children came forward, the pinched frightened-looking farm children who worked early and late at chores, and the smug little children of small village storekeepers, with here and there among them the angelic face of a child who would never belong anywhere. Looking at one of these, a little brown-haired girl, staring at the few candles upon the tree, dreaming them into hundreds, Joan saw herself. She watched the little girl, smiling, catching from the child’s eyes a solitary gleam of Christmas. She made her way to the little girl’s side and said, “Merry Christmas!” But the words were strange to the child. She did not know the greeting. She pointed a thin little finger at the tree and cried out, “That there one is a-fallin’!” She drew close while Joan straightened the candle, and stared on, lonely and entranced.

So they came back to the farmhouse. They sat down to a better dinner than usual — roast pork and baked apples, and for dessert a bread pudding with raisins. She had made little gifts. She took some of her money and spent it, not for them, but for Christmas — wool for a pair of slippers she crocheted for the father, silk for a knitted green tie for Sam, and a brown one for Bart, and for the mother a handkerchief with a bit of lace at the edge.

She had wrapped the gifts in bright paper and put them on the table. They shone gaily red on the white cotton cloth, but no one spoke or seemed to see them, and at last she could not keep from saying, “Aren’t you going to look at your presents?” Then, one by one, clumsily, shyly, almost unwillingly, they took the packages and opened them, all except the father, who left his unopened. The mother said, “I don’t know how to thank you, I’m sure.”

Sam said, grinning at her intimately, “Green’s my girl’s favorite color. If it had been blue now, I’d have given it back to you.”

Bart said, “Is that what you’ve been doing every night on the sly, sitting up when you ought to have been in bed!”

The father, because the unopened package was so large upon the table, put it on the floor under his chair. After he had eaten he took it with him and went upstairs and when he came down he wore the slippers.

“Do they fit you?” she asked, wistfully.

“A mite short, but I can wear them,” he answered.

Without speaking she went upstairs to the cold bedroom and shut the door and sat by the window and looked over the gray hills. A year ago today they had gathered in the pine-scented church where her mother lay dead under the Christmas star. It was very long ago. Her mother was locked away into the earth, into all that was gone forever.

That little girl, dreaming the few candles into hundreds upon the scanty Christmas tree this morning in the bare little church!

She could not keep down her heart, after all. It would come up like a bubble in a breeze whenever she forgot. And she forgot very often. She forgot in the joy of snow. There was the old childish rush of pleasure over snow, the soft wide whiteness of the new earth. She put on her boots and her old red leather coat and plowed through the woods in an ecstasy. Then the universe shrank small and warm about her and she was not lonely, not for this moment. And the snow melted and underneath were small green plants, leafing and sprouting and ready. In the afternoons, when the work was over, there were waiting for her the hidden rosy buds of arbutus and the pearly whiteness of bloodroot. She could bear the loneliness in the house, thinking of all that was waiting for her in the intimacy of the earth over which she wandered alone and was not lonely. She took pleasure in small things, small flowers and small curious stones and in little dells. She discovered valleys, named them to herself: “My dell where I found the dogtooth violets”; “My pool—” But she avoided the pale tremendous largeness of earth and sky at dawn, and twilight, and at night she drew the shades because the sky was so wide and glittering with the cold far stars.

So the year passed, and another Christmas, and she gathered to herself all she could possess to fill her emptiness.

And she still had something of her own to put into her emptiness. Rose and Francis were alive. They were some where in the world and so they belonged to her. Early in the new year Rose wrote from across the seas that she was soon to have a baby. When the letter came, Joan put her hand to her lips to press them shut. She must have her part in this. She wanted Rose’s baby, too. And Rose must come home now. She could come here — this was her home and Rose could come to it and have her baby.

She planned quickly. It was a good place to have a baby, quiet and clean; and there were the hills. It would be spring when the baby was born and she could set a basket out under the trees. She curved her arms, feeling Rose’s baby in them. Rose wouldn’t know how to take care of a baby. She laughed aloud — Rose with a baby! Someone must be told. She ran to find Bart. He was in the field, building a stone wall.

“Rose is going to have a baby,” she cried, waving the thin foreign sheets at him. “I must write to her to come home—”

He went on lifting the stones. There was this stretch of wall and another before sundown. “You know how Ma is,” he said.

“You mean — she wouldn’t want Rose?”

He laid a stone in silence before he spoke. “She always took kids hard,” he said heavily. There were some women who came out into the fields and helped, but Joan didn’t seem to think of it. Well, no one should say he wasn’t good to her. “We never could have the other kids home after school much,” he went on. “She always took them as work. She was always afraid of the muss they might make in the house.”

Something in his voice made her suddenly see Bart, a small overworked boy with no chance to play. She looked at him for the first time, instantly moved by the little child she saw.

“Didn’t she ever invite any children over — to a party or something?”

“We never had a party,” he said slowly, striking a rough stone into pieces. “She was afraid of the trouble, and he was afraid of our learning something sinful.”

“Didn’t anyone ever invite you?” she asked, troubled. When she had been a child a party was nothing — her mother would cry in gaiety. “Let’s have a party!” And almost at once there was a party, the house full of noisy children, prancing about, dressed up, an orchestra blowing on combs and drumming on tin pans.

“You don’t keep getting asked if you never ask,” said Bart.

… In the kitchen she said to the stout pale woman sitting eternally by the kitchen stove, “My sister Rose is going to have a baby — I’m so happy!”

Bart’s mother sighed. “Children are a lot of trouble. They mess the house up.”

“Weren’t you glad when your children were born?” Joan asked, angry for that little boy.

“They’re good,” she answered. “They’ve always been good boys. But they’ve made work. I got so I just couldn’t make pie for them. It seemed too much to work for a long time and roll out the pie and see them eat it in a few minutes as quick as though they was drinking milk. I gave up making pie in their teens. Three men can eat up a whole pie at once and your work’s gone for nothing, seems like. It didn’t seem necessary.”

She sighed again, in the midst of the clean kitchen.

“But my sister is coming home …” Joan began again. She would not give up quite so easily as this.

Then she thought of a key to open the door of this house to Rose. Once a month in the middle of the week Bart’s mother put on her second-best black dress and one of the boys or Bart’s father hitched up and drove her to the church to a missionary meeting. Joan never wanted to go. She always said, “I’ll have supper ready for you when you come back.” But once or twice she had gone and sat quietly through the meeting. It was like all the others she had known, the good mothers sewing, listening to tales of famine and flood and falling down before idols, their eyes absorbed, turned inwardly upon their houses, upon the house where each must be back for supper. There was the tinkling dribble of small silver and copper coins and it was all over. Still they went, since it was a duty.

“You know — did I tell you? — that Rose and her husband are missionaries?”

“Yes, you did tell me,” Bart’s mother said. “I always thought it kind of queer that you never cared more about the meetings, they being missionaries themselves. Well, I guess I’ll stir the potatoes. Does seem as if mealtimes come round quicker than anything could.”

She rose from her seat by the stove, sighing.

No, there was no room here for Rose’s baby to be born. She wrote to Rose, “If I ever have a place of my own—” For she had no place of her own, after all. She must let Rose have her baby in a foreign country.

Into the emptiness she began to put an image of Bart. She needed an image in her emptiness and so she took a little here and there of what she had. “He’s my husband,” she said to herself. So she took fragments of Bart and shaped them with the welding of her imagination into an image. She took his size, the breadth of his shoulders and his strong neck and his length of limb. But she did not take his hands, clenched, hard, swollen, so that he could never really straighten them or never seem, when he took her hand in his, really to hold it. She took his square jaw, his close curly dark red hair. But she did not take his stiff pale lips, nor his deep-set reddish eyes. She even took his silence and made it strength. And the breath with which she breathed life into this image she made was the moment in the field when she saw him as a small awkward country boy, wanting the merriment of parties, of play, and doomed to work, to get up and milk the cows before he went to school, to milk cows and chop wood and carry feed and water to the beasts when other boys were playing ball and sledding and skating and giving and going to parties.

For of course there had never been any fun in this house. There was no room in which fun could be made. The parlor was full of the old-fashioned horsehair set, the polished table, the bright rose-flowered carpet, still clean after fifty years. The sitting room was full of the jangling piano, the cabinet of shells and hair flowers and little boxes and bits of glass. Poor Bart — poor little working boy!

She began to be kind to Bart, to talk more to him. In that silence of his, what might there not be sleeping but alive? She might find thought and imagination — if not love, perhaps thought and imagination. It would be good to find these buried under the vast silence, the silence he did not break in the day — for it was not broken by his saying, “Where’d you put my old pants?” or by her saying, “They are mended and hanging on the second hook behind the door”—which he did not break in the night, which he would not have broken if she had cried aloud what she so often cried with inward desperate tearless weeping, “Is this all, Bart? Is this all it is?” For he took her night after night, swiftly, and in the same silence in which he ate and drank or in which he fell into instant sleep.

But sometimes in the day when she was away from him she remembered the little longing boy she saw in the field. From that little boy Bart might be born again, a man such as his father and mother had not made him.

“Bart, would you like me to read to you sometimes?”

“What?”

“My books. They were in the round-topped truck I brought with me, remember? I’ve set them on a shelf in the attic. Your mother said they wouldn’t be in her way so much there.”

“Sure.”

He was so amiable that the image in the emptiness stirred with life. In their own room that night she opened the book she had chosen. In the afternoon, after the work was done, she had gone to the attic and had sat down and one by one she had taken down her books. Here were the books she had had in college. On a page she found Mary Robey’s name scrawled: When this you see, remember me. Yes, she remembered. It was another life — a life finished with its end. Strange how life could end abruptly and begin again, wholly different, so that one was another person! But these books, some of them her mother’s, were like a frail mesh, binding that past to this hour. Perhaps they would bind Bart and her into some sort of life together. Story of an African Farm. It had been when she first read it a troubling book, with the trouble of reality and of herself in the child on the farm. And then Miss Kinney had made Africa vivid in darkness, and she could see it all.

She began to read to him. He sprawled upon the sheepskin rug before the empty fireplace. She began to read in a quiet even voice, eagerly. Perhaps this was the beginning of a sort of companionship. Perhaps she had not tried enough. She read on a while, and then the old sense of troubled reality came over her again out of this book. It became at last too much for her. She looked up, trembling, pleading. She laughed shyly, her eyes wet.

“Bart, this child is so much like me that I—”

He was asleep, deeply asleep, his mouth open. He must have been asleep a long time.

Though she put her books away to read alone sometimes, going up the steep attic stairs to them alone, she was still kind to Bart, who was only a boy. She saw now that there was nothing more in him than what was to be seen by anyone. He could never be anything but a boy. Once reading of a man and a woman in one of her books, she found herself weeping. It was like waking from sleep to find herself weeping. It was not a surface weeping, not tears only, but some hurt in the roots of her. She was a woman now. There was no more of the girl Joan left. She knew why she wept and she said steadily to her weeping heart, “Be just. I married him for a home and for safety, and I have these two things.”

But the book made her think of the way she used to kiss Martin Bradley. She did not love Martin Bradley. She did not want him anymore. But there had been those kisses, the only ones she had ever given any man. She did not kiss Bart. She could not kiss Bart. When he pressed her she touched his lips quickly, she kept her lips still and patient beneath his. She said to herself day after day, “I must always be just to Bart.”

Sometimes passive in the night she thought, reproaching herself, “I have injured him. On one of the farms in these hills there would have been a woman to love him in his own way.” She remembered the farmer and the girl who had come to be married in the manse. The man was like Bart, she thought, filled with remorse. “I have deprived them both so that I might have a place for myself. I must make it up to him.”

So she was very kind to Bart. She denied him nothing, by day or by night. She went when he called from the barn or the yard. “Bring me a pail of fresh water this morning. Jo — I’ll be in the west field.”

“Yes, Bart.”

“Come and see the two old hogs fight, Jo. It’s a sight to make your sides split!” She stood by the pigpen with him, watching, revolted by the angry grunting beasts.

At night he said roughly, “Don’t you go to sleep yet, my girl.”

“All right, Bart.”

She had at first hated the silence of the house. It had pressed upon her, intolerable to bear. But now it was a cloak under which she could hide. She was glad for their habit of silence. Since none spoke and none revealed himself, she also need not speak nor reveal herself to any. Silence was shelter. And day and night she was kind to Bart. …

Out of her steady determined kindness to Bart she conceived her child. She waited, breathless with joy, in a shining mist of joy, until she was sure. And then she was sure and then she was no longer alone. She was never to be alone again. She was in the full company of her child.

So she did not need any longer the image of Bart. She could accept Bart as he was. For instead of the image there was now the reality of her child. She carried that reality with her everywhere. There was this steadily growing secret life within her. Soon, like a bud pushing daily more steadily to the light, this life would also come into the light, and she would see her child. But she held him as securely her own already as though she had him, flesh and blood, in her hands. She was not impatient, for she had him. It was enough that he was alive, growing, moving. She carried him with her into every realm of her being. He was not only in her body, he was in her heart and her mind. For him she made her life. Even when she read she put what she read consciously into his making. “That’s a lovely thought,” she would say to herself. “That I put into him.” But she needed a place for him in this house. She found an old broken armchair in the attic and mended it and made it soft with a ragged quilt and there she sat, by the small gabled window toward the west, dreaming, sending her dreams through her beating blood, her blood that was feeding and fashioning her child.

Now she took stock of all that made her life to see what she wanted for her son. This house was to be his home, this land, these hills must for years be his home and his world. She pondered it all, everything, examined each separate part, to see what she wanted for him. Here he and she would live together, taking what they wanted, making what they had not. She would take the great shadowing sheltering trees, she would take the undulating hills, the valleys full of woods, the curious aged rocks, the stream at the edge of the cornfield, the marsh where lady’s slipper and wild iris grew, all her small private possessions. She would take the barn with its great hayloft, the cattle lowing and giving their milk.

She would go to the barn herself and even now take the milk for him whole. When Bart’s father said, “We sell the cream,” she would say, “My baby shall have cream. It is more important for him to have cream than for it to be sold to city people.” She would take the eggs they guarded as jealously as jewels. He must have eggs every day. She began even now for him, now when her body was his source of growing. So she had had to tell them about him. She kept, it as long as she could to herself, so that in the silence she and the child could live together. But for his sake it was told.

“Bart,” she had said one night in the bedroom when he stepped out of his blue jeans. She stooped to pick them up and hang them on the nail behind the door. “I’m going to have a baby.”

“Are we?” he cried. She paused, astonished at his “we.” It had not come into her mind that the child was anyone’s except her own. His square unshaved face broke into a great grin. “I been wondering when that was going to happen.”

She had gone on distinctly. “I want you to get me a quart of milk every day with all the cream in. And I want two eggs for my breakfast. The baby ought to have them.”

He scratched his head and looked at her. “Don’t know about that — Pop’s kind of low since the fruit trees got frosted.”

“It’s got to be, Bart,” she replied.

“Sure,” he said amiably. “If you say so, I’ll put it up to Pop.”

“I never coddled myself,” Bart’s mother said next day in the kitchen. “I raised the boys on skim milk all right. Folks don’t need cream. It sells good and we’re short.”

Joan did not answer. She could use stubborn silence now, too. She went on steadily kneading bread. She had learned how to make good bread, great snowy loaves, brown crusted. Some day her little boy would run into this very kitchen, “Mother, I’m hungry.” She would answer, “Yes, my son.” She would go and cut him a full slice of the bread she had made and butter it thickly before their very eyes, and give it to him. “There’s plenty more if you want it, my son,” she would say clearly before them all. She would take ruthlessly for him.

So now she went openly into the cellar and poured out cream and put it back into her skim milk, cream that was bottled, ready to be sold. She went to the nests in the chicken house and took what eggs she wanted. They watched her, their silence loud with astonishment and anger, so that Bart was afraid before his father and tried to placate him with extra work. Let him, she thought triumphantly, let him do that for my child.

Only Sam said aloud, with envy and hostility, “Say, it’s luck for you, ain’t it!” His mother hushed him, outraged. “Sam, be quiet!” But it was outrage because it was not decent to know that Joan was to have a baby. It was another thing about which to be silent. Joan spoke quickly, tranquilly. “Why luck? I want my child to have a strong body, Sam.”

But to such frankness he had no answer. He grew red and retreated into their common silence and said no more. They were shocked at her indecency. But she was not afraid of their silence anymore. She had learned how to live in it now. She took what she wanted and was not afraid.

And then one day there was a letter for her. She had no letters these days except from Rose, for Francis did not write. He had lost himself in the world and she did not know where he was. She could only wait for him to come back. She tore at this letter quickly, for the stamp was not foreign. But it was not from Francis. The paper was stamped with the words, MINISTER’S INSURANCE DEPARTMENT. She read it quickly. There was a check pinned to the corner. Her father, the letter said, had for years carried a small insurance. Since they had not known of his death until recently there had been a delay in sending her the money. More than two years ago he had written saying his wife had died and he wished his elder daughter to have his insurance in case of his death. The check was for five hundred dollars.

She sat down on the old stump by the mailbox. If she had had this letter before her child began to live in her — but she had not.

She was held now to this house. She must keep this house to be a home for her child, a family into which he could be born. Money could not buy her freedom. She had taken their blood into her and mingled it with her own blood. She could never be free. She sat, gazing over the morning fields. On the hill across the valley she saw Bart plowing, small against the earth. She heard his voice crying at the horses, faint and very thin in the distance. Money could not free her. She had taken him into herself. But she would not tell him of this money. At least that would be hers. She would put it into the bank in some town where they did not go and keep it in her own name. She would know it was there if she needed it, a secret power.

But she was jealous of Bart. As the days passed, as the child moved in her and grew, she wanted it to be all her own. Bart’s part in its creation was so little, so unconscious, so accidental.

And Bart could not be a father when he was only a boy. He was longing for a car now, exactly as a boy longs. She listened to him. “Jo, I just got to get me a car. I got seventy dollars in cash now and my share of the pigs and pullets. I got a good notion to go on and get me a car.” He was excited by the thought, pleading for her agreement. “Don’t you think we ought to have a car? It’s so slow these days not to have one. Every fellow my age drives his own car, and it looks foolish to go to church or town in that old surrey, hitched to the plow horses. If Pop wasn’t so old-fashioned — he’s got money in the bank — I know he has.”

She smiled in secret triumph. This great boy the father of her son! She smiled tolerantly. “Why, yes, Bart. Why not?”

“I could get me a used car,” he said in excitement. “I could paint it up all new. Say, do you like red or blue? Maybe a nice green. I’m partial to green.”

He went off, planning. She said to herself, “Let him have his car. It will mean more to him than the child. I can have the child to myself.”

The next Saturday, when he came home in an old car, she went out and admired it. The owner said loudly, “He’s the quickest fellow to learn to drive I’ve ever seen. I told him a few things and he’s got the hang already.” Bart said, “Move over and let me see.” He shoved himself into the driver’s seat and studied the gears. “Let’s see—” The car moved slowly. His face grew solemnly ecstatic.

She smiled, content. Her child was her own. It was more easy now to be pleasant, to be kind. She was very kind to them all, these days.

But she wanted someone to whom to talk. If her mother had been alive she would have run to her. “Mother, I am going to have my child!” She could see her mother’s dark eyes go joyous in that brightness, as though an inner light had been turned on, like windows shining in the night. “Oh, my darling!” She could feel the quick warm arms about her. And she yearned for Rose and Francis. It had been so long — how had they grown so separate? She wanted to see him again. As if an answer to her longing, a letter came from Rose. Rose’s child was born, a little delicate boy, so delicate they had not dared to hope to keep him alive, but he lived. He had been born on a warm April day in a Chinese city, a fair little boy who looked like Rob. Rose had no milk for him. Her round breasts were useless, for the nipples were too small. They would not rise and the boy could not grasp them in his lips, or he was too feeble to try. So they had hired a Chinese wet nurse, a peasant woman whose baby was a girl. She was willing for money to take the girl’s milk for Rose’s little boy. “We feel only our prayers have kept him alive,” Rose wrote. Joan, reading the letter closely, longed for the frail child. She looked at her own swelling breasts proudly. If the children had been together, I believe I could have fed them both, she thought in triumph. I shall have so much — far more than enough.

Bart’s mother said, “Reckon I can help you when your time comes. And Mrs. Potter over at Clarktown is a midwife, if anything seems out of the way.”

But Joan said, “I’ve made my plans. I shall have Dr. Crabbe.”

“It doesn’t seem as if you had to have a real doctor,” Bart’s mother objected. She was peeling potatoes and she looked at Joan reproachfully. “It ain’t like a sickness.”

“He knows me,” Joan answered tranquilly.

She was ironing a small, plain white dress she had just finished — six little dresses. Bart’s mother had said, “There’s some of Sam’s old baby clothes in the attic.”

“No,” said Joan quickly. “No, I don’t need them.” She could not have Sam’s old garments on her little tender-fleshed son. The thought revolted her. She could not bear to touch Sam even in accidental passing. But she opened the round-topped trunk and searched over the baby dresses, the little petticoats and shoes, and the red jackets Francis had worn. They were old and much washed but still dainty, because her mother had made them so fine of good lasting stuff and with small embroidery and tiny worked buttonholes and narrow laces.

One day in late October she hitched an idle horse to the buggy and drove to Middlehope to see Dr. Crabbe. She chose a Monday, when people would be busy and she might meet no one. Bart said proudly, “I’ll drive you in the car if you’ll wait till the work’s done.” But she could not trust her son to his slow-witted driving. She said quietly, “I’d better go earlier, thank you, Bart.”

So she had driven gladly alone through the still October sunshine. She had made it habit now to choose things for her son’s life. I choose these colors, she thought happily, that red vine in that oak, that yellow white-barked birch, that little gay chipmunk. Together they would see all these things, and soon, in only a year or two, they could talk about them. Then there would always be someone with whom to talk. She must watch and find out all she could, see all she could, with which to enrich his life. These hills should not imprison him, nor should the woods seem dark or frightening. He must never feel lonely in this silence. She must be always there.

She drove into the quiet sunlit street, and past the churchyard, the church, the manse. Upon the manse steps sat two small children, a boy and a girl, eating slices of bread, staring at her as she passed. She heard a woman’s brisk voice calling, “Mollie, where’s Donny?”

“We’re here,” the little girl piped back.

“Take good care of him,” the voice answered. In the garden she saw a youngish man raking leaves, bareheaded and a little bald. It was the new minister. Monday was his holiday as it had been her father’s. But her father never raked leaves — he spent the whole day in his study, reading books he had not time for on other days or making parish calls. The new minister? He was no longer new. He was the minister now, his the house and children. It was impossible to believe that the two small children were not the ghosts of herself and Francis, so short the time was since they had sat on the steps eating bread and sugar. She could hear her mother’s voice: “Joan, where’s Francis?”

“We’re here, Mother!”

“All right, darling.”

She must find Francis, she thought ardently. She took her mind from her errand to think of him, troubled, her conscience stirring. She ought not have let him go so long. But he did not write and she had no way to find him. She must send letters, many letters, send them out like arrows, until one found him and brought him home to her again. …

In Dr. Crabbe’s office she waited, and then in a moment he was there, his hair a curly white rim about his bald crown, his blue eyes dim and rheumy, his hands shaking.

“My goodness, it’s you, Joan Richards! Why on earth haven’t you — Where’s that Godforsaken hole you hide in, anyway? I’ve been driving all round that country seeing sick folks and never see hide nor hair of you!”

She found her lips trembling. She wanted to cry. She wanted to cry and cry and tell Dr. Crabbe everything, to be the little girl again, to catch for a moment the warm old circle about her. But she steadied herself. No use trying to go back.

She laughed and took his hands, feeling their shaking.

“Dr. Crabbe, I’m going to have my baby — and I want you to help me.”

“Well, well, well — I keep on living and living. Your mother came to me with those very words. Let’s see — sit down, child — I want to ask you a few things. Let me look at you.” She gave her body over to his hands gratefully, confidently. He peered and puffed as she remembered he always did, breathing hard as he grew absorbed.

“There — you’ve got a glorious body, Joan — sound as an apple — no trouble at all — everything’s just beautiful. God, I like to see a good body!”

He washed contentedly, talking cheerfully. “Old Mrs. Kinney’s not dead yet, Joan — had pneumonia last winter and I had to pull her through it, damn her! She thought sure she’d go. You know how scary she is of everything — won’t even ride in an automobile. But she got well. I swear I’m going to live to bury her. You heard Netta and Ned married, didn’t you? They’re going to have a baby next month, but she’s a different story — slack built sort of female — I don’t know what’s going to happen there — I’m dubious, that’s all, I’m dubious!”

He asked no more questions of her until she went outside. Then he shot his white eyebrows over his eyes at her and said sharply, “You happy, Joan?”

She smiled at him. “Why not? I’m going to have my baby.”

And jogging home alone she began to sing. She hadn’t sung in months. Now she thought she could, if she had a little time, make a song of her own again. The tight dark isolation of her heart was over. Yes, actually, there was a song in her mouth. She held it lightly on her lips, waiting for it to shape. Here was a phrase, and here. When she reached home she went straight to the attic and found a bit of paper and put down the two lines and then a third.

But although she waited, the end would not come. The song hung there, unfinished, and she let it be. It was a song written to a child not yet born. The end would come in its own time.

Waiting for her baby in overflowing tenderness, she wrote to Rose more warmly than she ever had. “Tell me all about little David, I feel he is mine, too.” She tried to see the little fragile fair baby, nursed by a brown woman. She wondered about his home and the Chinese landscape. If only Rose would tell her more — she couldn’t see anything of Rose’s life. When she tried, she saw a static picture of a church, shining among dark vague temple shapes, and a stream of brown people leaving the temples, pouring into the church. But that could not be life. The work was going well, Rose said. Little David had had a fever — malaria, they thought, but he was better again. The Lord blessed them and they were receiving nearly fifty new members this year. Rob was opening new territory. The people were hostile and he went in danger of his life among them, but they were not afraid. They persisted steadily in God’s work, preaching the Gospel to unwilling ears, trusting to God for the harvest. She hoped Joan would bear her child more easily than she did. David interfered a good deal with her classes, but he would soon be older.

I wish I had him, Joan thought, folding the pages. I could take care of him easily. I believe he bothers Rose. I can’t think of her holding a baby and bathing him and dressing him.

But Francis never answered her letters. She thought about him while she was waiting, worrying about him because he never wrote. She seemed to see him now always as he had been when he was a small boy in a little red sweater, his eyes very black above round scarlet cheeks and his black hair curling a little at the ends. … “Joan, take Frankie with you if you are going to the Winters’ to play.” … “All right, Mother — come on, Frankie!”

If sometimes she was impatient with his short steps and his constant tagging, one look at his face and chubby body softened her. None of the girls had a little brother so pretty. What if she’d had a pale-eyed weazened little runt like Netta’s Jackie? She was always proud to walk along the street with Frank. They might meet a stranger who would surely, say, “What a beautiful little boy!” Then she could always reply proudly. “He’s my little brother!”

But he never wrote to her.

Then one clear frosty morning when she was doing the Monday’s wash under the elm tree in the yard she looked up and saw him walking down the road to the house, a small suitcase in his hand. She could not believe it was he, but she knew the way he walked. And it was like him to come suddenly, without a word. She straightened herself above suds and ran, clumsy with her child, to meet him and take him in her arms.

“Oh Frank!” she cried, laughing and wanting to cry. “I’ve been thinking about you so much. Why haven’t you answered my letters? I’ve written and written!”

Ah, it was good to have her arms warmly about someone!

He had grown. He was taller than she now, he was handsomer than ever. But so thin! Her eyes took him all in at once — that was the same blue suit he had when he went away. Now it was worn and gray at the wrists and elbows, and he had turned the cuffs of the trousers inward. But it was his face at which she looked. His rosy boyish color was gone. His face was sharp-boned, sunken at the jaws and the temples. He looked tired enough to die.

“I only got two letters,” he said. “It’s taken me a while to come — to get here.”

“It’s home,” she said quickly. “Where I am is always home for you.”

He did not answer. He walked beside her to the house, and followed her in. She took him to the dining room, the only room that was warm, and the day was chilly with autumn. Then she did not know where to take him. “Wait,” she said. “I’ll ask Bart’s mother.”

In the kitchen she said, “My brother has come.” She paused, “May he — What room shall I put him in?”

Bart’s mother looked up from the stove, astonished. “How long’ll he be here?” she asked after a while. No one had ever come here to stay.

“I don’t know,” she answered. “I haven’t had a chance to talk.”

Bart’s mother lifted the lid of the stove and pushed in a knotty stick of wood. The lid would not fit down and she clattered at it.

“He can sleep with Sam, or in that old bed in the attic. We used to have a hired man up there when times was good, but nobody’s slept there for a long time. It’s all right as long as it’s not summer. There’s some quilts in that old chest under the eaves.”

She went back to the dining room and took his hand. It was callused and hard, so hard that she looked at it quickly. It was grimed with so deep a grime that it looked as though it could never be clean. “What have you been doing?” she cried. His hands had been slender, the joints supple. It was still a slender hand, it would always be slender, but the skin was scarred and the nails black and broken.

“Been in machine shops,” he said, “and this last six months I’ve been in West Virginia in a coal mine.”

“In a mine!” she said, astonished. “I thought you wanted to fly.”

“I do,” he said. “I lost my job — nobody can hold a job these rotten days — and I went south with my pal. We heard there were jobs in the mines.” He made a grunt of laughter. “Do you see me in a mine, Joan, wanting to fly?” He sat down and put his grimy slender hands through his too long heavy black hair and leaned upon them.

“Come upstairs,” she said. “Come up to my room. I must know everything.”

He followed her up the front stairs, not knowing why she hesitated a moment and then said firmly, “Yes, come this way.” She led him into the bedroom.

“Gee,” he said, “I’d like a bath, Joan. I’ve hiked and hitchhiked for days.”

She hesitated again. There was the bathroom, but — the child made her strong today for Francis. Someday the child would be a man like Francis, and he would not wash himself in a wooden tub in the woodshed. “I’ll show you where the bathroom is,” she said.

While he bathed she went downstairs. She was foolish enough to be afraid for a moment of this fat silent woman moving about the kitchen. She listened to know if Francis was quiet. He used to be so noisy, rushing the water out of the faucets, dropping the soap dish, his strong bare footsteps thudding about. But he was very quiet now. For a moment she was so foolish as to think she would not tell Bart’s mother. She could put everything in order — Then she straightened herself. She would not be afraid, she was going to make a life for her own boy here in this house.

She went to the door of the kitchen. “Francis is using the bathroom,” she said quietly. “He has come a long way — he’s very tired.”

Looking down, she met Bart’s mother’s eyes fully — pale eyes whose brown had no depth. They were the color of shallow leaf-stained water flowing over stones. She gazed into them steadfastly, defying them. Sometimes it was good to be tall and towering. The pale eyes wavered and fell.

“There ain’t too much hot water,” she said. “If he uses too much there won’t be enough for the dishes. How long did you say he was staying?”

“I don’t know,” said Joan.

She set his place beside hers for the noon meal, and went back upstairs. He was dressed again and sitting in the bedroom. Now that he was clean, he looked very pale.

“You are much too thin, Frank,” she said, instantly troubled.

He gave the grin above which his eyes used to sparkle. But now they remained somber. “I haven’t eaten my fill steadily,” he said. “Seems to take a lot to feed me, Joan. I didn’t realize it before when I wasn’t doing it myself.”

He looked about the room restlessly. “What sort of a place is this you’re in? I haven’t seen your — I haven’t seen Bart yet. I can’t seem to think of you as married.” His eyes swept her figure delicately and moved away.

She said at once, “You see I’m going to have a baby soon, Frank.”

“Yes … I hope you’re happy.”

She did not answer. Now that Frank was here something of her own was near her again. She wanted to talk to him, to confide in him as she had never confided. But he kept his eyes steadily turned from her and his reserve held her away. “I’m happy about the baby,” she said.

She waited but he did not answer, so she knew they could not speak of herself. She said, “Now tell me about yourself — everything. I’ve thought about you so. Why didn’t you keep that job?”

“I never could work up in it. They kept me greasing parts and cleaning — all the young fellows who’d been to schools kept coming in and getting ahead. There isn’t any fairness in this rotten system, Joan. I’ve learned a lot since I’ve been away. I used to think if I worked hard and good, I’d get ahead anyway. I soon gave that up, like I gave up all that stuff Dad used to preach. He didn’t know anything real — all that talk.” His face was set in a bitter half-grin.

“He believed it,” she said quickly.

“Oh, sure,” he replied. “That’s why it was so poisonous. He was good enough, but that’s no use — not on this earth, not with things the way they are. There’s no chance for a fellow who hasn’t influence or money or something. Remember that letter you got me? That letter didn’t help me. Bair hadn’t any use for Bradley. He hardly looked at it. I got the job because they happened to need a hand just then. It was summer and things were busy.” He examined his hands carefully as if he had never seen them before. “Well, then things weren’t so busy and they dropped me, and there was nothing to do about that. I was hoping to get to be one of the regular ground crew. And about that time you wrote about Father — but I didn’t want to come to Middlehope.”

“No, it was better that you didn’t.”

He looked at her sharply and she added, “I mean you couldn’t have helped — it was all over.”

“That’s what I thought. So I went to Michigan with a fellow and got a job in the factory there. It was furnace work. I couldn’t stand it. I had to stoke the furnaces all day — my skin cracked on me — I was half-roasted. I used to look at my hands and expect the meat to drop off of them. Then I got into some trouble there. I got taken up by some fellows who were arrested for trying to start a strike. Joan, there wasn’t a job in that factory fit for a man to live by except the gatekeeper’s job. He could stand out in the sunshine and air. The rest of us just stood ten hours a day doing one thing, stoking, riveting, hitting the same place in each car as it came along. If you were on that assembly line you couldn’t stop a minute even to breathe or straighten your back — the next car was there and you had to do your share. Another man at the furnaces with me was named Jim Dobie — he was a West Virginia fellow, and his dad had been in the coal mines. He swore he’d never go back. But he did go back and I went with him. He said at least it was cool in the mines — cool and dark. I’d stared into that fire until I thought my eyeballs would burst. I thought if I could just get into some cool dark place … but I couldn’t stand the mine. Every day I had to go down and down — into blackness.” He was twisting his grimed hands and she saw him tremble a little. A light sweat broke out about his lips and he wiped it off and went on twisting his hands. “I’d look up at the sky before I went down. Then I’d have to go down. I had to stand being in a hole in the darkness, the earth and the rocks clamping me in. I never could stand being shut in anywhere, even when I was a kid. One morning — soon after I got your last letter — I looked up like that. It was the brightest morning I’d ever seen, sunshine everywhere and the leaves all glittering yellow — everything was sunshine. And I looked up and there was a plane flying high in all that light. I just laid down my stuff and quit. I guess you won’t understand. But I quit. I said, I’ll never go down again, not if I starve, not if I never fly. At least I won’t go down again.”

“I do understand,” she said. “I understand better than I can tell you.”

“I don’t see—’” he began, and the door opened and Bart came in.

Bart stretched his hand out toward Francis heartily. “I heard downstairs you were here,” he said. Upon his square unshaved face was his aimless good-natured grin. She saw him sharply, in Francis’ astonished eyes. She saw Bart’s rough looks and heard his crude laughter, she saw his simple mind. She saw his thick nostrils and little deep-set meaningless eyes, his huge useless strength, as useless as a beast’s unless it were harnessed to some primitive tool.

Her eyes met Francis’ eyes with brave pleading.

“You see I do understand,” she said.

She had been living here on this hillside, and beyond the rim of the stable hills the world had been roaring and whirling around her, as huge and unknown as the night sky against which she had drawn the shades, lest she be lost. Francis had been caught and held in that whirling, tossed and caught and thrown up again into this one still spot. She listened to him, hour upon hour. He did not pour out talk upon her. He was too wounded for that. In fragments, in torn bits of himself, in scattered words, he let her see. They wandered into the orchard, and into the woods. They sat by the stream in the valley under the falling leaves. In the house he was completely silent, with a guarded stopped silence. But alone with her outdoors he talked, pausing often to breathe deeply, to wipe his forehead when the sweat burst out, to break off suddenly, “Well, there’s no use in going into all that.” There was nothing left in him of that willful boy, tumbling down the stairs in the sunny old manse, crashing into the dining room shouting for food, whistling noisily everywhere, planning loudly for pleasure, arguing eternally for his own way. He moved, guarded and controlled, his head bent downward a little, as though he had been walking for a long time under a roof too low for him. But from the scraps she pieced out what was whirling about this still spot of earth. In the silence of the woods where the stream slipped so softly over smooth stones that it was scarcely to be heard, she listened.

“Things are shutting down on us everywhere now. You can’t get jobs. They don’t want you. Nobody cares if you starve.”

He said, “I came near starving right there in New York City — food everywhere, restaurants full of food, shops full of food, groceries, delicatessens, wagons full of food, people sitting eating everywhere. And I was so hungry I went crazy and went up to a taxi stopped at a traffic light. There was a woman inside — an old woman. I wouldn’t have spoken to a girl. I said, ‘Would you let me go with you to any restaurant to get a meal? I’m faint with hunger.’”

“Frank!” she cried. “Why didn’t you come home?”

“What for?” he answered. “That wouldn’t help. I can’t keep coming home all my life. She wanted to give me money. She said, ‘Here’s a dollar.’”

“Oh, Frank,” Joan said.

“I wouldn’t take it. That wasn’t what I wanted. She said, ‘I’ll lend it.’ And I said, ‘I can’t pay it back.’”

“Then what?” she whispered.

“Then the light changed and the taxi went on,” he replied.

A leaf floated slowly down, upheld by the breeze, and settled upon the small placid pool. Its shadow lay, magnified through the clear water, upon a rock at the bottom.

“And?”

“I fell in with another fellow who hadn’t any job, and he took me to a joint he knew and the fellow that ran it gave us some stuff left over from what he didn’t sell — lemon pie and stuff that spoiled if he kept it.”

She was silent, staring at the shadow of the leaf, so clear, so dancing. A squirrel capered up a tree. She could see its inverted reflection in the pool.

“If you had come home—”

But he straightened himself impatiently and threw a stone into the smooth pool. It broke into a shimmer of ripples and the leaf tossed like a little ship upon the little waves.

“Don’t you see it wouldn’t matter? There’s hundreds of fellows like me, trying to catch on somewhere, hungry as hell — running home doesn’t help them. There’s got to be a place for them. Gosh, when I think of that stuff Dad used to talk — all that holy salvation stuff! Listen here — not one thing he said was ever any use to me.”

“He honestly believed—” she began, troubled.

“Yeah, and what of it?” He was snarling. She saw a hungry boy wandering along the city streets, his hat over his eyes, his body aching with hunger. “You’ve got to do something more than talk these days. Something’s got to be done, and be done damned quick! There’s a lot of us feeling like that. And I stick by them! I stick by the hungry and the fellows that can’t get jobs!”

He was shouting, his voice ringing through the quiet woods. He had sprung to his feet and she looked up at him.

“Why, Frank, you look just like Father!” she said.

He stared back at her.

“Oh, my God!” he whispered.

He dropped to the log beside her and began scuffling at the small stones.

“I mean—”

“I know what you mean,” he said bitterly. “It’s the damnedest thing, the way you can’t get rid of your ancestors!”

He fell into moody silence and she was bewildered. “Come on home to supper, anyway,” she said at last. At least today she had that to give him, food upon a table and a roof under which to sleep. She would take him home. He rose to follow her, and they stood a moment looking at the pool. It was smooth again and the little leaf was quietly sailing on a wave, sailing nowhere and the stone he had flung lay lost among the other stones at the bottom.

But here was no home for Francis, though with all her strength she sought to make it a home. She took the walls of this house and encompassed him about for his shelter. She made his bed in the attic soft with quilts and put sheets upon it for comfort, although Sam slept without sheets, and not until she came had Bart used them. But Francis should use their mother’s sheets which she had brought with her. She dragged the boxes and trunks to make a sort of room for him near the bookshelves. And at the table she plied him with food, passing him the butter, the bread, the meat, relentlessly under their eyes.

“I’ll make a pie,” she said to Bart’s mother. She had not cared before, but now she wanted to make it.

“It takes lard,” the older woman said, grudgingly.

Then Joan shamelessly made use of Bart. “Bart says he likes pie,” and when she saw Bart’s mother give way she used this means again and again. “I made a raisin pudding, Bart.” “Bart, I made cookies today — Francis, they’re the old ginger cookies, like Mother’s.” Bart ate, enchanted. “Gosh, Jo, you’re a famous cook. What’s the matter you been keeping it all to yourself?”

She smiled, her eyes on Francis. His thinness was daily growing into a slender resilient strength. When they were alone she urged him, “Eat, Frank. I want you to get your strength back.”

“Yes, I’ll take food,” he said sturdily. “I’ve got to begin again, I’ll stay until I am able to begin over.”

He was so beautiful she could not stop looking at him. His hands were free of the black of the mines now, but they were hard, clean and hard. He helped silently about the place, chopping wood and filling the box in the kitchen and in the dining room, helping her wring the clothes and hang them, carrying water to the barn. She would give him something when he went back to work, buy a new suit for him. She would coax him to take it. But now she gave him a pair of the blue jeans that Bart wore. “I’ll take your suit and clean it and press it.” She brushed and pressed the stuff with careful pleasure. It was not work to touch and clean and mend that which clothed one’s beloved. Strange how garments partook of the bodies which they clothed!

But none of this made his home. In the attic they met sometimes alone, and they knew that their only home was all that which they had shared and which was gone now. They talked long hours here together, he talking again and she still listening. She led him on to talk and now he talked more easily. His speech did not come in such wrenched, broken sentences. He was growing a little healed. But as he was healed he was restless. He was like an animal held by a wound, and one day he would be well of it and ready again to go away. But they talked always and only of him — and she wanted it so. She fended off day by day the question which she saw hanging upon his lips, daily nearer to utterance: “Joan, how did you come to do this?” She talked feverishly of himself. “What do you want to do now, Frank darling? When you get rested and ready to start again—” In the attic she poured out the names their mother used so lavishly upon them all: “darling Frank,” “dear heart,” “dearest Frank”—all the names for which she had as yet no other use — no use until her baby was born. So that she might fend off that question she talked constantly with him about himself, because in such talk he forgot her. “I want to fly,” he said, over and over. “I’ve got to fly — I can do it. If I had a chance I could do it. I feel it in myself — the power to do it. I’d know how to do it if I could just get at the controls. They wouldn’t need to tell me but just the once—”

He liked the attic. He came to it now whenever there was nothing he could do, when she was busy about the house, when they were not at meals. She found him here when she was free by the gable window, staring out into the sky, over the hills and fields. “I can almost imagine sometimes here that I’m flying,” he said. “That elm tree top just outside hides the ground. You see Joan? You look straight over it to the hills and it seems far up.”

Yes, she knew Francis must go. They were pushing him out by their silence, by their steady disapproving silence. She said, placating Bart’s father, “Let Francis shell the corn for you today.”

“I’ve shelled it myself for thirty-five years,” he said grimly.

“Francis can bring up the milk for you,” she said to Bart’s mother. “Francis and I will gather the eggs.”

“The hens don’t take to strangers,” she said, and Francis stumbled upon the dark cellar stairs and spilled the milk. “You better go and set somewhere,” she said bitterly, and cried at Joan, hastening with a cloth and a pail, “Don’t bend over — you’ll hurt yourself and I’ll have the care of you.”

No, here was no home. And he never really gave himself up to her here. For with all their talk, they never spoke of why he had gone away that day, of why she had urged him to go away and why he had eagerly gone. Part of him still hid from her.

One morning after breakfast, when he had been there less than three weeks, Sam beckoned to her with his great thumb. She followed him into the hall and he shut the door.

“You kinda follow me after a half hour or so,” he whispered to her. “I’ll be in the barn cleaning out the manure. Got something to tell you.”

“Why don’t you tell me now, Sam?” she asked, surprised. His full red face was strangely unyouthful, close to hers like this. He had already lost his front side teeth. He was not yet twenty-five.

“You’ll thank me for not telling you here,” he replied. “It’s about your brother.”

She stopped, frightened. “All right, Sam,” she said quietly.

In the kitchen, over the dishes, she searched for excuses. “I believe I’ll stir up some applesauce,” she said to Bart’s mother. “I’ll go out and pick up some corncobs to start the fire up a little.”

“I told Sam to get them last night,” the mother answered.

“He forgot,” said Joan. “I’ll tell him.”

In the barn, above the smoking manure, she heard Sam’s coarse whispering. He leaned upon the spade, his little hot eyes boldly upon her, glancing now and then at her fullness.

“I heard something last night, Jo. Never mind where I heard it, but I heard it, straight from a colored girl. She’s looking for your brother. Says he owes her something and she’s going to get it. She’s not all colored — she’s pretty near three-fourths white. Name’s Fanny. She heard he’d come back.”

“How did she hear?” Joan asked. She knew he was staring at her, but she would not seem to know. She could penetrate that shallow skull. He turned away and spaded with elaborate ease about the edge of a stall. “Oh, women like her — they got ways of knowing — they find out anything they want to find out.”

She did not speak. She stood watching his spade searching out the filth and lifting it. The stench overwhelmed her — rank, penetrating, hot. He stood in it, breathing it in and out. She turned quickly and went outside the barn, panting for the clean air.

But she was grateful for the warning, else how would she had known so swiftly what to do that next afternoon? It was a still, fair afternoon, and she had just come down from the attic. She had gone to find Francis, but when she lifted the latch he lay on the bed, his hands folded under his head, asleep. He lay very still, breathing so gently she could not hear him. Upon his face was a look of deep repose. She closed the door again, softly. Let him rest. He seemed so seldom to rest. In the close tense stillness in which he now held himself there was no rest. He had in so short a time changed all the loose gamboling ways of his youth to this controlled stillness of the body. It was as though under his clothes his body were bound in secret chains. So let him rest.

She went out into the sunshine of the afternoon. It was not late, but the sun would soon be gone. She turned westward down the road, to walk a little while, her face toward the sun. In the barn the men were milking. She could hear Bart’s voice roaring at a cow: “Stand over there, Bessy! Careful now, you—”

She set her face steadily westward.

It was then that she saw the girl coming toward her. She came up the road, walking with a sort of springy dancing step, and she had a child with her, a little boy. She had been carrying him, but when she saw Joan she set the child down in the dusty road and led him toward her.

Joan stopped, waiting, looking at the two. Of course this was Fanny. She remembered now she had seen this face, this gay careless passionate pretty face, the last time she had been at the mission with her father. This girl had been there. She remembered her wearing a thin red flowered dress through which her skin had shone, golden. The girl’s face looked up to hers, a face like a dark, petunia, the full red lips, the great dark swimming eyes, black iris, clear white, passionate eyes and mouth, smooth round dark cheeks, strong short curly black hair under a small bright red felt hat.

“Are you Frank Richards’ sister? You favor him mightily.” The girl’s voice was like honey, thick-deep, sweet.

“Yes,” Joan said — no use trying to say anything else. “I’m his sister — what do you want of him?”

“I heard he was here.”

She looked down into the black eyes. … And why should she now remember Miss Kinney, standing before the missionary meeting, talking about great eyes peering through the jungle, jungle eyes?

“He’s gone,” she lied. “He’s gone back to his job.”

“Could you kindly tell me where he is?”

“Far away — away out west.”

“Is he coming back soon?”

“No — not soon — perhaps never. He didn’t say.”

In the twilight the child suddenly began to cry softly, and the girl slapped him sharply on the cheek. “Shut up, you!” The child turned and buried his face in her skirt, and sobbed noiselessly. He was too thinly dressed and Joan saw he was shivering.

“He’s cold,” she exclaimed.

“He wouldn’t be so cold if he’d walked more instead of fretting me to carry him,” the girl said petulantly. But Joan dropped to her knees, not able to bear the child’s noiseless weeping. A little child ought not to know how to weep silently, she thought. He must have been many times afraid before he could have taught himself to weep like that.

She began to unbutton her jacket.

“I have a sweater underneath,” she said. “Let me wrap it about him.” She took off the garment and knelt upon the ground and slipped the child’s arm through the sleeves and turned them back over his hands. Without knowing it she was coaxing him, talking to him tenderly, persuading his little chilled body into the wrap. “There now, little boy! Now, this hand, now we’ll button it up warm and tight. See, I’ll put your own belt around to hold it close There … there …”

The child, won by her voice, looked at her, and she saw his face fully, near to her own. Her heart turned in her breast. Francis had been beautiful, but this child was the most beautiful she had ever seen. This little face was the face of a dream child. She stared into it, trembling, drawn, repelled. Francis, her mother, her father, her own self — all of them were there in this jungle child’s lovely face, but to them all were added the darkness, the passion, the power of the jungle.

“He’s your own brother’s child.” She heard the girl’s deep wild voice. “He put this child in me. He come and met me in the woods down by the stream and put this child in me and then he went away and left it on me. I got no way to keep him. If a man fathers a child in me, he’s got to take it or pay for it, one or other. Else I can’t make my living. And I’m wanting to settle down. I got a colored fellow will marry me if I can do something about this child. It’s your own brother’s — I can prove it.”

“Don’t tell me anything!” Joan whispered. “I believe what you say. I don’t want to know. Let me think.”

She rose to her feet and stood looking at the child. He looked back to her silently, comforted by the jacket, trying to hold his lips against quivering. From under his fabulous lashes he looked up, his eyes unearthly large. He could not possibly understand. He was too small. And yet he seemed to know his circumstances. She loved him suddenly, and she knew she could not let him go — she must keep hold of him — her mother, her father, Francis, all of them were here in this tiny body. His blood was theirs.

“If you will wait a few days,” she began, breathless, still looking down at him, “not more than a week — say a week from today — I’ll bring you a little money. I have to get it from the bank. I haven’t much, but I’ll surely help you. And I’ll think what to do — if you’ll just go home now. I’ll be here a week from today at this same time with the money. You can trust me, can’t you? My father used to preach in South End.”

“Yes, I used to hear him.” The girl laughed, a full deep laugh. “Lordy, I used to think what a conniption he’d have if he knew he was a granddad!”

Joan said, “Our parents are dead.”

“Yes, I know. The chapel’s shut up. They say it’s going to be a dance hall next summer — fellow name of Jack Weeks is going to open a beer hall there as soon as the main road’s finished — a little peakedy white fellow, but his dad’s putting up the cash. Going to open the factory again, too. The state’s working on a big new road now right through South End, and everybody says business is going to be good — we’re all going to make money.” The girl spoke eagerly, her mouth a poppy for redness in her glowing face. She was restored to good humor. “I’ve got to be gone, I guess. My fellow’s waiting down the road. He’s got a car. Well, thank you, ma’am, if you will help me. I call this child Frankie, after his pa. I call them after all their pas — the two girls, I twisted their names. Willa, I call one, and the other — Here, you take off the lady’s jacket, Frankie.”

“No — let him keep it,” said Joan. “And take care of him.” She turned and began to walk away.

“Oh, sure I will! I’m always good to them — nobody can say I’m not good to them.”

She looked after them once, quickly. That small creature was trudging along over the rough earth road. She could see her jacket warm around him, glowing through the twilight a spot of scarlet.

Oh, what had Francis done?

In the house there was the smell of wood burning in the kitchen stove. The cover had been taken from the table and in the kitchen, the men were washing. She heard Bart say, “Where’s Jo?”

“Upstairs, I guess,” his mother answered. “I’ve had no help from her tonight, I know.”

But she tiptoed through the room and went straight upstairs to the attic. Francis was still asleep. No, he was not asleep. He was lying awake, and he had lighted the candle on the box.

“That you?” he asked.

“Yes,” she said. She came over and sat on his bed. She had no time to waste. In a few minutes Bart would be shouting for her.

“Francis,” she began and stopped. “Francis — there was a girl here this afternoon — from South End — looking for you. I met her on the road.”

She felt his body gather and grow tense. “She was here, looking for me?”

“Yes — but I knew before.”

“You knew?”

“Yes.”

They were both whispering. He sat up. “If you knew, why didn’t you tell me?”

“I couldn’t — you didn’t tell me.”

“I wanted to get away. … Damn her, she used to say she’d find me wherever I went. That’s why I couldn’t come back home. Thought I was safe here. How’d she know? I haven’t stirred out. I haven’t seen anybody.”

“She heard somehow.” He did not ask of the child.

“I’ve got to go away now.”

“But why are you afraid of her, Frank?”

“I’m not afraid of her — she’s only a whore. You can’t understand.”

“Then what are you afraid of, Frank? I could help, you know. I’ll think of some way to help.”

“You can’t help — you don’t know.” He began picking at the old tufted quilt he had put over his knees. “You — I’m not afraid of her—it’s myself—you can’t understand. I’m spoiled, see? I’m afraid of — wanting to go back to her. I–I’m not decent. I — want her — a woman like her. You don’t know. I don’t know what’s the matter with me. I make myself sick. I want her and then I’m sick. I’m sick. I’m sick when I remember her — other women like her — but I want her. It’s the only kind I can — can want. I can’t get away from it — I want to get away, but I can’t.”

But he did not speak of the child. He did not know of the child. He must never know about the child. … “Me in a coal mine, Joan, wanting to fly!”

“Jo!” Bart’s voice shouted up the stairs. “Time to eat!”

“You shall get away — poor Frank, you shall get away!” she promised. Somehow, she could do it, she said to herself fiercely. She could do what ought to be done.

She rode over them all. Bart, astonished, cried, “But you don’t know how to even get around in the city! You’ll get lost — and I can’t go with you right now. We’re butchering this week — don’t know if Sam could go, even.”

“I don’t want anybody. Frank knows the way there and I can get back.”

She forced her own will ruthlessly.

“You’re near your time. You might be took,” Bart’s mother said. New York! It was a hundred miles away. She knew all about it and she wouldn’t go there for anything, and never had. Things happened there. You could read about it in the newspaper. Everybody said—

“I’ll be all right,” said Joan. “I have more than three weeks to go.”

“You can’t tell so near,” the woman fretted.

“Dr. Crabbe says so,” she answered with composure.

“How can he tell? Can’t anybody tell exactly when a woman takes.”

She did not answer. She went on wiping the table, putting away dishes, sweeping the crumbs, planning. She was going with Frank herself. She was going to find Roger Bair herself this time and tell him about Frank. She could do it.

“It’s not decent for a woman in your fix to go among a lot of men strangers.” Bart’s mother was watching her from the stove.

She turned on her. “You mean it’s a shame for a woman to have a child?”

“No,” the other woman said, embarrassed. She was wiping out the zinc-lined sink and she did not look up. “It’s not shame — not after the birth. But before, a decent woman doesn’t show herself.”

“I do,” said Joan. “I don’t care — I’m proud.” She was triumphant over this house now, triumphant over their silence, over their stubbornness.

“You going to New York?” said Bart’s father at the dinner table. He shot his eyebrows over his eyes at her.

“Yes, I’m going,” Joan cried.

He grunted and filled his mouth with bread.

“Bring me back something, Sis,” said Sam, grinning. He had finished his food and was picking at his black nails with the tines of his fork.

She saw Francis look at him and then stare down into his plate. He ate doggedly, saying nothing. But after the meal he hung about her as she worked. “Don’t come,” he muttered. “It doesn’t matter about me. I’ll find something. There are lots of fellows like me — I’ll go on away again.”

“We’re going tomorrow,” she said cheerfully. “I’ve always wanted to see New York.”

But of New York she never remembered anything. She stayed by Francis closely, getting off the train, going down into subways, going up into elevated trains, walking along the streets that were swaying with crowds. He seemed to know his way, going on with certainty from one place to another. She looked at the faces flying past her, a glimpse at this face, a glimpse at another, before they passed. It was as though they were all whirling about her and Francis, and only they two seemed to have direction.

Or were they lost, too? Once in a subway, deep underground, he took her hand. “Don’t you get lost,” he said.

“I shan’t lose you,” she promised him, holding fast.

They climbed at last into a bus. “Now,” said Francis, “we are nearly there.” He sat down beside her. “There isn’t any hope, you know, Joan. It’s nonsense. He won’t remember me — he doesn’t know you.” His face was bleak in the early morning.

“Are you sure this is the time he will be there?” she asked. She did not answer his despair. She would do anything. All these houses and people — she was not afraid of any of them.

“Yeah,” he said listlessly. “I looked up the plane schedule. He comes the same time he used to. I was always there to see him come in and take off. He’ll be there unless he’s dead. He’s nuts about his plane.”

“Then I’ll see him,” she said tranquilly. “I brought enough money along. Even if I have to buy a ticket and ride somewhere in his plane, I’ll see him.”

The flying field was as big as the whole farm laid smooth. She had never seen so wide and smooth a place. She had never seen a plane before, except as it flew, a bird among birds, in the sky. But then it was impossible, gazing at that far shape as she stood alone upon a hillside, impossible to believe that it contained in its body human beings. Only its purposefulness seemed guided and human. Birds fluttered and swerved, dipped and soared and drifted in dreaming circles. But a plane went straight to its desire.

They were walking across the level field.

“Here’s his plane,” said Francis.

She forgot to look at Francis — she did not hear the eagerness of his voice. She was staring at the great plane. It was enormous, more huge than her imagination of it. She gazed at it, forgetting everything else, herself, her life. All her wonder was held in this shining shape of silvery metal, seeming to touch the earth so delicately, seeming to spurn it, its wings forever outspread ready for instant flight, its never-folding wings.

But out of the wonder someone was speaking to her. “What do you see?” She looked up at a man taller even than she was — it was strange to look higher than herself — she was always taller than everybody. He looked down at her, a man in a khaki shirt and breeches, a visored cap on his head. Under the cap his face was lean and hewn, the cheeks flat, the eyes bold and blue.

“It’s the plane,” she said. “I’ve never seen anything so beautiful before. It’s — it’s concentration — the clean shape — it’s the very shape of flight — it’s motion put into shape.”

She turned her head. She stared at the plane dreamily in ecstasy. She was thinking. I’m glad I saw this before my baby is born. I’m glad I have this to go into his last making.

She was recalled again by the man’s voice. “Are you a passenger? Are you going?”

“Oh, no,” she said quickly. “I couldn’t — I have to go home — I came here with my brother. He wants to fly.” She looked around for Francis and saw him standing a little way off, twisting his hat in his hands. “There he is! Wait — perhaps you could tell us where to find Roger Bair. He’s the pilot.”

Francis came up to her and caught her words.

“But, Joan,” he whispered.

The man smiled. “I’m Roger Bair!”

“Are you?” she cried, and laughed aloud. When she looked at his face now she saw very clearly the straight brow and nose, the deep lines from mouth to chin, the brown weathered skin. It was impossible to tell how old he was from his face, and the cap hid his hair. But his eyes were blue, a clear imperial blue. Looking up in the morning light she seemed to be looking through his face to the sky, his eyes were so blue.

A young man in overalls came up panting. “All right, sir — she’s ready.”

“All right — I’m ready. Look here”—his eyes came back to Joan’s face—“what’s this about your brother?”

“I’ve always wanted to fly, sir!” Francis said quickly.

“I seem to remember your face,” the man said, looking at him.

“I worked here a little while.”

“Ground crew?”

“No, sir. I never got that far. I was just a sort of extra. Then they cut down their men. It was after an accident, I guess, and they took off some planes.”

Roger Bair looked from one to the other of them. They were both beseeching him. “Look here,” he said hurriedly to Francis, “I’m not a potentate. I don’t know what I can do about jobs. But — you feel about this plane like she does?” He looked at Francis and nodded toward Joan.

“Yes, sir,” said Francis. He wet his dry lips and looked steadfastly back at this god who could deliver him.

“All right. Show up here two days from now at this same time and I’ll see what I can do. Now I must go—” He turned to Joan and his face wrinkled deeply into the warmest smile she had ever seen. “Some day you’ll fly with me.”

“Shall I?” She smiled back at him. It was impossible, seeing him, not to let her smile respond to his, and not to believe him.

“Yes!” he shouted confidently. He was already running. Now he was in the plane, and she could not see him.

The steps were drawn away, the door closed, and the great roaring creature moved to mount into the air with the heavy lightness of an eagle. She stood, not knowing that any soul was near, watching him fly higher and higher to disappear into the far mists of the morning. He was gone. Without a word she followed Francis and he put her on the train.

“You’ll be all right now,” she said.

“Yes,” he said. “I’ll be all right.”

She was going back, alone again. But she had those words, like a token, like a flower left in her hands. “Some day you’ll fly with me.” Anything was possible, as long as life lasted. Her heart flew dancing out of her breast and gamboled among the shining clouds, following him merrily. I believe I shall, she thought. She held the corners of her mouth into a smile, because she could have laughed in sheer exaltation and delight. Beauty! The world was full of it. Her face lit and sparkled, but she said nothing at all. She let her pure pleasure flow through fields and villages. She thought of him in purest pleasure, remembering him, shaping the memory, holding fast in her mind the movement of his body, the lines of his face, the color of his eyes. And there was, for life in the image, the memory of his smile.

The house was dark and close. To come back to this house, its closed windows, its empty rooms, the small huddled dining room, the kitchen where the men washed, where the food was prepared, where they sat more and more about the iron range now that winter was closing in, was to burrow into the earth. She could never forget, so long as she lived, that wide smooth field, the light of the rising sun, the shining silvery lifted plane. And Roger Bair was a part of it, the embodiment of that morning, just as Bart was the embodiment of these backbreaking fields, this earthy life filled with nothing but the work for food to eat, food forced from the earth, washed, cooked, eaten.

For here they spent their days in getting and eating the food. They went to bed early, exhausted, and slept like beasts, soddenly, heavily. They rose at dawn to get their food again. And they thanked God for this. It was the life of moles, burrowing through the sullen earth. They never lifted their eyes from earth to sky. The seasons were for the fruitation of their crops for food. Snow might fall but there was no beauty in it. It was a cause for anger if it fell too long; if it fell too lightly, the wheat suffered. Spring was measured not by bloodroot in the woods and arbutus under the brown leaves around the roots of an old oak, but by the frost upon the fruit trees, and summer was cursed by insects on the potatoes and the beans, by storms too harsh for corn and ripening grain, and autumn was gloomy with a harvest too scanty. They were bound into the earth, mind and body, and their souls were never lifted. When the old man prayed, he pulled God down to earth.

But sometimes she heard a far rushing sound and then she ran out, though the wind were bitter from the north, and looked up into the clouds to search in that distance for the diving shining shape. Sometimes she found it, glittering like a daytime shooting star. Sometimes it was lost in cloud and she would only hear it passing. But she could always imagine it was the plane beside which she had stood, into which he had climbed. She could imagine it, and so make it a light in her darkness, and he was there, a companion in her loneliness. And, she argued to excuse her dreaming, if she thought about him the baby might grow a little like him perhaps. Surely dreams were not wrong, not if there was nothing else, especially not if her hands went on doing their duty day after day.

She came, as winter drew near, to spend more and more time in the attic, high among the treetops. She sat there often while the swift evening fell, gazing out of the gabled window, hearing the city branches crack as they swayed about her. Was the plane flying, she wondered, through these frosty clouds? … Francis had his job, he wrote her.

Roger Bair had been very kind. He was going to be taught to fly some day. He was learning everything about the plane. If he got there early in the morning, Roger Bair taught him things. He always was there early and he always was there when Roger Bair came in … She sat in the stillness of the attic. Francis was safe now. She could take her mind from Francis. Down in the earth, in this house, buried among these hills, she could remember the sky and that clean springing soaring shaft of flight into the sky.

When the attic grew dark, as it did early these days, she curled for warmth into the quilts where Francis had slept. She had left his bed as it was, and now it was a place for her. For she could not sleep with Bart now. She was restless with him, and it was no slight restlessness of the body. This was a restlessness which fell upon her like a sickness that first night of her return. She was afraid of this increasing restlessness. In the night she drew far from him, lest she touch him, even inadvertently. At first she lay far from him, grateful for the width of the old bed, so that in his sleep he might not fling his heavy arm unknowingly upon her. Then one night she crept in the darkness to the attic bed, and there alone fell instantly into deep sleep. He found her there, astonished, angry. She woke the second time to see him in the doorway in the woolen underwear he wore at night as well as in the day.

“What’d you come up here for?” he cried resentfully, staring at her over the lighted candle he held. “What’s the matter with you anyway these days?”

“I’m restless,” she answered. “The baby’s so near.” Her conscience stirred. She would have been restless without the baby. This was another restlessness. Then her courage welled up strongly. She would make a life. She was not afraid of Bart. She went on calmly, her heart thudding, “I shall sleep here as often as I like, Bart. I’m going to do whatever is best for the baby now. I’ve got to think of him.”

He stared at her over the candle. The upward light threw into relief his thick stubborn jaw, his wide coarse dry lips, the broad base of his nose. The forehead and the small grayish eyes receded into shadow.

“I have my rights,” he muttered. “You got to give me my rights.”

“I’m staying here,” she said. She must speak very plainly to him. He understood nothing else but the straightest, plainest speech. “I’m staying here as long as it’s best for the baby.” She turned over and closed her eyes. Her heart was beating very hard and she must still it. This sickness, this fearful repulsion, must not go into the making of her baby. She must think of other things, lovely things. She would think of the sky and of the driving silver stars. She lay waiting until she heard him stumble down the stairs and until she heard the door slam. Then she leaped from her bed and searched the sky. But there were no stars. Outside was the deep darkness.

She went on the day she had promised toward the bend of the road where she was to meet Fanny. It was a sullen day, the snow drifting from smooth, frigid gray clouds. She had brought some money. For the present she would bring a little money each week, but soon she must think of some way to earn more. She held it in her hand, the precious stuff. It could not be more precious to Fanny than it was to her. She would tell Fanny she had only a very little and her own child coming. But Fanny was not there. She waited a while, gazing over the bleak hills, not daring to leave too soon. She walked up and down until she was cold, so cold that the child within her felt still and cold, and she grew afraid for him. Troubled, she resolved she would come again the next week, on the same day. She searched the whitening landscape, the bitter wind tearing at her coat, at her hair. But there was no living creature in sight. The road wound emptily into the distance. She turned and went back to the house.

Before the week was gone, on Christmas Eve, her child was born. She had made this year no mockery of preparation for Christmas. Her mother was three years dead. She remembered and put away the memory. Another year there would be a reason for Christmas, a little child for whom to make gifts and cut a tree and trim it. And then in the twilight, the birth began.

But she had the child so easily that it was like a gift. She had been ready for any pain. She remembered scraps of whispers here and there through her years of girlhood — her mother, hurrying in sometimes in the early morning, pale but cheerful, to be at the breakfast table, “Yes, dear, I am a little tired. I was at the Watsons’ most of the night. They have a dear little baby girl.” Later, neighbors running in, she could hear, when she was dusting in the hall, her mother’s lowered voice. “Dr. Crabbe sent for me. No, things didn’t go just right, but she pulled through. It’s a miracle the child was saved. What? Yes, she suffered agonies! If only the child is all right — you know what I mean. You never can tell—”

Once Hannah said primly, “I’ve never married, but there are rewards. I’ve been spared some agonies, anyway.”

She had been ready for agonies, though Dr. Crabbe had said, “You’re made for this job, Joan — measurements perfect! Don’t often see a woman like that these days — spindly lot, living off pineapple and spinach and looking like yellow wax beans!”

Yes, the child had come like a gift. In the afternoon of Christmas Eve she was in the attic, looking out of the gable window at a deep orange sunset sky. She had had the premonition of pain, and recognized it instantly. She laid herself upon the bed and waited and almost at once the rhythm of pain began. She went downstairs and called Bart.

“Go for Dr. Crabbe,” she said. To Bart’s mother she said quietly, “My time’s come. I’m going to be in the attic in my own bed.”

“You’re not going to give birth in the attic!” Bart’s mother cried. “Folks will talk! My son’s wife lying in the attic like hired help!”

“Who will know?” she answered quietly from the stairs. She wanted her baby born there among the tree-tops, high above the earth. She had been preparing for him there. His little clothes were there in the tray of the round-topped trunk, and the few things Dr. Crabbe had told her to have ready.

“The doctor will tell,” Bart’s mother cried up the stairs after her. “It will be a shame to us! And if I have to fetch and carry for you, it will be extra steps. There’s enough work as it is.”

“Bart will sleep better,” Joan answered, and heard no answer.

In the attic she made ready. She made everything ready to the measure of the rhythm of pain now quickening its swifter and swifter paces. When its beat brought the sweat upon her forehead and her upper lip, and the palms of her hands were wet, she laid herself upon her bed and stared straight into the rafters, gathering herself for each crisis of the pain. Soon Dr. Crabbe would be here. He had said, “Five hours, perhaps, since it is the first time.” Three hours were gone. He would be here at any moment. She could almost catch the rumble and racket of Bart’s old car. God send he would drive carefully! He was so absurdly proud of driving that he scorned to be careful. Like a child he boasted, “Look at me pass that fellow!”

Don’t think about Bart! This was something she was doing alone. She was having her own child, her first child, the first of many children. Children were to fill her life, all her little children. Now her life was really beginning. She had waited so long for her life to begin. The pain gathered in her, deep, immense, pulling every fiber of her body into a focus of bright pain. Why did people say pain was dark and dull? If one let pain come free — like this — like this — letting it possess the body, letting it gather and mount and soar, it was bright, a shape of edged beauty, acute and clear, rising, tingling, flying upward into purest feeling — a winged body, mounting, soaring into the sky. Above her was the sky, black, deep, soft, a blackness for pain to shine against, to pierce — to pierce and rend and tear.

Something broke in her, her very being gushed forth. She might have been terrified at this melting and flowing. But she was not afraid. By body’s sense she knew this was right. Then, almost immediately, the child was born. She gave one great involuntary cry, a cry mingled with the child’s first cry. There were footsteps and Dr. Crabbe’s voice roared up the steep stairs. She saw his curly grayish head rising at the door. “My God, Joan!” he rumbled, hurrying, stumbling. She was smiling, panting, saying over and over, “Dr. Crabbe — Dr. Crabbe—”

He was bustling, hurrying, cursing. But she had everything ready. He was there instantly at work, grumbling at her, grinning. “Had to be forehanded, didn’t you? Damn these capable women anyway! It’ll be a pretty kind of world for the profession if women go having their babies by themselves — and it’s about all that’s left for me to do nowadays — nobody getting sick much and old Mrs. Kinney, still hanging on. It’s a biggish baby, Joan — a boy!”

All Christmas day she lay upon her bed under the rafters in the deep quietness. Beside her lay the child. She would never be lonely again, never. Her body had divided and made this second self. She was contented as she had never known content. It was body content, content of instinct. Mind did not stir, heart slumbered. But the womb had fulfilled itself richly and she slept and the child slept. Twice she woke, once at Bart’s heavy tread, catching upon the stairs. “Dang these stairs — here’s your food, Jo.”

“Thank you, Bart.” She was hungry and she ate while he sat waiting, tipping back on his chair. He had stared curiously at the baby once. “Most as big as a calf,” he had said, grinning. She did not answer. He had nothing to do with her child.

“Looks like snow,” he remarked.

“Does it?” she said. She looked at the window. Yes, the sky was softly, deeply, evenly gray. He took her bowl and spoon and clattered heavily down the stairs. The clatter was scarcely gone before she slept again. She woke once to find Dr. Crabbe gazing down at her. “Sleep, girl,” he had murmured. “That’s right. Sleep deeply. Everything’s fine — nothing for me to do. I’ll be getting back before the snow gets any heavier. It’s six inches already.”

Snow — it was snowing, then. She was glad. Fanny wouldn’t come through the snow. She was safe. She and the baby were safe under this roof. The snow was covering them, warming them, giving them its shelter. She slipped deeper into her covers and felt the body of the child, warm, robust, sleeping. The child was here. She returned into her sleep.

Surely this child was the best child that was ever born. He lay for hours in the rough little cradle she had found under the eaves. She had taken an old pillow and cleaned it and made it into a mattress and cut up two of her mother’s linen sheets into small sheets, and she made a tiny pillow and edged it with the fine crocheted lace upon her mother’s wedding petticoat. The petticoat was in the round-topped trunk and there she found it, yellowed and scarcely worn, and very fine. Her mother had been an only child and her wedding clothes had been fine, and she had had good linen, though her father had been poor — a professor of Latin in a little Southern university. She scarcely ever talked about her father and mother, because they had died close together the last year before Joan was born. There was no home to go to anymore — no home to take her baby and show her off. She used to say, “I did so want to show you to my mother, Joan. You were the loveliest baby, and she loved babies. It was so hard not to have her see you.”

Yes, it was hard. Looking at her own baby, Joan cried out in her heart, “I wish I could show him to her. I wish she could see him, somehow. Maybe she does see him.”

But even if she saw him from some far heaven of the dead it was not enough. She wanted to cry out to her mother, “Look at his little hands and feet! See how quietly he lies. I believe he will have curly hair. Isn’t his hair the goldenest gold?”

She wanted to hear her mother’s voice, eager, excited, agreeing, praising, “The loveliest baby, darling! I always knew you would have lovely babies.”

But there was only silence, and she sitting alone by the crib holding his plump, passive little hand. He was so good. He would lie letting her hold his hand or cuddle him to her. It did not matter how firmly she strained him to her, he never cried. He ate and slept and never cried when she put him down. He lay in his crib, staring at the rafters, breathing gently, slowly. He was so quiet, so silent. Even Bart’s mother said grudgingly, “He’s pretty good. But I declare I don’t see the use of washing out his diapers every time they’re a mite wet. The soap jar’s nearly empty again. It’s a chore to make soap, too.”

She grew strong quickly and went downstairs. Everything was exactly the same and yet it was all different now that her baby was born. This was her home. She was rooted here now.

“Seems to me it’s about time you was moving into your right bed again,” said Bart to her one night. She was putting away his blue shirts she had just ironed. He was in bed, ready to sleep.

She was suddenly breathless. “The baby would disturb you, Bart.”

“He doesn’t make any noise,” said Bart grumpily from the bed. He was watching her, the thickened look creeping about his lips and nostrils. She hastened a little and then remembered. She was not afraid. She did not answer. She put away Bart’s heavy shoes and hung up his work garments. “Shall I open the window, just a little?” she said quietly.

“No,” he grunted from the bed. “It’s as cold as sin outside.”

“Then good night,” she said. She blew out the lamp quietly and escaped him in the darkness.

She climbed the attic stairs and made ready for bed. In the cradle the baby lay sleeping. She threw open the window wide and felt the clean icy air rush in upon them. I’ll keep him where I can open the windows, she thought. He’s going to live up here with me.

She lay there in the keen darkness, awake, the cold air coming and going, an energy in her blood against sleep.

She was perfectly strong again. The baby was three weeks old. Dr. Crabbe said he wouldn’t come anymore — she didn’t need him.

“You never needed me anyway, darn you,” he said affectionately, accusing her. “You’ve got health enough in you to heal any sickness.” Yes, she was strong — strong enough for anything, strong against anybody.

Echoing at the edges of her thought was Fanny’s voice. Fanny might come any day. The heavy snows were melting. She must get word to Fanny. That little dark child belonged to her, too. She must do something, she must think what to do. But now she would know, she was so strong. Things came to her when she was strong like this.

And next day she thought of how to get word to Fanny. She met Sam on the small back stairs and waited for him. The stair was too narrow for passing. As she waited for his clumping step, waited for his rough grinning face to pass her, she thought of it. There was a look on his face, a look she hated and would not see. He could not see any woman without that look. But she could use even that. “Sam,” she whispered, “will you do something for me?”

“Sure,” he said. He clamped his hand heavily upon her shoulder and patted it. She did not flinch. “Do you see Fanny sometimes?”

He dropped his hand and his grin widened. “Now you’re trying to find out something.”

“No, no,” she said quickly. “I only want you to tell her something for me — tell her that I’m ready to do what I said.”

“What did you say?”

She fenced him off. “Now you are trying to find out something.”

“Yes,” he parried. His hand was heavy on her shoulder again. “I got you.”

“No more than I have you,” she said smoothly. “I would tell your father, you know.”

His hand was dead on her shoulder. The grin was stricken from his face. “You wouldn’t!” he whispered.

“No, of course not!” She laughed, sick within herself. “Of course I won’t say a word. You will tell her, won’t you, Sam?”

“Sure, I’ll tell her,” he said. “I’ll tell her — I’ll tell her tonight maybe—”

She went upstairs and took the baby from the cradle and rocked him against her, sick, sick. She must remember that little dark angelic face. What she did was for him — for them all.

She looked at the baby. He was so fair, his eyes blue like her father’s. I’ll call him Paul, after Father, she thought. She had not known what to call him. Once she had asked Bart suddenly, “Do you like the name Roger, Bart?”

“What for?” he had asked stupidly.

“For the baby.”

“I don’t know,” he had answered, pondering. “We had a sorrel horse named Roger. Pop sold him because he wouldn’t go in a team. He’d rear and pitch if he was put with another horse.”

No, she thought, looking at the child’s broad pale forehead and wide blue eyes, Roger didn’t suit him. Roger meant someone else. Paul — she named him Paul.

“Shall we call the baby Paul?” she said brightly at the supper table.

They looked up at her out of the silence. Whenever she spoke they looked at her astonished, unable to comprehend at once what she said, since she did not speak of the things of which they were thinking — the field just sown, a horse to be shod, the pig’s litter. Then Sam spoke. “Paul — it’s all right, isn’t it? Pop will like it.”

“It’s short and handy,” said Bart.

“They can’t nickname it when he goes to school,” said Bart’s mother.

The old man waited, his jaws full of dry bread. He swallowed hard and gulped the skim milk. “It’s a good Gospel name,” he said.

“Then it will be Paul,” said Joan. She smiled. It would have been Paul anyway.

She had often dreamed in the silence of this house of children’s voices, of the chatter and singing, of the shouting and laughter. The house would be full of lovely sound when a child was born. Even a child’s lusty crying would be good to hear.

But Paul was so still. He never cried. Not unless he were hurt and in physical pain would he cry. She waited for the sounds of bubbling laughter, of cries and little angers. Frank, she remembered, searching her memory, had been always bubbling and cooing and roaring with laughter or crying. But Paul was still. She coaxed him with singing and prattle and smiles. But he stared back at her quietly, his face grave, his blue eyes wandering from her face. She held him in her arms and shook him in play and he bore it patiently. The most he ever gave her was one day when she touched his cheek with her finger and moved it about his chubby jaw, his lips. Then for an instant he smiled, as though she had touched some nerve or muscle. But when she cried out in delight, it was over. When she took her finger away, the smile was gone. It was like a ripple when a finger is trailed in water. She could not be sure it was a smile.

She wrote to Rose. “Does David laugh and smile? Does he make sounds?” Rose replied, surprised, “You forget David is nearly a year old. He is trying to talk. He is very delicate and he has been ill so much, too.” She sent a small photograph of a grave little boy, held by a cheerful dark-faced Chinese woman. She studied the small shape. It was a delicate face, a thin body held very straight. The eyes looked out, intense, tragic, and the mouth was pursed into some rebellion. Her heart rushed to him. If I had him I’d build him up, she thought. He needs good food — he ought to get out of that climate. She went and picked Paul up from his crib. He was beautiful. She took pride in his size and health. His body was fat and solid, the dimpled hands chubby, his thighs broad and well-fleshed, his cheeks scarlet and his lips apple-red. But he was so lazy.

“Lazy, lazy!” She laughed at him and nuzzled her face into the fragrant creases of his neck. “Sit up, lazybones! It’s time you were sitting up!”

But when she took her hand away from his back he fell against her, softly, effortlessly, and leaned upon her. “You don’t try,” she scolded him. Then, sick with her love for him, she held him against her. Children were not all the same, she thought, cuddling him. Not all children could be the same. And he was so dear to hold, a lovely baby to hold, leaning in her arms, willing to be held.

“David is so independent,” Rose wrote. “He is so difficult to keep in bed when he is ill. He is a very difficult child to control.”

She kissed Paul’s soft whitish hair under her chin. Against her bosom he lay, his full pink cheek pressed against her breast. He did not cry even to be fed. It was as though he did not know her bosom lay there beneath his cheek. His lips never went seeking. He was like a pretty, plump doll. She held him to her firmly.

“Not all children can be the same,” she said.

And after a while after the winter was passed and spring came again, he began to hold his head up a little and to reach sometimes for the toys she made him — a red dog she sewed, a green rabbit. Perhaps if his toys were bright he would see them better. He would reach for them and hold them and soon they would drop from his hands and he would not miss them. She ran to pick them up for him, to play with them for him, to coax his hands to hold them.

One windy April day she took him outdoors, and above the gusty wind she heard a steady roar. She looked up quickly to see the plane driving through the huge white clouds, flashing across the blue between. “Look, look,” she cried to Paul. She held him up, and with her hand under his chin she forced his gaze upward. And if by any chance Roger Bair was there, so high above her, would he look down and see a woman holding a child up to him? But Paul’s eyes could not catch the swiftly moving shape.

“Look, Mother’s boy! See, darling!” she cried. But his eyes slipped away quickly. She followed them. At what was Paul looking? He seemed not to look seeingly at anything, his gaze as silent as his voice.

But the silence was not as it was before his coming. It was not empty silence, not lonely silence in the house. He was there, growing, eating, sleeping. He was there to be carried in her arms. She carried him in the spring to the woods and made him a bed upon soft old leaves and he lay in the warming sun while she found bloodroot and violets and she carried him into the orchard and saw him seraphic beneath the blossoms, his cheeks pink too, his hair a fluffed gold, his eyes blue. She must have him everywhere. When he was awake, she propped him in pillows near her while she worked. When he slept, she ran to see if he still breathed.

Nothing else was real. Bart was surly with her these days. “I’m still nursing him, Bart,” she said steadily. “I’m not willing — not until I’ve finished nursing him anyway.” Bart glanced at her often from underneath his thick red brows. He tried to catch hold of her awkwardly when she happened to pass him. But she made her body tense and cold against him and he let her go. Once his mother said to her, a faded pink in her cheeks and red staining the folds of her neck, “If you take care, you don’t need to keep Bart waiting till the baby’s done nursing.” Joan was ironing one of Paul’s little dresses and at the words she turned her head quickly back to her work. Bart had complained of her.

“I can tell you what you can do,” the voice came again from beside the stove — halting, thick with embarrassment. “I can tell you what my own mother told me. She said to me the day I married Abram—‘a man can always spit outside the pot’—that’s what she told me.”

Joan went on steadily … Now run the iron along that tiny tuck, now along the fine edge of lace. She folded the little dress and for a moment lifted her eyes to the window and gazed into the maple trees. They were summer green, the fresh young leaves now fully grown. A little wind moved among them and stirred the clear green shadows and the branches showed for a moment, dark and smooth. She knew the branch shape of every tree. On winter mornings she had lifted her gaze to them, bare against a gray sky, or standing noble under snow, statues in the storm. She did not answer. She could not answer with this sickness in her. Let her think of lovely things, of the ferns in the rocks of the wall, of the lilies growing under the trees. But what she saw against the inner curtain of her brain was a man’s face, Roger Bair’s face, thin and finely drawn upon her brain. And she knew she could never go back to Bart now. She picked up the pile of dresses and climbed the back stairs to the attic and put them away in the round-topped trunk, the smell of their newly ironed freshness warm in her nostrils. She went over to the crib and looked down at the child. He was lying awake and he looked back at her. “Paul,” she whispered. “Paul.” All her lonely being rushed out and laid hold upon this child. “Speak to me,” she whispered, “your mother—”

He was nearly eight months old. She fell upon her knees and wrapped her arms about him and lifted his head in her hand. She forced a smile to her lips and nodded her head to him to draw his wandering eyes back to her face. They came wavering back to her at last, the great beautiful blue eyes. For a moment they met her eyes fully, for a moment before they slipped again. For that moment she looked down into their depths, caught and plumbed them and stared down into them. They were empty. He could not answer her because he did not know her. She held him rigidly a moment, terrified, and then laid him gently down. Something was wrong with Paul. It was as though when she laid him down he was gone away forever. She went to the window and stood there. She had a fantasy that somewhere a little boy had tiptoed away and closed the door and left her alone again.

It began to come to her in the early dawn that perhaps the real Paul had never been born at all. She sat holding him, holding his body to which she had given birth. She had sat holding him all night. She could not bear to lay him in his crib. She must have his warm body in her arms at least. It’s like holding him dead, she thought. It’s holding my dead child. Paul is dead.

In the early morning she heard Bart’s footsteps on the stairs. He stumbled upon the threshold and caught himself. “Say, where did you put those blue shirts I had last summer? I’ve got to make hay today and I’ll roast at best.” He saw her face bent over the child. “Kid sick?” he asked. He came over and took the child’s hand in his great hand. The small plump white hand lay there in his lined, grimy palm.

“Bart,” she said, “there’s something wrong with this child.” She forced every word slowly.

But Bart grinned. “He looks all right — not fevered — hand’s cool as a cucumber.”

“He doesn’t know me — he doesn’t sit up alone.”

“He’s too little,” Bart said.

“No, he’s not. Rose says David sat up long before this.”

“Kids aren’t the same. You fuss too much, Jo. Sam was sort of slow, I remember, but he turned out all right. Give him time. Here, kid—” He put his thick finger under Paul’s chin and tickled him. A slow vague smile came to the small lips. “Sure, you’re all right, aren’t you? Say, Jo, I wish you’d come and get me those shirts. Pop’s yelling to start on the hay.”

“All right, Bart.”

But then it was good to stir, to have to move and do something, to know the night was ended. She laid the child down upon the bed. After the shadows of night it was good to feel the stairs beneath her feet, to open drawers, to feel solid stuff in her hands, solid, coarse, everyday stuff.

She found the shirts and gave them to Bart. She went downstairs and busied herself about the kitchen. The sun was tipping the horizon and light spilled from it like shining water. In the barnyard across the road Sam was harnessing the horses, forcing them backward into the traces. Their great heads towered over him, snorting, protesting. The cows were coming in a solemn procession out of the gate and turning down the road to the pastures, lush with the full-grown grass. Behind them was Bart’s father, his shoulders bent beneath the weight of a full milk bucket in each hand. She fetched a cup and went to meet him to dip up the new milk. The old man watched her, grudging, silent, and went on his way into the cellar.

She stood drinking the milk in the sunshine. Within her was the waiting darkness of the night, to which she must return. But just for this moment it was morning. The trees, the hills, the sky were real. She stood among them in the morning. The night was behind her and before her, but here was morning. She looked upward to the sky, quickly, searching. It was a habit now to search the sky. But it was empty, high, above her, serene and blue.

“When did Bart begin to talk?” she asked his mother, when Paul was well past a year old. For these many months she had spent her every moment watching Paul, measuring him, testing all his powers. Did he hear her when she called him? Yes, he turned his head slowly when she called. Did he see? Yes, his eyes followed the red flannel dog if she moved it slowly enough. Would he put out his hand to take it? Yes, he took it, but he let it fall. He did not remember that he had it.

Bart’s mother stirred the sauce made from the sweet apples. She used sweet apples for sauce so that sugar could be spared. “There’s enough sugar in food natural,” she said. “Folks shouldn’t want to keep eating sugar. It’s a flesh pander.”

Sam and Bart both bought cheap candy, secretly, like little boys, and ate it as men drink liquor, starved for sweetness. Bart’s pockets were sticky with the stuff when Joan washed his garments.

“Bart?” said his mother vaguely. “Oh, I don’t know — he was kind of late. He didn’t really talk before he was five, I guess. I remember some pestering neighbor woman came in one day when he was three and said it was funny he didn’t talk yet. But I always said he’d talk when he got ready to, and he did.” She stirred and tasted the stuff. “Em had a girl who never did talk, though. She had a fall, they always said. She never was just right. They got her put away finally. Em couldn’t do with her around when she was grown up — she’d act queer before folks.”

On a spring morning she waited for Fanny under the oak tree around the bend and when they came, she took Frankie’s hand and said, “Look at me, Frankie.” He looked up at her instantly, fully, his eyes directed into hers, knowing, intelligent.

“When did he talk, Fanny?”

“Who — him? That child? He talked as soon as he walked, I reckon — he wasn’t a year old before he was talking.”

“He’s very quiet,” she said.

“He talks when he wants to,” Fanny said indifferently. “And can he sing! Sing, Frankie!”

He dropped her hand then, and clasping his hand behind him, he opened his mouth so wide she could see his rosy red tongue and small white teeth, and he began to sing. His voice came out clear and full and unchildlike. “I’m singing with a sword in my hand, O Lord,” he sang fervently, swaying from side to side. She listened in silence until he finished. In the tree above them a bird began to twitter madly.

“Here,” she said to Fanny, giving her the dollar she had now been giving her each week.

“Thank you,” said Fanny. “Come on, Frankie, let’s go.”

But Joan did not wait. She was plodding down the road. And what sort of God was it of whom her father used to speak in such belief, who numbered the very hairs of their heads, who watched a sparrow lest it fall? So carelessly was a dark and nameless child born and gifted. But her child, her wanted child, had been given nothing.

Precious body of Paul! Let her keep his body sweet and fresh — his perfect body which she had made. She went to Clarktown and bought recklessly fine soft linen, blue, yellow, and gay gingham printed with flowers, and made him little suits. Above the vivid stuff his rosy face glowed. It was a beautiful body, the body of a beautiful little boy, the shoulders square, the thighs full, the dimpled knees and feet. She held him all the time now, sleeping and awake. At night she put him beside her in the bed. In the day she sat him astride her hip and held him as she walked and worked. She must feel his body. She had this body.

On one August day she dressed him carefully and drove into Middlehope to Dr. Crabbe. She drove down the street, not seeing it. The buggy top was up. That was to shield the child from the sun — the child and her. From the shadow she need see no one. She would reach there at noon and Dr. Crabbe would be at his own house — and everybody else would be at dinner. She planned all the way what she would say. She would be very calm and matter-of-fact. “Dr. Crabbe, I am worried about Paul. He is slow about doing things. I want you to see him. I want to know the truth.”

Yes, she must know the truth. She must press the cruel truth across her heart and know it whole. But she would be very calm and wait for him to see the truth and tell her. She had waited all these months, gathering herself to be strong, to be calm.

She went into his little dun-colored office and sat down, and his housekeeper, Nellie Byers, stuck her head in at the door. “That you, Joan? He’s just eating his dinner. My, isn’t that a cute baby you got? Yours, isn’t it?”

“Yes, mine,” said Joan. “I’ll wait, Nellie.”

She would be glad to wait, glad to have the chance to force down this hardness in her throat. But she had no chance. He was there at once. He wiped his lips with his napkin and threw it on the floor.

“Well, well, Joan!” Oh, his blessed hearty voice, his warm good voice!

“You came just in time. I was about to go and see Mrs. Mark — nothing urgent, poor soul, just going round to see how much more of her is dead. I try to get around once in a while, though she don’t want me to come. Why, Joan, what’s wrong?”

She was staring at him, sobbing, sobbing loudly. The sobs came loud and dry, and she was helpless in their gasp. They seized her and shook her. Speechlessly she held out the child to him and he took the baby. She gasped through her terrible sobbing, “Something’s — wrong. He doesn’t — know me.”

She gave her burden to him, and she was eased. She stopped sobbing. For the first moment in all these weary wakeful nights, these restless frightening days, she had rest from her burden. The long silence in her broke. Now she could not stop talking. She must talk on and on—“He lies so still — he’s so awfully still — I can’t tell you, Dr. Crabbe — it’s him. No one ever says anything. They think it’s wrong to talk — it’s as though they had blighted him—” All the time she was talking, talking, and he was looking at the child, testing him, touching him here and there, moving his limbs. He took off the little clothes and held the child.

“Beautiful body,” he said abruptly, breaking into her talk. “Got your fine body, Joan.”

She was panting with her terror, her lips dry. Now let her seize the pain firm and hard with both her hands.

“Dr. Crabbe, where is his mind?”

The pain of waiting for birth was nothing to the pain of this waiting. All of life, all the world, stopped, faded, was nothing. In all the world there was nothing but this tiny room, this old man, this child, herself. But he did not answer for a long time. At last he began to put on the garments again, slowly, carefully, to fasten them expertly, securely. At last, when the child was dressed, he looked at Joan, his face a twist of wrinkles.

“His mind was never born, Joan — my dear child—”

She drove slowly through the leaf-shadowed street. Once someone called after her excitedly, and she saw, through the fog of her terror, Netta Weeks pushing a baby carriage. “Joan, Joan!” she screamed. “Wait. I haven’t seen you in ages.” She had to stop then, for a moment. “No, I won’t get out, thank you, Netta. I must be getting home. Yes, this is my baby.” Paul was asleep. He lay upon her lap, his head in her arm. He was so still she could manage the reins while she held him. She was glad he was asleep. He was beautiful in his sleep — all children lay quiet in sleep. She listened while Netta praised him.

“Why, he’s a beauty, Joan! He favors you, doesn’t he? My, he looks grand and strong! You’re lucky — I bet he’s easy to look after. My Petie is a terror — into everything these days.” She pulled back the hood of the carriage and disclosed a thin, sandy, lively-looking child. He was sitting upright, babbling over a toy duck which he was picking to pieces. Netta screamed at him. “Oh, my heavens — his granddad just gave him that down at the store! He’s so mischievous—” She snatched the duck away and instantly he bellowed and she gave it back to him and winked at Joan. “Smart as a tack,” she confided. “Your baby’s a beauty, though,” she added.

“He’s a good baby,” Joan said quietly. Paul stirred a little and she gathered up the reins quickly. She must go, lest he wake, lest he open his lovely wandering empty eyes. She could not bear the thought of Netta’s gossip. “Joan Richards always held her head so high — but you ought to see her kid—”

“Come and see me, Joan,” Netta cried after her.

“Yes,” Joan called back. But she knew she never would. There was this pain in her, waiting for her, shutting her away from everyone. She had to seize it, to wrestle with it, to plumb it, to live it alone. She drove slowly back, holding Paul. But around them, beside them, like a separate presence, was the pain, waiting for her.

In the attic she laid him down upon the bed and took off his little hat and coat and she fetched a soft damp cloth and wiped his face and hands. Then she sat down beside him, and fed him. There were these things to be done for him, to comfort her. Though he had not cried, he was hungry. She studied his absorbed face. When he slept, when he ate thus, he looked like any other child. Dr. Crabbe was only an old man. Perhaps he was wrong. She reviewed the morning quickly. She had forgotten to tell him that Bart had not tried to talk until he was five. And Bart was all right now. Wasn’t Bart all right?

Dr. Crabbe was so impetuous. He made up his mind so fast. … She still had nearly three hundred dollars. She could take Paul to a city doctor and see what he said. She could go to New York and look in the telephone book for a baby doctor and ask him to see Paul. Yes, she would do that. She was happier, suddenly, planning something to do. She would not say anything to anybody until she had done it. Until she had done this she could push the waiting pain away. It was like pushing away a solid substance with her hands. She held it off.

“It’s all a fuss over nothing,” Bart declared.

Downstairs in the kitchen when he was washing up after milking, she had told him. “Dr. Crabbe says Paul isn’t right, Bart.”

“I don’t hold with doctors,” Bart’s mother said. “I wish I hadn’t ever told you about Bart not talking till he was five. I told you to ease you. Bart turned out all right.”

She did not answer. It was always easier now not to answer. She would go tomorrow. Perhaps when she knew, she could sleep again — when she knew Paul really was all right. She reckoned the day swiftly. It was Thursday. Fanny would be waiting. She’d have to tell Sam to get word to her to come on Saturday this week. She watched and made the chance to meet him before he reached the kitchen door. He was carrying the milk pails. But when she asked him, he shook his head shortly.

“I don’t see her any more,” he said. “She’s got married.”

She was frightened for a moment, then it did not matter. She could only fight one thing at a time. The fear of what Fanny might do if she were disappointed must wait until this waiting pain was fought off. She went back to the attic and packed a small bag of garments for Paul.

She found a doctor easily. There was a woman at the telephone booth waiting for a turn, and when she saw her holding Paul in one arm and turning the pages of the book with the other, she said, “Can I help you?”

“I want the name of the best baby doctor in New York,” Joan said. Paul’s head was slipping from her shoulder and she put up her hand quickly to hold it.

“You’d better go to the Edmonds Clinic,” the woman said. She wore a bright red dress and her yellow hair stood out from her round fat face. But her small blue eyes were kind, and her full bright red lips were soft. “You can go and it don’t cost you anything if you say you haven’t any money. Just write down you haven’t no support. My, he’s heavy, isn’t he? What’s wrong?” She was turning pages slowly, moving her glittering pointed nail down the names. “Here it is — see? You take the bus here at the corner uptown. What did you say was wrong?”

“He doesn’t walk or talk,” said Joan. There the pain was, as near as that. When she said the words, it flew at her, stabbing her. She pushed it back again.

“Don’t he?” the woman said. She was about to go on when the door of the telephone booth opened and a man made to enter. She recalled herself. “Here, you!” she cried loudly. “I’m next in line!”

“Well, go on then,” the man muttered. He was tired and sallow and middle-aged, and as he waited he sucked the handle of his umbrella. The door banged and the woman was shut behind it. She was screaming into the telephone, her face twisted and red.

Joan looked at the address. It stamped itself upon her mind instantly and she found it easily. People were very kind to her on the way. It was wonderful that people were kind to her as they passed, so much kinder than Bart was, or Bart’s family. It was sweet to have a courteous word or touch. In the bus a white-haired man gave her his seat and smiled and touched his hat, and when she got out, someone held her arm when she stepped down.

“He’s too heavy for you,” a voice murmured, a gentle pleasant tenor voice. But when she turned to speak, she could not see who it was. It was only a voice in the crowd. But she was comforted. There were kind people, unknown and kind.

She looked out into the streets of New York as the bus ground its way along. And yet these hurrying people did not look kind. They were so distracted in their gaze. Once when the bus stopped in front of a store she saw some people who were not hurrying — a woman and two men in dingy clothing. They were sauntering back and forth, their hands folded in front of them, and carrying signs that read LOCKED OUT OF BRISK AND BRAM FOR DEMANDING HUMAN CONDITIONS. But no one looked or gave them any heed. The bus went on again and she reached the hospital and entered a door over which was painted, FREE CLINIC. She went in and sat down on one of the benches in the long hallway. The benches lined the walls and they were full of women with sick children — with children crying and moaning and lying in weary stupor. Beside her a young woman with a white narrow face and exhausted eyes held a little girl with a huge misshapen head. She looked at Paul enviously. He was asleep, as soundly as though he were in the crib in the attic.

“It doesn’t seem as if anything could be wrong with such a lovely child.”

“No, it doesn’t, does it?” said Joan gratefully. It was true that among the sick children Paul looked sound and beautiful. She could not help being proud of him, a little. At least, sleeping, he was beautiful. The other woman’s child began to cry fretfully.

“She gets so tired, the poor little thing,” the woman said, trying to shift the weight of the huge head. “The doctor is late. They’re always late. I wish I had back all the hours I’ve wasted waiting for doctors.”

“Can’t they do anything?” Joan asked. Under the bulging enormous forehead the little girl’s face looked out, weazened, tiny, mouselike, twisted in old, old suffering.

“I don’t give up hope,” the mother said fervently. She bent and kissed the great forehead. “I keep hoping. You’ve got to hope.”

They all had the same hope, Joan thought, looking at the women’s faces. They looked eagerly at each other’s children, relieved when their eyes fell on one worse than their own. They looked quickly away from Paul because he seemed so sound, and they stared at crippled, deformed children hopefully.

When the doctor came in, their faces turned to him together, their eyes following him, searching his face eagerly. He came in, a robust, middle-aged figure with a small square beard and very clear agate-gray eyes. He was talking loudly and positively to a younger man who was with him.

“I tell you, Proctor, the diagnosis is perfectly obvious in ninety percent of these cases. The congenital undeveloped mind is consistently different from the birth-injured case that is possibly mentally normal. I never confuse the two — Just look at these here—”

His eyes ran, cold, darting, analyzing, along the walls. He was directly in front of her. She could smell a strong clean perfume upon him. She could see the hairy underside of his chin, the sharp triangle of his nose, the cold agate-gray eyes gazing downward. They did not see her. They saw only Paul. He had waked and was lying quietly in her arms.

“I am his mother,” she said steadily.

“You needn’t wait, my good woman, unless you want to. I don’t have anything more to say anyway. Take him home. When he gets too much for you, you’d better find a good institution.”

He passed on, talking and talking. She had turned in agony to the young doctor. But he had not met her eyes. He was listening closely and with respect to the cold, intelligent, knowing voice. She rose, pressing Paul’s little cap to his head.

Let her go home now, to the attic. She could fend off the pain until then. She would not examine the words until then. When she got home, under the close dark roof, she would take them out of her memory and comprehend them and let the waiting pain flow over her and cover her at last. Around her the patient women sat, not heeding. The door of the doctor’s office opened and their faces turned to it. A nurse came out, white and brisk, “First case, please!” No one saw her as she slipped away.

Bart met her at the station in his car. She climbed in and sat in silence beside him. He clattered along the rocky country road. She knew he was showing off to her. He wanted her to say how well he drove the car. The speedometer crept up and she could feel him wanting her praise, and when it did not come, perversely driving too fast that he might force her to say something. He had no imagination and so he never sensed danger. He could climb the barn roof and laugh when she looked away, shuddering. But if they were all killed, it would be well. She said nothing and at last he slowed down, sullenly.

“What did the doctor say about the kid?”

She seized the blade of pain in both hands. “He says Paul will never be right.”

She looked out over the fields. The corn was tasseling, and the summer was at its full. The forest green was deep and dark.

If Bart were a grown man, if he was really what his body seemed, she could turn and give Paul to him and rest her head upon his shoulder. There would be a bottom to this pain then. It would not go deeper and deeper fathomless, endless, a black tunnel through which she must walk alone all her life, without light to guide her to the end.

“Shucks, you can’t believe everything them city doctors say, Jo. He’s healthy as can be.”

“His body’s all right.”

“He’ll turn out good,” Bart repeated heartily. “You see if he don’t.”

She did not answer. The road was deep with dust. The sunset was flaming out of orange dust.

Bart cleared his throat. “Need rain,” he remarked. “Good growing weather for the corn, though.”

“Yes,” she said.

The house was just around the turn. They were there.

Now they were at the kitchen door. Bart’s mother was at the stove, frying potatoes.

“Supper’s ready,” she said, without turning her head.

“I’ll be down soon — don’t wait,” she answered. She carried Paul upstairs and washed him and fed him and laid him in his crib. He was tired and fell into effortless sleep. She fetched the small oil lamp from the box she used as a table and stood looking at him. These must be her moments of dreaming now, these moments at night when he was fast asleep. She could dream that he was like any other child. He had had a day of play, shouting, calling, chattering, crying, carrying out his busy little-boy plans, and now at the end of the day he was tired out. As his body grew she could pretend he was going to school, that he played baseball and rode a horse. When a young man’s body lay asleep, she could dream he was going to college. Her imagination flew in agony down the years. This was the waiting pain. Now it was come — now it could no longer be put away. It was here. It would go with her night and day as long as she lived, walk with her wherever she went, wait in her awake or if she slept. It seemed now she would never sleep again.

She opened a drawer to put away Paul’s cap. There lay the song she had begun to write on the day before he was born. The opening lines were there, the gay and triumphant beginning. But she had not known the ending. Today she knew. She took the paper and tore it into bits and went to the window and let them fly out into the deepening dark. Then she blew out the light and groped her way down the stairs.

At the table the food was dry in her mouth. She kept taking gulps of water to force it down. She must eat, of course. She must live now, as long as Paul lived. And his body had a long life to live.

“What did the doctor say?”

She looked up at Bart’s mother out of solitary deeps of pain. The question came from a long way.

“He said Paul will never be like other children.”

Over and over her life long she must be ready to say that. Wherever she went, people would say, “What is the matter with your baby?” After a while they would say, “What is the matter with your little boy?” They would say, “What is the matter with that young man?” Steadily, over and over, she must be ready to repeat, “He will never be like other children are — never as other young men are.” She must not flinch.

“Pass the bread,” Bart said. “I don’t take any stock in it.”

Sam passed the bread.

“It doesn’t pay to listen to doctors,” he said cheerfully. “I had a doctor tell me once I had a bone felon. But it was no more’n a boil.”

“I wish I hadn’t told you about Aunt Em’s girl,” said Bart’s mother fretfully. “Now you’ll get notions. They’re not one bit the same. Em’s girl was sickly from the time she got her fall. Paul’s different in every way. He’s just like Bart. Bart was an awful healthy baby. I said he’d talk when he got good and ready and he did. And Paul will, too.”

“Get some more milk,” Bart’s father interrupted. “I have to get done early tonight. There’s a meeting over at the church — a missionary from Africa’s talking. The parson wants a crowd and spoke to me as superintendent. Sam, get your good clothes on and go, too. You’d better go, Minna. He’s got lantern slides.”

“I haven’t planned,” she exclaimed in distress. “You ought to have told me sooner, so I could plan the work after supper.”

“I’ll do everything,” said Joan.

“Wouldn’t you like to go though, maybe, Joan?” Bart’s mother, about to agree, paused. “It would be interesting — your sister a missionary and all. I’ll stay with Paul.”

“I’m very tired,” said Joan.

“Then maybe—” Bart’s mother said, unwillingly pleased. Then she said quickly, “It isn’t that I just want to see the pictures. I feel I ought to take an interest in the work the church is doing in heathen lands.”

“Yes,” said Joan. She turned to Bart. “Why don’t you go, too, Bart? You’d like the pictures.”

“Don’t know but I will,” said Bart.

So the house was emptied. There was only Paul and herself. The silence was complete. There was no sound of breathing or of footsteps. She washed the dishes and swept the crumbs away and set the table for breakfast and covered the table with the cloth. Then she bathed herself and brushed her hair and put on her nightgown. It was, she thought, as though she were laying herself down to die by her own hand. But she could not die, for Paul was alive. In the darkness she went to his crib and listened. He was breathing steadily, soundly. She felt his hand. It was warm and lax. She had done everything she could think of to do. She went and laid herself down in her bed and let agony fall upon her, unchecked at last.

But how could one live in agony day and night while a year passed, and then another and another? She would sleep a little and wake in the morning stifled, as one might wake in a dense smoke, or under a heavy weight. Before she was well awake, dragging her mind upward out of sleep, she knew something was wrong — terror waited. Then she was awake and there the terror was, fresh and sharp and new with the morning.

When she forgot, as sometimes she could forget, for a moment, for a moment of sunlight through shining leaves, for a moment of the phlox bed glowing under the noon sun, for a moment of dewy madonna lilies freshly blooming at twilight, the beauty of mists stealing up the hills from the valleys under the moon, the terror was there, new again, to be realized again and again. Better never to forget it than to have that continual new realization. “Oh, how lovely the hills are today under the moving shadows of the clouds! — Yes, but Paul will never be like other children.”

And there was no edge so desperately keen as when he himself made her forget, the close dearness of the nape of his neck when his fair hair began to curl against the white skin, the lovely roundness of his body in the tub. She could laugh with her passionate tenderness, adoring his loveliness, forgetting for a moment’s adoration, and feel her heart dissolve again in the eternal agony.

She longed to see other children. She plied Rose with questions of David. But Rose wrote unhappily that she was going to have another child. “I have so little time for the work now,” she wrote.

“I don’t know what she’s talking about,” Joan cried aloud to herself, fierce with envy. She thought of going to Netta, and shrank from it. Meeting Fanny under the oak tree beyond the bend of the road, she begged her, “Bring little Frank with you next time. I want to see him again. It’s been so long.”

“Surely,” said Fanny. She had put on flesh in the past two years, and looked like a great dark poppy in a ruffled dress of scarlet lawn.

And the next week Joan could hardly listen to her for looking at the boy. There was some trouble. Fanny was in trouble, quarreling with her husband. She took pleasure in trouble and quarreling.

“Darling,” said Joan to the little boy, kneeling in the dust to him, “you’ve grown so big. Are you going to go to school?”

The child stared at her, charmed, his great black eyes soft and fathomless.

“If Fanny’ll let me—” he whispered.

“Don’t you say mamma?”

“She doesn’t like me to.”

Fanny laughed richly. “No, I don’t have any of them call me ma. It looks better. If I take him anywhere. I say he’s my brother.”

The child looked at her gravely as she laughed. Then he turned back to Joan and regarded her curiously and quietly with profound intelligence. That was the look Paul’s eyes should have had, that comprehending aware look. Francis, for all his waywardness, used to have it, and their mother seeing it would seize him and hold him and murmur over him. Strange to see Francis looking at her now out of the jungle!

“What are you going to do with this child, Fanny?” she asked anxiously.

The girl shrugged her shoulders gaily. “He’s all right, long as I don’t decide to go away. Long as that man behaves, that is!” She frowned darkly. “Not many men been to my taste like Frank was, though, I declare. Sometimes when I get thinking about Frank, I just lose my taste for them all. Isn’t he ever coming home? I wouldn’t bother him — just show him the boy and say hello.”

“No,” said Joan quickly. “He’s never coming back — he said so.”

The girl sighed, a deep full sigh.

“Well, I’ve got to be going. Thank you for the dollar again — it sure does help. I keep Frankie the nicest of any of my children.”

But she could not let him go. She felt the small body all over with her hands. It was firm and hard and shapely. She took his hand and it held to hers closely. The very feel of the body was different from Paul’s heaviness, the cling of the hand so different from Paul’s loose, varying clutch. She held the hand a moment and looked at it. She could imagine the smooth fresh skin white. But underneath, the blood ran dark.

“Is your little fellow all right?” asked Fanny. She was staring into a small mirror, rouging her already scarlet mouth.

Joan hesitated. Then she said firmly, “No, he’s not all right — there’s something wrong.”

Fanny lowered her mirror. Her face warmed with pity. “That’s too bad! My children’s all healthy. But I know a girl with a puny baby. She took her to a gospel meeting, and the preacher put his hand on her and she’s better — at least her ma says she’s better. Come on, Frankie — Lem’ll be mad, waiting for us!”

She had to let him go now. She rose and stood watching him walk sturdily through the dust. When she could see them no longer, she sat down beside the road, again desolate. Summer was passing, the corn was ripening, nothing was growing now. Summer after summer, before, she had left everything growing, pushing to bud and blossom and fruit, life full tilt with growing. Now it was stopped, over the whole land, over forest and field. There was no more growing. There was only ripening and slow downward dying. Another autumn was near. She got up and went home to Paul.

She kept remembering what Fanny had told her. There was a woman with a puny baby who took her to a gospel meeting and she got better. In South End the people were very ignorant and full of superstitions. Rose still wrote her long letters which Joan still sent to Mrs. Winters when she finished them, so that they could be read at missionary meeting. Rose said there were heathen women who went to temples if their children fell ill.

“In their blindness and ignorance,” Rose wrote, “they go to their gods and promise new robes or new shoes if the child recovers. It is difficult to persuade them to give up this foolish and wicked practice.”

On that first Sunday morning when she came home from college, it had not seemed necessary to think about God, because then she had taken everything for granted. God would take care of her. She had been told so often that God was good. Here in this home night and morning she sat while Bart’s father read “the Word of God.” She had not needed to listen, since God was good.

But now there was no use in pretending that Paul grew any better. He was no better. She played with him every day, singing over and over to him with desperate grim patience the gay childish songs her mother had sung to them all. “Pat-a-cake, pat-a-cake, baker’s-man.” Francis used to pat his baby hands together in solemn ecstasy. “Paul, Paul, see? Pat-a-cake, pat-a-cake—” She held his hands and patted them together day after day. Each day she waited to see his hands move a little upward of their own volition. “Pat-a-cake, pat-a-cake—” Day after day she let his hands fall and got up quietly to busy herself at some other task. It took a long time to teach little children — a long, long time. Her mother used to cry, “It does seem to me I have to keep telling you children the same thing over and over.” Every day she told Paul the same thing over and over.

Then one day when he was nearly five years old, she put his hands down. She went to the trunk and found a little box of toys she had made ready for his Christmas. Each year she had planned in happiness. “Next year, I’ll have a tiny tree. He will be big enough surely to notice the candles and to laugh at toys.”

She would not wait this time for Christmas. She lit the lamp and set it where he could see it. She opened the box and brought out a rattle she had bought, with bells on the handle, and she jangled it near him. She took his hand and curved the fingers about the handle and moved it gently. But when she took her hand away, the rattle dropped. She snatched up the lamp, sobbing, and held it above him. He did not recognize the light. His wandering eyes saw and slipped away.

“It is no use pretending anymore,” she said aloud, fiercely. She set down the lamp and put all the toys back into the box and set the box into the trunk and closed it. There never would be Christmas in this house. She knew it now. She began her old sobbing again. “Oh, God,” she said sobbing, “oh, help me, God!”

Her father used to teach them, saying, “Ask and you shall receive, for so we are taught.”

She searched in the trunk for her mother’s Bible. She and Rose had put it there. It had been years since she had read the Bible for herself. On Sunday afternoons when she was a little girl they each had to read a chapter. And once for a while when she was a young girl she had read it of her own will, to delight in the swinging powerful words. There was the Song of Solomon. And then abruptly she had put it aside and read instead the poems of the Brownings, and Tennyson’s “Princess,” and any love stories she could find.

Once she had really prayed for her mother’s life and her mother died. But then her mother was no longer young and there comes a time to die. Paul was only a child, and death was not for him — not for years upon years. She fell upon her knees by her bed, clenching her hands together, her eyes closed, her whole being pouring and concentrated. She felt a power sweeping up from her feet, through her limbs, her body, soaring upward to the cold starry sky, a shining shape of intense desire. “Oh, God, make Paul well!”

… She would give God time. She lived in a waiting intensity through days and nights. The work was to be done, in this house. There was so much work to be done, a routine of sweeping and polishing and cleaning. She worked at it doggedly. On Tuesdays she opened the dark unused parlor and wiped all the furniture and the pictures, all the curly carved surfaces. She knew every surface now without loving any. There was no meaning to any shape. She had never seen anyone sit on the chairs. The window shades were not lifted except on Tuesdays. On Wednesdays she cleaned the pantry. There were three heavy complete dinner sets on the shelves. “You shall have them when I’m gone,” Bart’s mother said often.

“Why don’t you use them?” she answered heartily. “I’d rather you used them now.”

“Use Mother’s good wedding set every day?” Bart’s mother cried in horror. “She never did, nor I. Besides, there’s the trouble of washing them every day. I’d never get over it if some were broken.” They ate from ten-cent-store dishes. She wiped the empty old-fashioned dishes savagely. If they were ever hers, she’d use them every day, every meal, and she’d slash them about in the dishpan.

“I always say,” Bart’s mother’s voice came dolefully from the kitchen, hearing the dishes clatter, “if you break up your few good things, you don’t know where you’re going to look to for more.”

She did not answer. She moved the dishes, wiping their edges. Nothing but things and things. This house was full of silent lifeless things, things to be taken care of. She’d like to walk straight out of it, walk away down the road, anywhere, never to return.

“I must be patient,” she cried, terrified. “How can I expect God to do anything for me when I am so unruly?”

It was very hard to be patient so long. She waited, day after day, prayer seething in her constantly, fretful, desperate, importunate prayer. She nagged at God with her prayers, unbelieving. “There’s nothing in it. Paul doesn’t change a bit.” Nagging desperately again, “There’s no other hope — Oh God, help me—”

She brimmed with a dreadful energy. She polished the front stairs she never used. Living in this house she had come to feel it sacrilege to use them. Bart’s mother’s disapproval made rebellion worthless. “But it means more to clean,” she said, hurt, to Joan’s cry: “Why should we climb up those steep back stairs?” The intensity of hope deferred was making her ill-tempered. She was often angry with Bart’s mother, furious at her large soft stupidity, her unwavering obstinacy … “Oh, God, when — when — is Paul going to get better!”

“Yes,” she answered violently to Bart’s mother, “I did wipe each banister — Yes, I did move the little marble-top walnut table and I did wipe behind the mirror.”

“Well, I’m sure,” said Bart’s mother, bewildered, “I was only asking — if you hadn’t, I was going to — if you had — I’ll begin picking over these windfalls to stew up.”

All the time she was watching Paul, testing Paul, trying to arouse Paul. One day she took him into the parlor and opened the old crack-voiced piano and holding him on her lap, she took his lumpish hands and holding them touched the keys softly. It had rained all day, a dark long day. In the attic she had walked with him, played with him, until the close down-sloping roof shut her in and made her breathless. Against the window the rain had beaten in gusts so that to look out was to see the trees’ indefinite cloudy green swimming in down-rushing water. She was as restless as a child, and taking Paul in her arms she had gone recklessly down the front stairs—“After all, I clean them!”—and to the piano. “Pat-a-cake pat-a-cake,” she was chanting, drumming his fist softly upon the keys.

The door opened suddenly and she turned, Paul’s head bobbing helplessly upon her breast, to Bart’s mother. Her large vague face was violently distorted.

“Now, Joan, that’s one thing I don’t allow anyway. I’ve stood enough. I never did let one of my children touch the piano, and you can’t start Paul doing it.”

She walked heavily across the floor, wiping her hands on her apron, and closed the piano with a bang. Joan rose. Now she knew she hated this woman. She hated them all. No use pretending anymore — no use trying to pretend. She stared into the small yellowish-brown eyes, lost in her hatred. She was holding Paul so tightly he began to cry. She turned and ran from the room … And all the time she knew she was herself hindering God. For how could God help her when she was so wicked and full of hate? In the attic she began to sob. “That old worthless piano — he’s her own son’s child — I don’t want to hate her—” She put Paul in his crib and threw herself upon the bed, sobbing. She cried so much these days. Any little thing would start her to crying.

When she grew quieter she lay in the darkness, thinking. She must just begin again. There were things she ought to do which she had not done. It was very easy for the heathen mothers who promised God a coat or shoes. She rose up and lit the light and found her mother’s Bible, poring over one of the pages heavily underscored. There was one verse blackly underscored: “He that cometh to God must first believe that He is—”

She had not been believing enough. “I believe, I believe!” she whispered fiercely.

“I believe!” she cried in her heart every day, every hour, as she swept and washed and mended. “I believe!” she repeated, holding Paul. She gave up the singing now. Instead she murmured over him like a fierce litany, “I believe — I believe in God!”

She began to be meticulous with herself, to read the Bible and to pray a certain time each day as her father had done. In her youth, she remembered with terror, she had laughed at people who were like this. It used to be a joke in the village because Mrs. Parsons always prayed before she began writing on her novel every day. “I want God’s blessing on all I write,” she used to say. “If I have God’s blessing on all I write, some day a publisher will take my book.” They had laughed at her in the careless fullness of their youth. Prayer was for church or to be murmured before sleep. It was like brushing your hair a hundred times, or like keeping your bureau drawers neat — all nice people did such things. Prayer was a nice habit. But nothing ever came of it beyond the feeling of niceness it gave. But perhaps they were wrong. Perhaps there was something there, a power upon which she had not laid hold.

Pray, Rose, she wrote, distracted, pray for Paul.

“God,” she cried to hills and sky, walking through the forests, green again with spring — incredible spring, coming year after year, just the same! — “God, help my little baby Paul!”

In this cunning to persuade God she whispered like a child to her dead mother. “If you are near God now, speak to Him of Paul!” She thought, if there is any way, she will find it and do it … But Paul still did not know her. He ate and slept and grew heavier and she tended him as she always had. For all her crying there was no sign that she was heard.

“Bart,” she said, “I have an idea I want to go to our old church. I want you to stay in the house with Paul once on Sunday.” Perhaps in the familiar church she might recapture the childhood sense she remembered of God’s being near and loving. They used to take it for granted that God loved them.

“You needn’t do anything,” she added to Bart. “Just be in the house — don’t touch him unless he cries.” She was jealous of Paul’s immaculate body. She did not want Bart’s great grimed hands touching him.

He spoke so heartily she looked up in surprise. He seldom spoke to her these days, and to him she did not speak unless she must. Between them there was that eternal wordless question-and-answer waiting. Whenever he opened his mouth, she drew up her resources ready for refusal. If she should speak to him, he might be led on to ask that question. Silence was safe. At first he had touched her hand often, and made awkward opportunity to brush against her as she passed. She learned to stay far from him, to come and go steadily, cold, never touching. “You’d think I was dirty or something!” he roared at her once. She looked away and did not answer. It was true — his flesh was like filth to her.

Then at last he made no more effort. He came and went from the fields, eating enormously, sleeping immediately after he had eaten at night. She ceased to feel the pressure in him. He was content to be silent toward her as he was to the others. They all lived in the round of silence. Sam was going with a girl now, a fanner’s daughter five or six miles away. Each evening after milking he cleaned himself and ate his supper in solemn uneasiness. He gave up his coarse joking and gazing at her secretly. He was going to be married. He was settled, or soon would be. Bart’s mother fretted a little. “They say Annie Beard is a real good cook, but she’s so free with butter and sugar. I ate a piece of her cake at the church supper once, and it was so rich it was sickening. I don’t care for anything but sponge, myself — more is flesh pander.” She sighed. It was not decent to say more. Her sons were men, and she supposed they must behave like men. Since Bart was not complaining anymore, she guessed he and Joan must have fixed it up. After all, his room was right at the foot of the attic stairs, and she’d told Joan—

“You go right ahead,” Bart said boisterously Sunday morning in the attic. “Paul’s all right with his dad, aren’t you, Paul?” He grimaced at the cradle.

She put on the white chip hat she had had before she was married. She had not worn it for so long that everybody would have forgotten it. Her white linen dress was old, too, but it was simple enough to wear without notice. She was thinner than she used to be and it hung a little on her hips. She had not for so long seen herself dressed like this. Her face was thinner, the lines of her bones clearly shaped, and her mouth was not so full as it once was. Her lips were restrained and set. But she had her clear skin and her mouth was still red.

She turned away from Bart. She knew she was still pretty enough so she did not want him to notice her. “I’ll walk from the Corners,” she said. “I can go in the surrey with them that far. Then it is only a little way.”

But Bart did not see her at all. He had thrown himself across her bed and was staring into the rafters.

She was a little late in church. They were all singing when she slipped into a back seat and sat down. She bent her head a moment and suddenly began to tremble. She was very tired. She had not realized how tired she was until she came to this familiar place. The singing went quietly on. The old folks sang gently:

“We may not climb the heavenly steeps

To bring the Lord Christ down”

The organ picked the notes out delicately, muted. The sunshine fell in bars as it used to fall through the closed windows, and lay upon the dying still air. All through her body little nerves began to relax and tremble. She wanted to cry again. She wanted to cry for herself, piteously and aloud: “I’ve had a hard time. I’ve really had a very lonely hard time.”

The singing softened in an “Amen,” and the people sat down. All their backs were to her, but she could recognize them. That was Miss Kinney’s summer hat, the tan leghorn with the circle of red cherries. There sat Mr. and Mrs. Billings. He had grown fatter than ever, and Mrs. Billings was already nodding, bless her heart. But the boys were gone. In the organ loft she saw Martin Bradley’s back, angular, as neat and spare as ever. His hair was almost white. He was moving his fingers over the silent notes as he always did during Scripture reading. Old Mr. Parker was dead. She had read that in the paper one day. He had died just before he was to retire on his savings, as he had feared he would. He had saved and saved for an annuity, going pinched all his days that he might be independent in age, and someone else was using it, someone who never cared for him, for he never married. “I have never made enough to warrant my inviting a lady to share my poor fortunes,” he used to say. Once he had said it at a church supper — that was when Mrs. Mark still had her legs. “I have asked the Lord concerning a wife, but there was no answer. I fear I asked amiss.” Mrs. Mark, cutting smartly into a huge white-iced cake, had shouted loudly, “That’s it, Brother Parker — you never asked a miss!”

Everybody had roared, and Mr. Parker smiled painfully and went out of hearing. Mrs. Mark was known to be a little indelicate for a lady.

Joan sat, smiling, remembering, forgetting for the moment why she had come. There was so much to remember here in this place — her mother, Francis, Rose, herself. It hurt most of all to remember herself. It was like remembering someone else, a young ardent girl. The door of the vestry opened and she looked up quickly, remembering her father. But instead a youngish bald-headed man came out in a dark business suit. He began to speak in a sharp practical voice.

“Today’s lesson is found in—”

He read quickly, plainly, without acknowledging any poetry in what he read, and sat down abruptly. A woman in the choir rose and sang in a sharp clear soprano. It was his wife. She remembered that definite high voice. “Is there only one bathroom in the manse? What sort of a kitchen stove do you have?”

She bent her head, waiting for the song to finish. When the congregation sang, she could go back to remembering. The soft murmuring of old voices, the muted organ — remembering, she might remember God. Her father could so invoke God in this place. Oh, that she might feel God true!

There was a short practical sermon, a few notices read. “There will be the usual meeting in the vestry after service. I shall discontinue the Wednesday prayer meeting while I am away on vacation during July.” A strange young man passed the collection plate and she shook her head. She had forgotten to bring money.

Then suddenly when they rose to sing the last hymn she could not face them. She could not bear the pressing questions, “Joan, what’s become of you?” “We never see you anymore.” “It’s nice to see you in the old home church again, Joan.” She was at their mercy, because they had all known her so well. She could not hide herself. She turned and hurried out of the church and went down the street. After her came the soft sound of their peaceful aged singing. The singing made the noon unreal.

… “Was Paul all right?” she asked Bart.

“Sure he was,” Bart answered. His voice sounded thick and queer, as though he had been drinking. But he could not have been drinking in this house. When a stranger asked Bart’s father for a match even, he would not lend it if he knew it was to light a pipe or a cigarette. “That’s flesh pander,” he said. And to drink even cider was wicked.

She looked at him closely. But he did not look at her. His red hair was tumbled and he smoothed it roughly. “You’ve been asleep,” she cried.

“Yeah,” he muttered.

“Asleep when you were to take care of Paul!”

“Well, he’s all right, isn’t he?”

Suddenly gorge rose in her. She could not bear to look at Bart. She let it pass. It did not matter, so long as Paul was safe.

She importuned Rose to pray for her, while she hung her own prayers on God. And she so prayed that she almost prayed herself into believing that her prayers must drive through the walls around her and reach an ear beyond. But in the night it was hard to believe. In the night, alone in her attic with Paul, the round-topped trunk pushed against the door, in the darkness of the deep night she might doubt and did often doubt. … “I must remember this is only because it is night and everything is so still, and because there is no one near me. I must remember that I believe in God and that the morning will come soon.”

She thought humbly of Rose who was so good, so sure. Rose’s prayers would count with God. In the night it was a comfort to think that far across the sea Rose was praying for her, too. And in the morning, when the sun came streaming through the treetops, it seemed to her that Rose’s prayers must be answered.

But it was a long time since she had heard from Rose. She went out one late summer morning to the mailbox at the road. When she saw the mail carrier there in his old Ford, she ran out. He seldom stopped, scarcely more than once a week to deliver the Sunday School Times or a farm circular.

“Good morning, Mr. Moore!” she called gaily. It was one of the moments of forgetting. The morning was clear over the hills, the earth was throbbing with sun and heat. The air was still and fertile with warmth. She felt her feet sure and vigorous upon the rich grass. It was impossible not to hope this morning. Paul was so well, so placid, so good.

Mr. Moore grinned at her, his gums toothless. “Foreign letter for you,” he said. He liked to bring her a foreign letter. “Makes your eyes shine!” he said, as he always did.

“Good!” she cried heartily. “I knew something nice would happen — it’s one of those mornings!”

“It’s not a bad day,” Mr. Moore admitted. It was so warm he had taken off his coat and was in his brown vest and gray chambray shirt. He was a little embarrassed as she reached out her hand freely for the letter. “I might have kept on my coat if I’d known you were coming out,” he apologized.

She took the letter and smiled at him warmly. It was Rose’s letter, the address neatly typed. Rob had never written. Rob was so busy, Rose said — and he had his own parents to whom to write. Rob was opening a new field often, Rob was pushing northwest among the Mohammedan peoples, over the deserts, into the high barren plateaus near Tibet, where the men looked like Indians, lean and dark and fierce.

“Well, you’ll be wanting to read your letter,” Mr. Moore said. His car set up a fury of noise and stirred a rush of dust. He jerked it into movement and urged the motor with a clatter of gears, and the car, choking, was on its way.

She thrust the letter into her dress and went upstairs to the attic. It was midmorning, and there was a pause in the work. In a few moments she must go to the kitchen and peel potatoes. But these few moments were empty. Paul was asleep in a clothes basket under an apple tree. She was always happiest when he was asleep. He was just a little boy asleep. The attic was beginning to seem a room of her own. It was her uncontrollable instinct to make a room pretty. She had made little ruffled green curtains for the gable window and a cover for the box. Last winter she had sewed rags into a round rug. Bart’s mother had showed her how. They were rags of colorless old work shirts too torn to wear, but she had dyed them green and brown. She sat down on a barrel chair she had found in the attic and had covered with the green curtain stuff. Now she tore open the letter.

It had always been a luxury to read Rose’s letters over and over slowly, to extract from them every picture. Slowly through Rose’s meager descriptions she had pieced the picture of a square mission house, dark servants coming and going, a garden thick with ferns and spotted lilies and quick-growing plants. “But, alas, there are snakes and centipedes,” Rose had written. “We have to keep continual watch over David.” David she saw clearly, a small, too thin, intrepid child. David was always running away. David was continually being sought for and found down by the riverside among the junkmen, or in the marketplace. Sometimes they found him first, but other times before they found him there would be knocking at the compound gate and a man would be there, a bare-legged farmer or a riksha coolie, holding the small boy firmly by the hand.

“He runs away in spite of everything,” Rose wrote anxiously. “Nothing will keep him inside the compound walls.”

She had read every letter absorbed, eager to see David, laughing at David, ten thousand miles away.

She tore open the thin Chinese envelope … But this was not true, not these words typed scantily here. A letter could not carry a message like this, a common letter! The lines ran together as her eyes read them. Now let her begin again carefully and quietly disentangle the words. The name of John Stuart — that was the doctor at the station — Rose had told her about John Stuart, a little. “He is a faithful worker,” Rose had said, “a man of few words.” Few words! In this handful of words he wrote, “And without warning bandits came into the town and forced the compound gates. Mr. and Mrs. Winters were killed almost immediately, we heard later from those who were watching in the crowd. The children were saved by their faithful nurse. The little girl was eleven days old. We escaped—” The lines were tangling and twisting again.

… “Rose, you are to stay here in bed and keep the children here and the amah with you, I shall go out to meet them. I shall speak to them quietly and tell them we are here only to help the people, to give them the true knowledge of God. You aren’t afraid?”

“No, Rob.” Rose was lying on the bed in the middle of the room, looking at him. She looked like a young girl again suddenly, smiling, her eyes shining. “I feel as though all my life has led up to this hour.”

“God, in whom we have believed—” he said steadfastly, his hand on the door. There was a great roaring from the street.

“In whom we have believed,” she repeated, her voice thrilling through the words. He opened the door quickly and went out. The silent little boy broke away from the Chinese woman’s grasp and ran to the window. He screamed suddenly, loudly, “Mother, they hit—”

The door burst open and the men surged into the room. He was lost — his mother was lost. It was like water rushing into the door and drowning them. A hand reached out and pulled him …

“They were found, he upon the threshold,” the letter said, “stabbed, and she, stripped and stabbed in the bedroom of their little house against the city wall. It was probably done very quickly. They were buried in the garden secretly at night by friends … I am bringing the children home.”

She sat with the letter in her lap, trying to know that they were dead. She had been trusting Rose to pray for her, and Rose for weeks had been lying folded in her grave. She would have said that surely she must have known it, that her hope, flying through space, would have met a barrier and dropped, daunted. There had been no sign. She had not felt Rose dead. She had not known. But all the time Rose was dead.

Now, any day, following this letter, this man would come bringing Rose’s two children across the sea to her, to be hers. Under this roof she must somehow make a place for them, too. The attic stretched about her, down to the eaves. If she could put two small beds there at the south, away from the wind—

Through the glorious still day she moved in silence. She could not speak to anyone yet. She went in quiet dazed mourning, tears often in her eyes. Whatever she did, she saw Rose at some past moment — Rose, demure even when she was very small, decided, knowing always what she would do, sure of how to make her life. But she could not decide against death. As reasonless as idiocy was death. One could only accept.

She went the length of the day and of the next day, death a secret in her. It would mean nothing to them that Rose was dead. They had never seen Rose, Rose standing to receive the dress like a shower of summer flowers about her white shoulders, Rose moving about the house with her quiet beaming look.

Bart’s father said fretfully, “All this government fuss and fidget with farming isn’t going to do any good. Things are getting worse all the time. In my dad’s day—”

Rose was lying now ten thousand miles away, on a low hill overlooking a Tibetan plain, in a garden beside a city wall. … “Apples won’t sell more than a couple of dollars a barrel this fall,” he continued. “Stew up as much as you can, Minna. We’ll eat apples.” And John Stuart was bringing two children to her, two more little children … “Don’t see how Annie and I can live on the little I get,” Sam was saying. He was afraid of his father and his face was redder than ever. “She’s a good manager, but—”

“She’ll have to be,” his father said. He soaked a crust in his coffee and sucked it … The children could eat apples and bread and milk. She’d get food for them. She could find a job. But she had less than two hundred dollars left out of the five hundred. Week by week it had gone for little Frank.

“She can’t manage what she hasn’t got!” Sam cried, goaded.

“I don’t know as I’ve any call to have to support my son’s wives and children.”

She spoke suddenly for them all. “We work, all of us,” she said clearly. She was not afraid of him.

“Lot of women in the house,” he muttered, his mouth full of dripping crusts.

“Not all the children can be as good as Paul is,” said Bart’s mother. “Anyway, he’s not much trouble.”

“No,” Bart said, pausing in his chewing, “you’re right, Ma. Paul isn’t any trouble.”

… No, she thought drearily, listening, only trouble enough to break his mother’s heart. And David was coming across the sea, who was always running away. He would want to run away from this house. Walls could not hold David. She had less than two hundred dollars left, and there were three children — and Frankie — four children.

In the church on Sunday she sat anxiously, planning, thinking. Paul was still to be healed, but here were these two, coming. She could not pray. The church was not full of remembering, now. She could not sit thinking about the past, even about her mother and father. She had to plan for what was to come. The minister began to speak. “Today we are to pray for one of our members who is in sore affliction. God has seen fit to take to himself as martyrs Robert Winters, son of Mr. and Mrs. Winters, a missionary to China, and his wife. Eight years ago the young couple went out from this church, and today they lie in their graves. Let us pray for our friends, the bereaved parents, the motherless children—” He did not put her name among the bereaved. He did not know her.

His unctuous voice flowed on. The people bowed their heads. She felt the tears rush to her eyes and got up abruptly in the middle of the praying. Yes, but something had to be done. She had to do something. She felt herself betrayed. While she had been praying … She walked swiftly down the street to the Winters’ house. At a window next door she saw Mrs. Kinney’s old withered head like a skeleton trembling at the window, but she did not call or make a sign of greeting — old Mrs. Kinney’s taking care of herself, living on and on, uselessly. She ran up the steps and rang the doorbell, and Mr. Winters came to the door. They had not gone to church today, but he wore his coat, because it was more decent in such sorrow. It was real sorrow. He choked a little when he saw her and said more loudly than he usually spoke, “It’s been a long time since I saw you, Joan. Come on in. Mattie’s lying down. She’s terribly upset. It seems as though she blames Rob and Rose for it.”

He followed her into the square neat sitting room. “I’ll go and tell her.” At the door he paused and looked back, his long pallid face melancholy. His voice broke in a sudden squeak and he pattered away, his bedroom slippers clacking.

She sat waiting. Once in this very room Rob had had a birthday party and the cake had been on the square carved center table, and he had given the first piece to Rose, and Rose had eaten a little of it and tied the rest in her handkerchief and had taken it home. That was the difference between Rose and herself. Joan always ate her cake immediately. Rose said, “I knew there’d be ice cream and things I couldn’t take home, so I saved the cake and two pieces of candy.” But she couldn’t think ahead like that. Rose had worn a pink dress, and she a yellow one.

Mrs. Winters came in suddenly. She looked older. She was thinner, much thinner. Her skin seemed loose on her, as though the flesh had melted away from under it. Although the day was warm she wore an old black cloth cape around her shoulders.

“Well, Joan,” she said, “I’m sure—”

Joan rose quickly and put her arms about her and for a second Mrs. Winters leaned against her. Then she withdrew herself and sat down, dabbing her eyes quickly with her handkerchief. “If I’d been listened to,” she said. Her full bluish lips trembled a little. “I was never listened to. Now this has happened — the two children — I’m not a bit well myself, and business has been dropping these two years in the store. If Rob had only listened to me and stayed home. What are Reds? I couldn’t seem to understand.”

Joan said quickly, “We can never understand. I’m to have the children.”

Mrs. Winters looked at her dubiously. “But how are you fixed?” she said.

Joan smiled. In this room she had once eaten all the cake on her plate at once, not thinking of tomorrow. “I’m all right,” she said sturdily. “I live on a farm. I have a little son of my own, you know. There’s a big house — plenty of room in the house.” She’d take the house and wrap it about the children, her children.

“I’m not real well,” said Mrs. Winters at last, looking about the neat room. “Rob was such a good boy. He never upset a thing. What I say is, people have no right to go off to the ends of the earth and leave their children for other people to bring up. But I’ll do my duty by my own son’s children, of course.”

Mr. Winters sat drooping, saying nothing.

“But I want them — they’re Rose’s children too,” Joan cried. “I’ll come to you sometimes and you can advise me and help me—”

Mrs. Winters shook her head sadly. “I’ll do all I can, I’m sure,” she said. “I always want to do all I can — and I do—”

“Of course you do,” said Joan quietly. Mrs. Winters looked old and tired and bewildered, more completely bewildered than she had on the day when Rob and Rose were married. “Goodbye,” said Joan. “Don’t worry. I can manage.” She went away quickly.

She strode through the street and down the road, her heart firm and sorrowful and exulting. She was to have the children. She went recklessly, her big body impetuous with generosity. She didn’t know how to manage, but she would manage. She must write to Francis and tell him. He never wrote to her, but she kept on writing to him anyway, because her mother would have wanted her to.

And then there she was at Mrs. Mark’s little stone house. She stopped short. She might go in, since she was early today. She hadn’t heard anything of Mrs. Mark for a long time, and she had not gone to see her. She had not wanted Mrs. Mark’s ruthlessness probing her — Mrs. Mark’s disgusted voice, “What’d you go and marry in a hurry like that for? A lout—”

But today she could forestall Mrs. Mark. She did not matter today — nor what she had done. She opened the door and called and a small voice answered and she followed it. Mrs. Mark lay buried under a thick cotton quilt. Her face looked out at her with the withered waiting look of an aged and suffering monkey. “I’m glad you’ve come, Joan Richards,” she said. “I’ve waited a mortal time for anybody to come. I been dead since yesterday noon from the waist down. I’ll never stir out of my bed again.”

“Oh, Mrs. Mark!”

She waited, groaning a little, while Joan heated soup she found congealed in a pot. She drank it slowly, and a thawed look came about her wrinkled mouth. “Wash me off,” she commanded. “Hot or cold water, it doesn’t matter from the waist down, but make it hot above. I like to feel as far as I can.”

When she was cleaned and fed, Joan said anxiously, “I’ll have to find someone to come and stay with you.”

“I won’t have a soul,” said Mrs. Mark promptly. “You can put some bread and milk by me and the clean bedpan and come back in a day or so. I hate fuss. It isn’t going to be but a week or two at most. An inch or so and it’ll hit my heart.”

“And maybe you’ll be alone!” Joan cried.

“Everybody’s alone,” said Mrs. Mark.

“I’m glad I came by when I did,” Joan answered.

But Mrs. Mark looked at her with suspicion. “Don’t you go thinking I prayed and you came by. I don’t pray. I lie here and take it, though it’s not coming to me more than to another. It’s chance — just as it was chance you came by. There wouldn’t have happened anything different, no matter what—”

“I wouldn’t leave you if it weren’t for Paul,” said Joan.

“Get along,” said Mrs. Mark. Her eyes were small and sharp and dark with the never-dying tragedy of an ape’s eyes. “Get along with you.” She shut her eyes and waited for her to go.

“I’ll go, but I’ll be back tomorrow,” said Joan. But Mrs. Mark would not answer and she went away.

She had stayed longer than she realized in Mrs. Mark’s cottage. When she reached the Corners, the sun had swung over the zenith and was on its way downward. There was no sign of the surrey. She searched the deep dust of the road and saw the narrow rut of its wheels, double, coming and going. There was the slight wavering of the right hind wheel, slipping a little. It was loose on its axle. They had come and gone, then. They had not waited. There was no sign of restless horses’ feet, stirring the dust.

She set her lips and struck out in long strides.

Paul would be hungry, and they would not feed him. No one had ever fed him except herself. It was not easy to feed him, not pleasant. It took a great deal of patience. She had to prepare his food and mash it soft and push it back into his mouth again and again when it ran out. They would let him lie hungry until she came. It never seemed to occur to any of them that Paul belonged to the family as much as Bart did or Sam. But she must not be bitter. It was easy not to be bitter about small things when all was well. But now sorrow stretched her soul.

She quickened her steps until she was half running through the hot dust. She took off her hat and let the sun beat down on her. Her thoughts marched to her feet. She must manage to get back to Mrs. Mark somehow tomorrow. She had put bread and milk and tea beside her and two tins of soup, and had filled the little spirit lamp freshly. If she could only find someone to go in every day — maybe Fanny would if she gave her a dollar more every week. She must get more money somehow. Maybe if she wrote to Francis he could send her a little.

Or maybe she could earn something somehow. She used to think she’d write songs. But what could she sing now? She had no song to sing. Songs could not be made out of the sort of days she lived. She could not even sing to Paul. She was living in deepest silence now that she knew she would pray no more. She strode on under the hot blue sky.

She had not prayed these last two days since the letter came. There was no use in it. Everything was stopped in her, every voice — even her own voice. The sky was blue emptiness, deeply, endlessly empty and blue. She stopped a moment to hear the utter stillness of the sky. But it was not quite still. There was a faint steady approaching drum of noise. That must be the plane. She turned her face up quickly. Far above her the silver flight went past, out of the sky and into the sky again. The sun poured its heat down upon her and she stood abandoned to it, her face turned upward. The sky was not empty. The sky was a sea for that ship to sail upon. She smiled, forgetting — That could be a song if she went on with it. Then she remembered that Rose was dead and she began to hurry again.

When she turned the bend of the road by the big elm she heard the noise. She was so used to silence heavy about the house that she could not believe it came from the house. Someone was shouting, a man’s voice, loud, hoarse, bellowing. She heard the crack of wooden furniture overturned. A woman’s voice screamed — a strange voice she did not know. She began to run. Noise was coming out of the silent house. Something had happened to Paul. She ran faster, her mouth dry, the perspiration upon her body stopped. The surrey was still standing at the side of the road. The horses were kicking and tossing their head at the flies, and they whimpered when they saw her. She ran across the grass. She could hear the voices, Bart’s father, Bart’s sullen voice, Bart’s mother begging, “Now Father—” The strange voice crying and crying, Sam’s complacent voice coaxing: “Let up, Pop — it’s done, isn’t it?” She ran into the open side door of the dining room, gasping. “Is Paul — is Paul—” and stopped.

Bart’s father and Bart were struggling together, and Bart’s mother and Sam were clinging to them and pulling at them. Sam was jerking at Bart, and his mother was hanging to the old man. Bart was standing, huge, stolid, warding off his father’s stiff clumsy blows. At the sound of her voice they parted. They were ashamed before her.

“Sit down!” Bart’s father roared.

Bart picked up the overturned chair and sat down sullenly. The old man sat, panting, and dusted off his clothes. Bart’s mother dropped into a chair and leaned her elbow on the table. They had not eaten. The table was still covered and there was no smell of cooking food.

Then she saw the girl, that silly coarse girl, the daughter of the tenant farmer over the next hill. She knew her. They were shiftless and let their cows run dry and the girl came sometimes for milk, not to the house but to the barn where Bart was milking. There she sat. She had painted her face and the paint was all smeared with crying. Her arms were bare and her hands were thick and red, like Bart’s hands. She did not look at Joan. None of them looked at her. But the noise stopped at the sound of her voice.

“Is Paul all right?” she asked again, sharply.

Bart’s mother lifted her head. “That’s all you think of!” she cried. “You don’t think of nothing but that dumb child—” Her heavy pale face was spotted with red. “You’ve ruined Bart!”

The girl began to cry again, foolish loud crying.

“I don’t know what you mean,” said Joan. The girl was staring down at her big red hands clenched in the lap of her pink cotton dress. She had seen girls like that. There were many girls like that. They came to Mr. Winters’ store oh Saturday mornings to buy fifty-nine-cent dresses, pink and blue.

“I’ll tell you what it means!” Bart’s father shouted at her suddenly, turning in his chair at her. “It means we came home from church and found Bart out lying in the hay with this girl! You and your fine ways, thinking you’re too fine for us — too fine to do your duty to Bart — you’ve driven him to it — he’s as good as had no wife for years!”

She stared at Bart. He sat there, his heavy inert body, his hair awry, his face thick and red, his great hands dangling between his knees. Bart and this girl — she was sick suddenly, her stomach writhing in her with sickness. His horrible thick heavy body. … The girl was wailing on and on. She wiped her hand across her nose on the edge of her sleazy white petticoat.

“Is Bart in love with this girl?” she asked.

“I don’t want any hifalutin talk!” Bart’s father shouted. He was panting as though he were still fighting. “If you’d done your duty as a wife—” His voice broke. He drew his sleeve across his forehead. “It’s an awful thing to happen in this house of a Godfearing churchgoing man,” he whispered, panting.

“Bart’s a good boy,” Bart’s mother began. “Bart’s a real good boy. My boys have been raised to be good boys.”

Bart coughed and wrapped his hands together and let them drop again. Sam tilted back on his chair. In his church clothes he looked neat and complacent beside Bart. Bart was in his old work shirt and trousers, his feet bare. But this morning when she went away he had on his blue Sunday suit.

Standing in the doorway, clinging to the door, she looked at them. They were waiting for her. They were all waiting for her, to see what she would do. But she did not know what to do. She looked around at them, and she was struck with their grief. They were grieving, this old man and woman. They were suffering, understanding no cause. They did not understand anything, not any more, really, than Paul did. But then, nobody understood why things happened to them. She could have touched their hands for the first time without repulsion and said, “Let’s be patient with each other because none of us knows why—”

But it was true. She had been unjust to Bart. She had done wrong to them all. She had come into this house of simple people, good people. Bart was not bad — he was only stupid. Ah, Paul helped her to understand them all — Paul, who was born as he was and not to be blamed.

“Yes,” she said. “You are right. I’ve done very wrong.” They looked at her astonished. They had not expected her to be gentle. She was not by nature gentle. But Paul had taught her to be gentle — she had learned how to be infinitely gentle.

Bart began to mumble. “I’m not—”

“I don’t blame you,” she went on quickly. “Don’t tell me, Bart. You — maybe this girl would have made you happy. I’ve injured you.”

The girl stopped crying and listened, her look upon Joan’s dusty shoes. Her coarse mouth was swollen and pouting, her small pale eyes were hidden behind their swollen lids. She looked like the girl who had come to the manse to be married, long ago—

“I won’t have divorce in this house!” said Bart’s father loudly. “That’s worse still. What God’s joined—”

“Bart and I aren’t joined — we can’t be — if we lived together all our lives we wouldn’t be joined.” They sat stupefied by her quiet voice. They were not able to understand. She turned from one bewildered face to the other. They understood meat, drink, work. But she went on. “I see how difficult I’ve been for you to bear.” She hesitated and went on quickly, forcing herself to smile. She made her voice bright as one makes one’s voice bright to speak pleasantly and resolutely to children. “I see it all so clearly. The only thing I can do for you is to go away. You can live as you did before I came. After a while you will forget I was ever here.”

Without waiting for them to answer, she ran through the room and up the back stairs to the attic. She must go away at once. She must not wait for Bart to come to her, sheepish, sullen, wanting her back. She must not wait until they laid hold on her to keep her so people would not know. Paul was whimpering for food, but she paid no heed to him. She would go by the cellar and get him some milk as she went out. She began to pack with frantic speed.

Where could she go in the world? There was no door anywhere hers to open. Then she thought of Mrs. Mark. She could go and stay with her — take care of her. In a week or two she could find something elsewhere. She’d put their clothes into a bundle — it would be easier to carry than a bag. She opened the round topped trunk and found the sandalwood box and took out all her money. That was comfort — it was her own. She put everything she was not able to take into the trunk and locked it. She would send for it. Now she must get away before they knew it. They would not believe she could go so soon. They would not imagine she would go on foot, carrying Paul. But she had her strong good body for servant.

She put a cap on Paul, picked him up and slipped her arm through the bundle and went softly down the front stairs and out the open door. She went around the porch to the cellar and filled a cup for Paul and put it to his mouth. She listened. Bart’s father was talking on and on. She held Paul to her and let him drink.

No one came after her. No one called. All about her was the rich silence of the lengthening autumn afternoon. She looked light. The sun was shining through the golden dusty air. An hour ago she had been walking this road, not dreaming of such a thing as she was doing. But now it was the one inevitable end ahead, into the sky. It was a deep empty bowl of pure blue to which life led her. She had been coming unaware down a long path alone and the path stopped at a gate, and she had opened the gate and closed it behind her forever, not knowing what was beyond.

She plodded steadily eastward. Paul slept again, content. By sunset she would be at Mrs. Mark’s cottage, at least by twilight.

The sun would swing its way around the world to bring another day. No cry or prayer of hers could stay or hasten the measure of the day and night. She knew it now and accepted all that had been her life. What had happened to her, she accepted. What was to come, she had strength to accept. She went steadily on, in freedom and alone, carrying her own burden.