BARREN GROUND

by

ELLEN GLASCOW

GROSSET & DUNLAP Publishers

by arrangement with Doubleday Page & Co.

CONTENTS

[Part First—Broomsedge]
Chapter [I]
Chapter [II]
Chapter [III]
Chapter [IV]
Chapter [V]
Chapter [VI]
Chapter [VII]
Chapter [VIII]
Chapter [IX]
Chapter [X]
Chapter [XI]
Chapter [XII]
Chapter [XIII]
Chapter [XIV]
Chapter [XV]
Chapter [XVI]
[Part Second—Pine]
Chapter [I]
Chapter [II]
Chapter [III]
Chapter [IV]
Chapter [V]
Chapter [VI]
Chapter [VII]
Chapter [VIII]
Chapter [IX]
Chapter [X]
Chapter [XI]
Chapter [XII]
Chapter [XIII]
Chapter [XIV]
Chapter [XV]
Chapter [XVI]
Chapter [XVII]
Chapter [XVIII]
Chapter [XIX]
[Part Third—Life-everlasting]
Chapter [I]
Chapter [II]
Chapter [III]
Chapter [IV]
Chapter [V]
Chapter [VI]
Chapter [VII]
Chapter [VIII]
Chapter [IX]
Chapter [X]
Chapter [XI]

PART FIRST
BROOMSEDGE

"A girl in an orange-colored shawl. . . ."

BARREN
GROUND

[I]

A girl in an orange-coloured shawl stood at the window of Pedlar's store and looked, through the falling snow, at the deserted road. Though she watched there without moving, her attitude, in its stillness, gave an impression of arrested flight, as if she were running toward life.

Bare, starved, desolate, the country closed in about her. The last train of the day had gone by without stopping, and the station of Pedlar's Mill was as lonely as the abandoned fields by the track. From the bleak horizon, where the flatness created an illusion of immensity, the broomsedge was spreading in a smothered fire over the melancholy brown of the landscape. Under the falling snow, which melted as soon as it touched the earth, the colour was veiled and dim; but when the sky changed the broomsedge changed with it. On clear mornings the waste places were cinnamon-red in the sunshine. Beneath scudding clouds the plumes of the bent grasses faded to ivory. During the long spring rains, a film of yellow-green stole over the burned ground. At autumn sunsets, when the red light searched the country, the broomsedge caught fire from the afterglow and blazed out in a splendour of colour. Then the meeting of earth and sky dissolved in the flaming mist of the horizon.

At these quiet seasons, the dwellers near Pedlar's Mill felt scarcely more than a tremor on the surface of life. But on stormy days, when the wind plunged like a hawk from the swollen clouds, there was a quivering in the broomsedge, as if coveys of frightened partridges were flying from the pursuer. Then the quivering would become a ripple and the ripple would swell presently into rolling waves. The straw would darken as the gust swooped down, and brighten as it sped on to the shelter of scrub pine and sassafras bushes. And while the wind bewitched the solitude, a vague restlessness would stir in the hearts of living things on the farms, of men, women, and animals. "Broomsage ain't jest wild stuff. It's a kind of fate," old Matthew Fairlamb used to say.

Thirty years ago, modern methods of farming, even methods that were modern in the benighted eighteen-nineties, had not penetrated to this thinly settled part of Virginia. The soil, impoverished by the war and the tenant system which followed the war, was still drained of fertility for the sake of the poor crops it could yield. Spring after spring, the cultivated ground appeared to shrink into the "old fields," where scrub pine or oak succeeded broomsedge and sassafras as inevitably as autumn slipped into winter. Now and then a new start would be made. Some thrifty settler, a German Catholic, perhaps, who was trying his fortunes in a staunch Protestant community, would buy a mortgaged farm for a dollar an acre, and begin to experiment with suspicious, strange-smelling fertilizers. For a season or two his patch of ground would respond to the unusual treatment and grow green with promise. Then the forlorn roads, deep in mud, and the surrounding air of failure, which was as inescapable as a drought, combined with the cutworm, the locust, and the tobacco-fly, against the human invader; and where the brief harvest had been, the perpetual broomsedge would wave.

The tenant farmers, who had flocked after the ruin of war as buzzards after a carcass, had immediately picked the featureless landscape as clean as a skeleton. When the swarming was over only three of the larger farms at Pedlar's Mill remained undivided in the hands of their original owners. Though Queen Elizabeth County had never been one of the aristocratic regions of Virginia, it was settled by sturdy English yeomen, with a thin but lively sprinkling of the persecuted Protestants of other nations. Several of these superior pioneers brought blue blood in their veins, as well as the vigorous fear of God in their hearts; but the great number arrived, as they remained, "good people," a comprehensive term, which implies, to Virginians, the exact opposite of the phrase, "a good family." The good families of the state have preserved, among other things, custom, history, tradition, romantic fiction, and the Episcopal Church. The good people, according to the records of clergymen, which are the only surviving records, have preserved nothing except themselves. Ignored alike by history and fiction, they have their inconspicuous place in the social strata midway between the lower gentility and the upper class of "poor white," a position which encourages the useful rather than the ornamental public virtues.

With the end of free labour and the beginning of the tenant system, authority passed from the country to the towns. The old men stayed by the farms, and their daughters withered dutifully beside them; but the sons of the good people drifted away to the city, where they assumed control of democracy as well as of the political machine which has made democracy safe for politics. An era changed, not rudely, but as eras do change so often, uncomfortably. Power, defying Jeffersonian theory and adopting Jeffersonian policy, stole again from the few to the many. For the good people, conforming to the logic of history, proceeded immediately to enact their preferences, prejudices, habits, and inhibitions into the laws of the state.

At Pedlar's Mill, where the old wooden mill, built a hundred years before by the first miller Pedlar, was now a picturesque ruin, a few stalwart farmers of Scotch-Irish descent rose above the improvident crowd of white and black tenants, like native pines above the shallow wash of the broomsedge. These surviving landowners were obscure branches of the great Scotch-Irish families of the upper Valley of Virginia. Detached from the parent tree and driven by chance winds out of the highlands, they had rooted afresh in the warmer soil of the low country, where they had conquered the land not by force, but by virtue of the emphatic argument that lies in fortitude.

James Ellgood, whose mother was a McNab, owned Green Acres, the flourishing stock farm on the other side of the railroad. It is true that an uncle in the far West had left him a small fortune, and for five years he had put more into the soil than he had got out of it. But in the end Green Acres had repaid him many times, which proved, as old Matthew, who was a bit of a philosopher, pointed out, that "it wa'n't the land that was wrong, but the way you had treated it."

On the near side of the station, secluded behind a barricade of what people called the back roads, which were strangled in mud from November to June, stood Five Oaks, the ruined farm of the Greylocks. Though the place was still held insecurely in the loose clutches of old Doctor Greylock, who resembled an inebriated Covenanter, the abandoned acres were rapidly growing up in sumach, sassafras, and fife-everlasting. The doctor had been a man of parts and rural prominence in his day; but the land and scarcity of labour had worn on his nerves, and he was now slowly drinking himself to death, attended, beyond the social shadow-line, by an anonymous brood of mulatto offspring.

Adjoining Five Oaks, and running slightly in front of it on one side, with a long whitewashed house situated a stone's throw from the main road, there was Old Farm, which belonged to Joshua Oakley and Eudora Abernethy, his wife. The Oakleys, as the saying ran in the neighbourhood, were "land poor." They owned a thousand acres of scrub pine, scrub oak, and broomsedge, where a single cultivated corner was like a solitary island in some chaotic sea.

Early in the nineteenth century, John Calvin Abernethy, a retired missionary from India and Ceylon, came from the upper Valley into the region of the Shenandoah, with a neat Scotch-Irish inheritance in his pocket. His reputation, as historians remark, had preceded him; and his subsequent career proved that he was not only an eloquent preacher of the Gospel, but a true explorer of the spirit as well, the last of those great Presbyterian romantics whose faith ventured on perilous metaphysical seas in the ark of the Solemn League and Covenant. Since there was no canny bargain to be driven, at the moment, in the Shenandoah Valley, John Abernethy regretfully left the highlands for the flat country, where he picked up presently, at a Dutch auction, the thousand acres of land and fifty slaves which had belonged to one William Golden Penner. One may charitably infer that the fifty slaves constituted a nice point in theology; but with ingenious Presbyterian logic and circumscribed Presbyterian imagination, John Calvin reconciled divine grace with a peculiar institution. The fifty slaves he sold farther south, and the price of black flesh he devoted to the redemption of black souls in the Congo. Dramatic, yet not altogether lacking in delicate irony. For he had observed in foreign fields that divine grace has strange gestures; and life, as even Presbyterians know, is without logic. To a thrifty theologian, bent on redemption with economy, there are few points of ethics too fine-spun for splitting. From which it must not be concluded that the first Virginian Abernethy was unworthy of his high calling. He was merely, like the rest of us, whether theologians or laymen, seasoned with the favourite fruit of his age. Though he might occasionally seek a compromise in simple matters of conduct, realizing the fall of man and the infirmity of human nature, where matters of doctrine were concerned his conscience was inflexible. His piety, running in a narrow groove, was deep and genuine; and he possessed sufficient integrity, firmness, and frugality to protect his descendants from decay for at least three generations. A few years after he had settled near Pedlar's Mill, a small Presbyterian church, built of brick and whitewashed within and without, rose on the far side of the railroad, where it stands now at the gate of Green Acres. Conversion, which had begun as a vocation with John Calvin Abernethy, became a habit; and with the gradual running to seed of the Methodists in the community, the Presbyterian faith sprang up and blossomed like a Scotch thistle in barren ground.

In his long white house, encircled by the few cultivated fields in the midst of his still-virgin acres, John Calvin Abernethy lived with learning, prudence, and piety until he was not far from a hundred. He had but one son, for unlike the Scotch-Irish of the Valley, his race did not multiply. The son died in middle age, struck down by an oak he was felling, and his only child, a daughter, was reared patiently but sternly by her grandfather. When, in after years, this granddaughter, whose name was Eudora, fell a victim of one of those natural instincts which Presbyterian theology has damned but never wholly exterminated, and married a member of the "poor white" class, who had nothing more to recommend him than the eyes of a dumb poet and the head of a youthful John the Baptist, old Abernethy blessed the marriage and avoided, as far as possible, the connection. Knowing the aptitude of the poor for futility, he employed his remaining years on earth in accumulating a comfortable inheritance for his great-grandchildren. When he was dead, his granddaughter's husband, young Joshua Oakley, worked hard, after the manner of his class, to lose everything that was left. He was a good man and a tireless labourer; but that destiny which dogs the footsteps of ineffectual spirits pursued him from the hour of his birth. His wife, Eudora, who resembled her grandfather, recovered promptly from the natural instinct, and revealed shortly afterwards signs of suppressed religious mania.

Of this union of the positive and the negative virtues, three children survived. Two of these were sons, Josiah and Rufus; the other was a daughter, Dorinda, the girl who, having thrown the orange shawl over her head, had come out of the store, and stood now with the snow in her face and her eager gaze on the road.

[II]

She was a tall girl, not beautiful, scarcely pretty even according to the waxen type of the 'nineties; but there was a glow of expression, an April charm, in her face. Her eyes were her one memorable feature. Large, deep, radiant, they shone beneath her black lashes with a clear burning colour, as blue as the spring sky after rain. Above them her jutting eyebrows, very straight and thick, gave a brooding sombreness to her forehead, where her abundant hair was brushed back in a single dark wave. In repose her features were too stern, too decisive. Her nose, powdered with golden freckles, was a trifle square at the nostrils; her mouth, with its ripe, bee-stung lower lip, was wide and generous; the pointed curve of her chin revealed, perhaps, too much determination in its outward thrust. But the rich dark red in her cheeks lent vividness to her face, and when she smiled her eyes and mouth lighted up as if a lamp shone within. Against the sordid background of the store, her head in the brilliant shawl was like some exotic flower.

Straight, tranquil, thin and fugitive as mist, the snow was falling. Though the transparent flakes vanished as soon as they reached the earth, they diffused in their steady flight an impression of evanescence and unreality. Through this shifting medium the familiar scene appeared as insubstantial as a pattern of frost on the grass. It was as if the secret spirit of the land had traced an image on the flat surface, glimmering, remote, unapproachable, like the expression of an animal that man has forced into sullen submission. There were hours at twilight, or beneath the shredded clouds of the sunrise, when the winter landscape reminded Dorinda of the look in the faces of overworked farm horses. At such moments she would find herself asking, with the intellectual thrill of the heretic, "I wonder if everything has a soul?" The country had been like this, she knew, long before she was born. It would be like this, she sometimes thought, after she and all those who were living with her were dead. For the one thing that seemed to her immutable and everlasting was the poverty of the soil.

Without knowing that she looked at it, her gaze rested on the bare station; on the crude frame buildings, like houses that children make out of blocks; on the gleaming track which ran north and south; on the old freight car, which was the home of Butcher, the lame negro who pumped water into the engines; on the litter of chips and shavings and dried tobacco, stems which strewed the ground between the telegraph poles and the hitching-rail by the store. Farther away, in the direction of Whippernock River, she could see the vague shape of the ruined mill, and beyond this, on the other side of the track, the sunken road winding in scallops through interminable acres of broomsedge. Though the snow had fallen continuously since noon, the air was not cold, and the white glaze on the earth was scarcely heavier than hoar-frost.

For almost a year now, ever since Mrs. Pedlar had fallen ill of consumption, and Dorinda had taken her place in the store, the girl had listened eagerly for the first rumble of the approaching trains. Until to-day the passing trains had been a part of that expected miracle, the something different in the future, to which she looked ahead over the tedious stretch of the present. There was glamour for her in the receding smoke. There was adventure in the silver-blue of the distance. The glimpse of a rapidly disappearing face; a glance from strange eyes that she remembered; the shadowy outline of a gesture; these tenuous impressions ran like vivid threads in her memory. Her nature, starved for emotional realities, and nourished on the gossamer substance of literature, found its only escape in the fabrication of dreams. Though she had never defined the sensation in words, there were moments when it seemed to her that her inner life was merely a hidden field in the landscape, neglected, monotonous, abandoned to solitude, and yet with a smothered fire, like the wild grass, running through it. At twenty, her imagination was enkindled by the ardour that makes a woman fall in love with a religion or an idea. Some day, so ran the bright thread of her dream, the moving train would stop, and the eyes that had flashed into hers and passed by would look at her again. Then the stranger who was not a stranger would say, "I knew your face among a thousand, and I came back to find you." And the train would rush on with them into the something different beyond the misty edge of the horizon. Adventure, happiness, even unhappiness, if it were only different!

That was yesterday. To-day the miracle had occurred, and the whole of life had blossomed out like a flower in the sun. She had found romance, not in imagination, not in the pallid fiction crushed among the tomes in her great-grandfather's library, but driving on one of the muddy roads through the broomsedge. To the casual observer there was merely a personable young man, the son of old Doctor Greylock, making the scattered rural calls of a profession which his father was too drunk to pursue. A pleasant young man, intelligent, amiable, still wearing with a difference the thin veneer of the city. Though he was, perhaps, a trifle too eager to please, this was a commendable fault, and readily overlooked in an irreproachable son who had relinquished his ambition in order to remain with his undeserving old father. Filial devotion was both esteemed and practised in that pre-Freudian age, before self-sacrifice had been dethroned from its precarious seat among the virtues; and to give up one's career for a few months, at most for a possible year, appeared dutiful rather than dangerous to a generation that knew not psychoanalysis.

And he was not only an admirable young man, he was, what admirable young men frequently are not, attractive as well. His dark red hair, burnished to a copper glow, grew in a natural wave; his sparkling eyes were brown-black like chinkapins in the autumn; his skin was tanned and slightly freckled, with a healthy glow under the surface; his short moustache, a shade lighter than his hair, lent mystery to a charming, if serious, mouth, and his smile, indiscriminating in its friendliness, was wholly delightful. To Dorinda, meeting him in the early morning as she was walking the two miles from Old Farm to the store, it was as if an April flush had passed over the waste places. She recognized love with the infallible certainty of intuition. It was happiness, and yet in some strange way it was shot through with a burning sensation which was less pleasure than pain. Though her perceptions were more vivid than they had ever been, there was an unreality about her surroundings, as if she were walking in some delicious trance. Beautiful as it was, it seemed to be vanishing, like a beam of light, in the very moment when she felt it flooding her heart. Yet this sense of unreality, of elusiveness, made it more precious. Watching the empty roads, through the veil of snow, she asked herself every minute, "Will he come this way again? Shall I wait for him, or shall I let him pass me in the road? Suppose he goes back another way! Suppose he has forgotten——"

The door behind her opened, and old Matthew Fairlamb came hobbling out with the help of his stout hickory stick. Though he was approaching ninety, he was still vigorous, with a projecting thatch of hair as colourless as straw and the aquiline profile of a Roman senator. In his youth, and indeed until his old age, when his son William succeeded him, he had been the best carpenter at Pedlar's Mill. His eyes were bleared now, and his gums toothless; but he had never lost his shrewd Scotch-Irish understanding or his sense of humour, which broke out in flashes as swift and darting as dry weather lightning.

"You'd better be startin' home, Dorinda," he remarked as he passed her. "The snow means to keep up, and yo' Ma will begin to worry about you." Turning, he peered at her with his cackling laugh. "Yo' face looks like a May mornin' to my old eyes," he added. "I ain't seen you about here fur a couple of weeks."

With her gaze still on the distance, Dorinda answered impatiently, "No, Ma had one of her bad spells, and I had to help out at home. But no matter how sick she is she never gives up, and she never worries about anything smaller than eternal damnation."

"Yes, she's a pious one," old Matthew conceded. "It's faith, I reckon, that's kept her goin', sence the Lord must know He ain't made it none too easy for her."

"Oh, it's hard work that she lives on," replied Dorinda. "She says if she were to stop working, she'd drop down dead like a horse that is winded. She never stops, not even on Sundays, except when she is in church."

Old Matthew's hilarity dwindled into a sigh. "Well, thar ain't much rest to be got out of that," he rejoined sympathetically. "I ain't contendin' against the doctrine of eternal damnation," he hastened to explain, "but as long as yo' Ma is obleeged to work so hard, 'tis a pity she ain't got a mo' restful belief." Then, as he observed her intent gaze, he inquired suspiciously, "You don't see nary a turnout on the road, do you?"

The dark red in the girl's cheeks brightened to carnation. "Why, of course not. I was just watching the snow."

But his curiosity, once aroused, was as insatiable as avarice. "I don't reckon you've seen whether young Doctor Greylock has gone by or not?"

She shook her head, still blushing. "No, I haven't seen him. Is anybody sick at your place?"

"It ain't that," returned the old man. "I was just thinkin' he might give me a lift on the way. It ain't more'n half a mile to my place, but half a mile looks different to twenty and to eighty-odd years. He's a spry young chap, and would make a good match for you, Dorinda," he concluded, in merciless accents.

Dorinda's head was turned away, but her voice sounded smothered. "You needn't worry about that." (Why did old age make people so hateful?) "I haven't seen him but once since he came home."

"Well, he'll look long befo' he finds a likelier gal than you. I ain't seen him more than a few times myself; but in these parts, whar young men are as skeerce as wild turkeys, he won't have to go beggin'. Geneva Ellgood would take him in a minute, I reckon, an' her Pa is rich enough to buy her a beau in the city, if she wants one. He! He!" His malicious cackle choked him. "They do say that young Jason was sweet on her in New York last summer," he concluded when he had recovered.

For the first time Dorinda turned her head and looked in his face. "If everybody believed your gossip, Mr. Fairlamb, nobody at Pedlar's Mill would be speaking to anybody else."

Old Matthew's mouth closed like a nut-cracker; but she saw from the twinkle in his bleared eyes that he had construed her reprimand into a compliment. "Thar's some of 'em that wouldn't lose much by that," he returned, after a pause. "But to come back to young Jason, he's got a job ahead of him if he's goin' to try farmin' at Five Oaks, an' he'll need either a pile of money or a hard-workin' wife."

"Oh, he doesn't mean to stay here. As soon as his father dies, he will go back to New York."

The detestable cackle broke out again. "The old man ain't dead yit. I've known some hard drinkers to have long lives, an' thar ain't nothin' more wearin' on the young than settin' down an' waitin' fur old folks to die. Young Jason is a pleasant-mannered boy, though he looks a bit too soft to stand the hard wear of these here roads. I ain't got nothin' to say aginst him, but if he'd listen to the warnin' of eighty-odd years, he'd git away before the broomsage ketches him. Thar's one thing sartain sure, you've got to conquer the land in the beginning, or it'll conquer you before you're through with it."

It was all true. She had heard it before, and yet, though she knew it was true, she refused to believe it. Whether it was true or not, she told herself passionately, it had no connection with Jason Greylock. The bright vision she had seen in the road that morning flickered and died against the sombre monochrome of the landscape.

"I must go in," she said, turning away. "I haven't time to stand talking." Old Matthew would never stop, she knew, of his own accord. When his cackle rose into a laugh the sound reminded her of the distant who—who—whoee of an owl.

"Well, I'll be gittin' along too," replied the old man. "My eyes ain't all they used to be, and my legs ain't fur behind 'em. Remember me to yo' Ma, honey, and tell her I'll be lookin' over jest as soon as the mud holes dry up."

"Yes, I'll tell her," answered the girl more gently. Old Matthew had known her great-grandfather; he had added the wings to the house at Old Farm and built the Presbyterian church on the other side of the track. In the prime of his life, forty years ago, he had been the last man at Pedlar's Mill to see Gordon Kane, her mother's missionary lover, who had died of fever in the Congo. It was old Matthew, Dorinda had heard, who had broken the news of Kane's death to the weeping Eudora, while she held her wedding dress in her hands. Disagreeable as he had become, it was impossible for the girl to forget that his long life was bound up with three generations of her family.

When she entered the store, she felt for a moment that she should suffocate in the heated air from the wood stove at the far end. The stuffy smell, a mingling of turpentine, varnish, bacon, coffee, and kerosene oil, was so different from the crystal breath of the falling snow that it rushed over her like warm ashes, smothering, enveloping. Yet there was nothing strange to her in the scene or the atmosphere. She was accustomed to the close, dry heat and to the heavy odours of a place where everything that one could not raise on a farm was kept and sold. For eleven months she had worked here side by side with Nathan Pedlar, and she was familiar with the usual stock-in-trade of a country store. In a minute she could put her hand on any object from a ploughshare to a darning needle.

"You'd better be going home early," said Nathan Pedlar, looking round from the shelf he was putting in order. "The snow may get heavier toward sunset."

He was a tall, lank, scraggy man, with a face that reminded Dorinda of a clown that she had once seen in a circus. Only the clown's nose was large and red, and Nathan's looked as if it had been mashed in by a blow. Aunt Mehitable Green, the coloured midwife, insisted that his features had been born like other children's, but that his mother had rolled on him in her sleep when he was a baby, and had flattened his nose until it would never grow straight again. Though he possessed a reserve of prodigious strength, he failed to be impressive even as an example of muscular development. Dorinda had worked with him every day for eleven months, and yet she found that he had made as little impression upon her as a pine tree by the roadside. Looking at him, she saw clearly his gaunt round shoulders beneath the frayed alpaca coat, his hair and eyebrows and short moustache, all the colour of dingy rabbit fur, and his small grey eyes with blinking lids; but the moment after he had passed out of her sight, the memory of him would become as fluid as water and trickle out of her mind. A kind but absurd man, this was the way she thought of him, honest, plodding, unassuming, a man whose "word was as good as his bond," but whose personality was negligible. The truth about him, though Dorinda never suspected it, was that he had come into the world a quarter of a century too soon. He was so far in advance of his age that his position inspired ridicule instead of respect in his generation. When his lagging age had caught up with Nathan Pedlar, it had forgotten what its prophet had prophesied. Though he made a comfortable living out of the store, and had put by enough to enable him to face old age with equanimity, he was by nature a farmer, and his little farm near the mill yielded a good harvest. Unlike most Southern farmers, he was not afraid of a theory, and he was beginning to realize the value of rotation in crops at a period when a cornfield at Pedlar's Mill was as permanent as a graveyard. Already he was experimenting with alfalfa, though even the prosperous James Ellgood made fun of "the weed with the highfalutin' name from the Middle West." For it was a part of Nathan's perverse destiny that people asked his advice with recklessness and accepted it with deliberation.

"I am going as soon as I speak to Rose Emily," Dorinda replied. "Did the doctor say she was better this morning?"

Nathan's hands, which were fumbling among the boxes on the long shelf, became suddenly still.

"No, he didn't say so," he answered, without turning. Something in his tone made Dorinda catch her breath sharply. "He didn't say she was worse, did he?"

At this Nathan pushed the boxes away and leaned over the counter to meet her eyes. His face was bleak with despair, and Dorinda's heart was wrung as she looked at him. She had often wondered how Rose Emily could have married him. Poverty would have been happiness, she felt, compared with so prosaic a marriage; yet she knew that, according to the standards of Pedlar's Mill, Nathan was an exceptional husband.

"Perhaps she'll pick up when the spring comes," she added when he did not reply.

Nathan shook his head and swallowed as if a pebble had lodged in his throat. "That's what I'm hoping," he answered. "If she can just get on her feet again. There's nothing this side of heaven I wouldn't do to make her well."

For an instant she was afraid he would break down; but while she wondered what on earth she could say to comfort him, he turned back to the boxes. "I must get this place tidied up before night," he said in his usual tone, with the flat, dry cough which had become chronic.

While she watched him, Dorinda threw the shawl back on one arm and revealed her fine dark head. The heavy eyebrows and the clear stern line of her features stood out as if an edge of light had fallen over them, leaving the rest of her face in shadow. She was wearing an old tan ulster, faded and patched in places, and beneath the hem her brown calico dress and mud-stained country shoes were visible. Even at Pedlar's Mill the changing fashions were followed respectfully, if tardily, and in the middle 'nineties women walked the muddy roads in skirts which either brushed the ground or were held up on one side. But shabbiness and a deplorable fashion could not conceal the slim, flowing lines of her figure, with its gallant and spirited carriage.

"I'm going to say a word or two to Rose Emily before I start," she said in a cheerful voice. "I don't mind being late." Walking to the end of the store, beyond the wood stove, which felt like a furnace, she pushed back a curtain of purple calico, and turned the knob of a door. Inside the room a woman was sitting up in bed, crocheting a baby's sacque of pink wool.

"I thought you'd gone, Dorinda," she said, looking up. "The snow is getting thicker."

Propped up among her pillows, winding the pink wool through her fragile hands, Mrs. Pedlar faced death with the courage of a heroic illusion. Before her marriage, as Rose Emily Milford, she had taught school in the little schoolhouse near Pedlar's Mill, and Dorinda had been her favourite pupil. She was a small, intelligent-looking woman, pitiably thin, with prominent grey eyes, hair of a peculiar shade of wheaten red, and a brilliant flush on her high cheek bones.

Ball after ball of pink wool unwound on the patchwork quilt, and was crocheted into babies' sacques which she sold in the city; but crocheting, as she sometimes said, "did not take your mind off things as well as moving about," and it seemed to her that only since she had been ill had she begun to learn anything about life. The nearer she came to death, the more, by some perversity of nature, did she enjoy living. If death ever entered her mind, it was as an abstraction, like the doctrine of salvation by faith, never as a reality. Every afternoon she said, "If it is fine, I shall get up to-morrow." Every morning she sighed happily, "I think I'll wait till the evening."

The room was a small one, divided off from the brick store, which adjoined the new frame house Nathan had built for his bride; and there was a confusion of colour, for Mrs. Pedlar's surroundings reflected the feverish optimism of her philosophy. The rag carpet and the patchwork quilt were as gay as an autumn flower-bed; the kerosene lamp wore a ballet skirt of crimson crape paper; earthen pots of begonias and geraniums filled the green wooden stands at the windows. On the hearthrug, before the open fire, three small children were playing with paper dolls, while the fourth, a baby of nine months, lay fast asleep in his crib, with the nipple of a bottle still held tight in his mouth.

"I'm glad I chose that orange colour for your shawl," said Mrs. Pedlar, in the excited manner that had come upon her with her rising temperature. "It goes so well with your black hair. You ought to be glad you're a big woman," she continued thoughtfully. "Somehow life seems to go easier with big women. I asked young Doctor Greylock if that wasn't true, and he said small women seemed to think so."

Dorinda laughed, and her laughter contained a thrill of joy. Some inward happiness had bubbled up and overflowed into her voice, her look, and her shy dreaming movements. There was sweetness for her in hearing of Jason Greylock; there was ecstasy in the thought that she might meet him again in the road. Yet the sweetness and the ecstasy were thin and far off, like music that comes from a distance. It seemed incredible that anything so wonderful should have happened at Pedlar's Mill.

In front of the fire, the three children (Minnie May, the eldest, was only ten) were busy with their paper dolls. They had made a doll's house out of a cracker box, with the frayed corners of the rug for a garden. "Now Mrs. Brown has lost her little girl, and she is going to Mrs. Smith's to look for her," Minnie May was saying impressively.

"You've got your hands full with those children," remarked Dorinda because she could think of nothing else that sounded natural. Her mind was not on the children; it was miles away in an enclosed garden of wonder and delight; but some casual part of her was still occupying her familiar place and living her old meaningless life.

"Yes, but they're good children. They can always amuse themselves. Minnie May cut those paper dolls out of an old fashion book, and the younger children are all crazy about them."

"Minnie May is a great help to you."

"Yes, she takes after her father. Nathan is the best man that ever lived. He never thinks of himself a minute."

"He gave me some sugar for Ma," Dorinda sighed as she answered, for the thought had stabbed through her like a knife that Rose Emily was dying. Here we are talking about sugar and paper dolls when she won't live through the summer.

"There's a pat of butter too," said Rose Emily. "I told Minnie May to put it in your basket. I don't see how your mother manages without butter."

"We've had to do without it since our cow died last fall. I'm saving up, after the taxes are paid, to buy one in the spring." Again the thought stabbed her. "As if cows made any difference when she has only a few months to live!" Were the trivial things, after all, the important ones?

"And Mrs. Brown found that her little girl had been run over and killed in the middle of the road," Minnie May whispered. "So she decided that all she could do for her was to have a handsome funeral and spend the ten dollars she'd saved from her chicken money. That's the graveyard, Bud, down there by the hole in the rug. Lena, stop twistin', or you'll pull it to pieces."

"Nathan says you can get a good cow from old Doctor Greylock for thirty dollars," said Mrs. Pedlar. "He's got one, that Blossom of his, that he wants to sell." Then an idea occurred to her and she concluded doubtfully, "Of course, everything may be changed now that Jason has come back."

"Yes, of course, everything may be changed," repeated Dorinda, and the words, though they were merely an echo, filled her with happiness. Life was burning within her. Even the thought of death, even the knowledge that her friend would not live through the summer, passed like a shadow over the flame that consumed her. Everything was a shadow except the luminous stillness, which was so much deeper than stillness, within her heart.

"He is just the same pleasant-mannered boy he used to be when I taught him," resumed Mrs. Pedlar. "You remember how mischievous he was at school."

Dorinda nodded. "I was only there a year with him before he went away."

"Yes, I'd forgotten. I asked him to-day if he remembered you, and he said he knew you as soon as he saw you in the road this morning." She paused for an instant while a vision flickered in her eyes. "It would be nice if he'd take a fancy to you, Dorinda, and I'm sure you're handsome enough, with your blue eyes and your high colour, for anybody to fall in love with, and you're better educated, too, than most city girls, with all the books you've read. I sent Minnie May to find you while he was here, but she brought Nathan instead; and the doctor had to hurry off to old Mrs. Flower, who is dying."

So they were all pushing them together! It was no wonder, thought Dorinda, since, as old Matthew said, young men were as scarce as wild turkeys, and everybody wanted to marry off everybody else. Almost unconsciously, the power of attraction was increased by an irresistible force. Since every one, even the intelligent Rose Emily, thought it so suitable!

"I've seen him only once since he came home," said the girl.

"Well, I told him about you, and he was very much interested. I believe he's a good young man, and he seems so friendly and kindhearted. He asked after all the coloured people he used to know, and he was so pleased to hear how well they are getting on. His father couldn't remember anything about anybody, he told me. I reckon the truth is that the old doctor is befuddled with drink all the time." She laughed softly. "Jason has picked up a lot of newfangled ideas," she added. "He even called broomsedge 'bromegrass' till he found that nobody knew what he was talking about."

"Is he going to stay on?"

"Just for a little while, he says, until he can get the place off his hands. What he meant but didn't like to say, I suppose, was that he would stay as long as his father lives. The old man has got Bright's disease, you know, and he's already had two strokes of paralysis. The doctor up at the Courthouse says it can't be longer than six months, or a year at the most."

Six months or a year! Well, anything might happen, anything did happen in six months or a year!

On the floor the children were busily pretending that the oblong hole in the rug was a grave. "Mrs. Brown bought a crape veil that came all the way down to the bottom of her skirt," Minnie May was whispering, alert and animated. "That paper doll in the veil is Mrs. Brown on the way to the funeral."

"Well, I'd better be going," Dorinda said, throwing the orange shawl over her head, while she thought, "I ought to have worn my hat, only the snow would have ruined my Sunday hat, and the other isn't fit to be seen."

Picking up the basket by the door, she looked over her shoulder at Rose Emily. "If the snow isn't too heavy, I'll be over early to-morrow, and help you with the children. I hope you'll feel better."

"Oh, I'm planning to get up in the morning," responded Rose Emily in her eager voice, smiling happily over the pink wool.

[III]

Outside, there was a little yard enclosed in white palings to which farmers tied their horses when the hitching-rail was crowded. Everything was bare now under the thin coating of snow, and the dried stalks of summer flowers were protruding forlornly from heaps of straw. Beyond the small white gate the Old Stage Road, as it was still called, ran past the cleared ground by the station and dipped into the band of pine woods beyond the Haney place, which had been divided and let "on shares" to negro tenants. Within the shadow of the pines, the character of the soil changed from the red clay on the hills to a sandy loam strewn with pine needles.

As Dorinda walked on rapidly, the shawl she wore made a floating orange cloud against the dim background of earth and sky. The snow was falling in larger flakes, like a multitude of frozen moths, and beneath the fluttering white wings the country appeared obscure, solitary, vaguely menacing. Though the road was quite deserted, except for the scarecrow figure of Black Tom, the county idiot, who passed her on his way to beg supper and a night's lodging at the station, the girl was not afraid of the loneliness. She had two miles to walk, and twilight was already approaching; but she knew every turn of the road, and she could, as she sometimes said to herself, "feel her way in the dark of the moon."

To-night, even if there had been wild beasts in the pines, she would not have turned back. A winged joy had risen out of the encompassing poverty and desolation. Though the world was colourless around her, there was a clear golden light in her mind; and through this light her thoughts were flying like swallows in the afterglow. Her old dreams had come back again, but they were different now, since they were infused with the warm blood of reality. She had found, in her mother's religious phraseology, a "kingdom of the spirit" to which she could retreat. She had only to close her eyes and yield herself to this clear golden light of sensation. She had only to murmur, "I wonder if I shall meet him again," and immediately the falling snow, the neglected fields, and the dark pines melted away. She was caught up, she was possessed, by that flying rapture which was like the swiftness of birds. With a phrase, with a thought, or by simply emptying her mind of impressions, she could bring back all the piercing sweetness of surrender.

And she had discovered the miracle for herself! No one, not even Rose Emily, had ever hinted to her of this secret ecstasy at the heart of experience. All around her people were pretending that insignificant things were the only important things. The eternal gestures of milking and cooking, of sowing and reaping! Existence, as far as she could see, was composed of these immemorial habits. Her mother, her father, her brother, Nathan and Rose Emily, all these persons whom she saw daily were engaged in this strange conspiracy of dissimulation. Not one of them had ever betrayed to her this hidden knowledge of life.

Beyond the old Haney place and the stretch of pines there were the pastures of Honeycomb Farm, where three old maids, Miss Texanna Snead, the postmistress, and her sisters Seena and Tabitha, who made dresses, lived on the ragged remnant of once fertile acres. Recently the younger brother William had returned from the West with a little property, and though the fortunes of the sisters were by no means affluent, the fields by the roadside were beginning to look less forlorn. A few bedraggled sheep, huddled together beyond the "worm" fence, stared at her through the hurrying snowflakes. Then, springing to their awkward legs, they wavered uncertainly for a minute, and at last scampered off, bleating foolishly. An old horse rested his head on the rails and gazed meditatively after her as she went by, and across the road several cows filed slowly on their way from the pasture to the cow-barn.

"That's a nice cow, that red one," thought Dorinda. "I wish she belonged to us," and then, with the inconsequence of emotion, "if I meet him, he will ask if he may drive me home."

There was the steady clop-clop of a horse's hoofs, and the rapid turning of wheels in the road behind her. Not for the world would she have slackened her pace or glanced over her shoulder, though her heart fluttered in her throat and she felt that she was choking.

She longed with all her soul to stop and look back; she knew, through some magnetic current, that he was pursuing her, that in a minute or two he would overtake her; yet she kept on rapidly, driven by a blind impulse which was superior to her will. She was facing the moment, which comes to all women in love, when life, overflowing the artificial boundaries of reason, yields itself to the primitive direction of instinct.

The wheels were grinding on a rocky place in the road. Though she hurried on, the beating of her heart was so loud in her ears that it filled the universe.

"I am going your way," he said, just as she had imagined he would. "Won't you let me drive you home?"

She stopped and turned, while all the glimmering light of the snow gathered in her orange shawl and deepened its hue. Around them the steep horizon seemed to draw closer.

"I live at Old Farm," she answered.

He laughed, and the sound quickened her pulses. She had felt this way in church sometimes when they sang the hymns she liked best, "Jesus, Lover of My Soul" or "Nearer, My God, to Thee."

"Oh, I know you live at Old Farm. You are Dorinda Oakley. Did you think I'd forgotten you?"

For an instant a divine dizziness possessed her. Without looking at him, she saw his eyes, black in the pallid snowflakes, his red hair, just the colour of the clay in the road, his charming boyish smile, so kind, so eager, so incredibly pathetic when she remembered it afterwards. She saw these disturbing details with the sense of familiarity which events borrow from the dream they repeat.

"I can't get out," he said, "because the mare is hungry and wants to go on. But you might get in."

She shook her head, and just as in every imaginary encounter with him, she could think of nothing to reply. Though her mind worked clearly enough at other times, she stood now in a trance between the rail fence, where the old horse was still watching her, and the wheel ruts in the road. By some accident, for which nothing in her past experience had prepared her, all the laws of her being, thought, will, memory, habit, were suspended. In their place a force which was stronger than all these things together, a force with which she had never reckoned before, dominated her being. The powers of life had seized her as an eagle seizes its prey.

"Come, get in," he urged, and dumb with happiness, she obeyed him.

"I remember you very well," he said, smiling into her eyes. "You were little Dorinda Oakley, and you once poured a bottle of ink on my head to turn it black."

"I know—" If she had been talking in her sleep, it could not have seemed more unreal. At this moment, when of all the occasions in her life she longed to be most brilliant and animated, she was tongue-tied by an immobility which was like the drowsiness, only far pleasanter, that she felt in church on hot August afternoons.

"You've grown so tall," he resumed presently, "that at first I wondered a bit. Were your eyes always as big as they are now?"

Though she was drowning in bliss, she could only gaze at him stupidly. Why did love, when it came, take away all your ability to enjoy it?

"I didn't know you were coming back so soon," she said after a struggle.

"Well, Father got in such a fix I had to," he answered, with a slight frown which made his face, she thought, more attractive. The haunting pathos, which she detected but could not explain, looked out of his eyes; the pathos of heroic weakness confronting insurmountable obstacles. "Of course it isn't for ever," he said in a surprisingly cheerful voice. "Father had a second stroke a few weeks ago, and they sent for me because there was nobody to see that he was taken care of. But as soon as he gets better, or if he dies," his tone was kind but impersonal, "I'll go back again and take up my work. I had just got my degree, and was starting in for a year's experience in a big hospital. Until I came I thought it was for a few days. The doctor telegraphed that Father wouldn't last out the week; but he's picked up, and may go on for a while yet. I can't leave him until he is out of danger, and in the meantime I'm trying to enlighten the natives. God! what a country! Nobody seems to ask any more of life than to plod from one bad harvest to another. They don't know the first principles of farming, except of course Mr. Ellgood, who has made a success of Green Acres, and that clownish-looking chap who owns the store. I wonder what the first Pedlar's were like. The family must have been in the same spot for a hundred and fifty years."

"Oh, they've been there always. But most of the other farmers are tenants. Pa says that's why the land has gone bad. No man will work himself to death over somebody else's land."

"That's the curse of the tenant system. Even the negroes become thrifty when they own a piece of land. And I've noticed, by the way, that they are the best farmers about here. The negro who owns his ten or twelve acres is a better manager than the poor white with twice the number."

"I know," Dorinda assented; but she was not interested in a discussion of farming. All her life she had heard men talk of farming and of nothing else. Surely there were other things he could tell her! "I should think it would be dreary for you," she added, with a woman's antipathy to the impersonal.

Turning to her suddenly, he brushed the snow-flakes from the fur robe over her knees. His gestures, like his personality, were firm, energetic, and indescribably casual. Against the brooding loneliness of the country his figure, for all its youthful audacity, appeared trivial and fugitive. It was as if the landscape waited, plunged in melancholy, for the passing of a ray of sunshine. Though he had sprung from the soil, he had returned to it a stranger, and there could be no sympathetic communion between him and the solitude. Neither as a lover nor as a conqueror could he hope to possess it in spirit.

"If I thought it was for ever, I'd take to drink or worse," he replied carelessly. "One can stand anything for a few weeks or even months; but a lifetime of this would be—" He broke off and looked at her closely. "How have you stood it?" he asked. "How does any woman stand it without going out of her head?"

Dorinda smiled. "Oh, I'm used to it. I even like it. Hills would make me feel shut in."

"Haven't you ever wanted to get away?"

"I used to think of it all the time. When I first went to the store, I was listening so hard for the trains that I couldn't hear anything else."

"And you got over it?"

Her lashes fluttered over the burning blue of her eyes. If only he could know how recently she had got over it! "Yes, I don't feel that way now."

"You've even kept your health, and your colour. But, of course, you're young."

"I'm twenty. When I'm forty I may feel differently. By that time I shan't have any books left to read."

He laughed. "By that time you'll probably begin listening again, harder than ever." He thought for a moment, and then added, with the optimism of inexperience, "While I'm here I'll try to get a few modern ideas into the heads of the natives. That will be worth while, I suppose. I ought to be able to teach them something in a few weeks."

If she had been older or wiser, she might have smiled at his assurance. As it was she repeated gently, innocent of ironical intention, "Yes, that will be worth while."

It was enough just to sit near him in silence; to watch, through lowered lashes, the tremor of his smile, the blinking of his eyelids, the way the pale reddish hair grew on the back of his neck, the indolent grasp with which he was holding the reins. It was enough, she felt, just to breathe in the stimulating smell of his cigarettes, so different from the heavy odour of country tobacco. And outside this enchanted circle in which they moved, she was aware of the falling snow, of the vague brown of the fields, of the sharp freshness of the approaching evening, of the thick familiar scents of the winter twilight. Far away a dog barked. The mingled effluvia of rotting leaves and manure heaps in barnyards drifted toward her. From beyond a fence the sound of voices floated. These things belonged, she knew, to the actual world; they had no place in the celestial sphere of enchantment. Yet both the actual and the ideal seemed to occur within her mind. She could not separate the scent of leaves or the sound of distant voices from the tumult of her thoughts.

They passed Honeycomb Farm, and sped lightly over a mile of rutted track to the fork of the Old Stage Road, where a blasted oak of tremendous height stood beside the ruins of a burned cabin. On the other side of the way there was the big red gate of Five Oaks, and beyond it a sandy branch road ran farther on to the old brick house. The snow hid the view now; but on clear days the red roof and chimneys of the house were visible above the willow branches of Gooseneck Creek. Usually, as the mare knew, the doctor's buggy turned in at the big gate; but to-day it passed by and followed the main road, which dipped and rose and dipped again on its way to Old Farm. First there was a thin border of woods, flung off sharply, like an iron fretwork, against the sky; then a strip of corduroy road and a bridge of logs over a marshy stream; and beyond the bridge, on the right, stood, the open gate of Dorinda's home. The mare stumbled and the buggy swerved on the rocky grade to the lawn.

"That's a bad turn," remarked Jason.

"I know. Pa is always hoping that he will have time to fix it. We used to keep the gate shut, but it has sagged so that it has to stay open."

"They ought to mend the bridge first. Those holes are dangerous for horses."

Again she assented. Why, she wondered vaguely, did he emphasize the obvious?

Within its grove of trees, in the midst of last summer's weeds, which were never cut, the long whitewashed house wore a forlorn yet not inhospitable air. Through the snow the hooded roof looked close and secretive; but there was the glimmer of a lamp in one of the lower windows, enormous lilac bushes, which must lend gaiety in April, clustered about the porch, and the spreading frame wings, added by old John Calvin Abernethy, still gave an impression of comfort. It was the ordinary Virginian farm-house of the early nineteenth century, built for service rather than for beauty; and retaining, because of its simplicity, a charm which had long since departed from more ambitious pieces of architecture.

"So we're home again," said Jason, glancing about him.

The buggy had come to a stop by the front steps, and regardless of the mare's impatience, he sprang to the ground and helped the girl to alight.

"Yes, it looks bare, doesn't it?"

She lifted her face to his as she answered, and while he looked down into her eyes, a quiver passed over his mouth under the short red moustache.

"Do you go over every day?" he asked. "Why haven't I met you before?"

She looked down. "Oh, I had to help out at home. But I've worked in the store ever since Mrs. Pedlar was taken ill. I get there about eight usually and stay until just before sunset."

"For which, I suppose, you receive an extravagant salary?"

She blushed at his whimsical tone. "They pay me ten dollars a month."

"Ten dollars a month!" A low whistle escaped his lips. "And you walk four miles a day to earn it."

"I don't mind the walk. In good weather I'd rather be out of doors. Besides somebody usually picks me up."

"Exactly. As I did this evening. If I hadn't, it would have been after dark when you got home. Well, I can help you while I'm here," he added carelessly. "I go that way every day, and I'll look out for you."

Again the dumbness seized her, and she stood there rooted like a plant, while he looked at her. For a moment, so intent was his gaze, she felt that he had forgotten her presence. It was not in the least as if he were staring at her shawl or her mud-stained ulster, or her broken shoes; it was not even as if he were looking at her eyes and thinking how blue they were. No, it was just as if he were seeing something within his own mind.

"I've known so few girls," he said presently, as if he were talking to himself, "but, somehow, you seem different." Then with delightful irrelevance, he added playfully, "Don't forget me. I shall see you soon."

After he had driven away, she stood gazing after him. Again the mare hesitated, again the wheels crunched on the rocky place. Then the buggy rolled over the bridge; she heard the sound of his voice as he avoided a hole; and a minute later the vehicle had disappeared in the border of leafless woods.

"Don't forget me. I shall see you soon."

Eight words, and the something different had at last happened to her! Everything around her appeared fresh and strange and wonderful, as if she were looking at it clearly for the first time. The snow wrapped her softly like a mist of happiness. She felt it caressing her cheek, and it seemed to her, when she moved, that her whole body had grown softer, lighter, more intensely alive. Her inner life, which had been as bare as a rock, was suddenly rich with bloom. Never again could she find the hours dull and empty. "Don't forget me. I shall see you soon," sang her thoughts.

[IV]

As she stepped on the porch, Rambler, an old black and yellow hound, with flapping ears and the expression of a pragmatic philosopher, stole out of the shadows and joined her.

"You'd better come in or Pa will begin to worry about you," she said, and her voice startled her because it did not sound as if it were her own. "I know you've been chasing rabbits again."

She wondered if the suppressed excitement showed also in her face, and if her mother, who noticed everything, would detect it. After she had entered the hall, which smelled of bacon and dried apples, she stopped and tried to rub the bloom of ecstasy off her cheeks. Then, followed sedately by Rambler, she passed the closed door of the parlour, which was opened only for funerals or when the circuit minister was visiting them, and went into the kitchen at the back of the house. The family must have heard the wheels, and it was a mercy, she told herself, that Rufus or Josiah had not come out to meet the buggy.

"Ma, Rose Emily sent you a pat of butter," she said, "and Nathan gave me two pounds of brown sugar."

Her eyes blinked in the light; but it was not the smoky flare of the lamp on the table that made the big kitchen, with its rough whitewashed walls, its old-fashioned cooking-stove, its dilapidated pine table and chairs, its battered pots and pans suspended from nails, its unused churn standing in the accustomed place on the brick hearth— it was not the lamp that made the room appear as unfamiliar as if she had never seen it before. Nor was it the lamp that cast this peculiar haziness, like a distant perspective, over the members of her family.

Mrs. Oakley, a tall, lean, angular woman, who had been almost beautiful for a little while forty years before, placed the coffee-pot on the table before she turned to look at her daughter. Under her sparse grey hair, which was strained tightly back and twisted in a small knot on her head, her face was so worn by suffering that a network of nerves quivered beneath the pallid veil of her flesh. Religious depression, from which she still suffered periodically, had refined her features to austerity. Her pale grey eyes, with their wide fixed stare, appeared to look out of caverns, and endowed her with the visionary gaze of a mystic, like the eyes of a saint in a primitive Italian painting. Years ago, while Dorinda was still a child, her mother had been for weeks at a stretch what people called "not quite right in her mind," and she had talked only in whispers because she thought the country was listening. As long as the spell lasted, it had seemed to the child that the farm-house crouched like a beaten hound, in the midst of the brown fields, beneath the menacing solitude. Since then she had never lost the feeling that the land contained a terrible force, whether for good or evil she could not tell, and there were hours when the loneliness seemed to rise in a crested wave and surge over her.

As she took the basket from her daughter, Mrs. Oakley's features softened slightly, but she did not smile. Only very young things, babies, puppies, chickens just out of the shell, made her smile, and then her smile was more plaintive than cheerful.

"Rufus can have his buckwheat cakes for breakfast," she said, without stopping in her movements from the table to the safe and from the safe to the stove.

She had worked so hard for so many years that the habit had degenerated into a disease, and thrift had become a tyrant instead of a slave in her life. From dawn until after dark she toiled, and then lay sleepless for hours because of the jerking of her nerves. She was, as she said of herself, "driven," and it was the tragedy of her lot that all her toil made so little impression. Though she spent every bit of her strength there was nothing to show for her struggle. Like the land, which took everything and gave back nothing, the farm had drained her vitality without altering its general aspect of decay.

"That's good!" exclaimed Rufus, a handsome boy of eighteen, with straight black hair, sparkling brown eyes, and the velvety dark red of Dorinda's lips and cheeks. He was the youngest child, and after he had been nursed through a virulent attack of scarlet fever, he had become the idol of his mother, in spite of a temperamental wildness which she made the subject of constant prayer. There was ceaseless contention between him and his elder brother, Josiah, a silent, hardworking man of thirty, with overhanging eyebrows and a scrubby beard which he seldom trimmed. After the birth of her first child there had been a sterile period in Mrs. Oakley's life, when her mental trouble began, and Dorinda and Rufus both came while she was looking ahead, as she told herself, to a peaceful middle age unhampered by childbearing.

"Sit down, Ma," said Dorinda, throwing her shawl on a chair and slipping out of her ulster, while Flossie, the grey and white cat, rubbed against her. "You look worn out, and it won't take me a minute. Have you been helped, Pa?" she asked, turning to the hairy old man at the end of the table.

"I ain't had my coffee yet," replied Joshua, raising his head from his plate. He was a big, humble, slow-witted man, who ate and drank like a horse, with loud munching noises. As his hair was seldom cut and he never shaved, he still kept his resemblance to the pictures of John the Baptist in the family Bible. In place of his youthful comeliness, however, he wore now an air of having just emerged from the wilderness. His shoulders were bent and slightly crooked from lifting heavy burdens, and his face, the little that one could see of it, was weatherbeaten and wrinkled in deep furrows, like the fissures in a red clay road after rain. From beneath his shaggy hair his large brown eyes were bright and wistful with the melancholy that lurks in the eyes of cripples or of suffering animals. He was a dumb plodding creature who had as little share in the family life as had the horses, Dan and Beersheba; but, like the horses, he was always patient and willing to do whatever was required of him. There were times when Dorinda asked herself if indeed he had any personal life apart from the seasons and the crops. Though he was not yet sixty-five, his features, browned and reddened and seamed by sun and wind, appeared as old as a rock embedded in earth. All his life he had been a slave to the land, harnessed to the elemental forces, struggling inarticulately against the blight of poverty and the barrenness of the soil. Yet Dorinda had never heard him rebel. His resignation was the earth's passive acceptance of sun or rain. When his crop failed, or his tobacco was destroyed by frost, he would drive his plough into the field and begin all over again! "That tobacco wanted another touch of sun," he would say quietly; or "I'll make out to cut it a day earlier next year." The earth clung to him; to his clothes, to the anxious creases in his face, to his finger nails, and to his heavy boots, which were caked with manure from the stables. The first time Dorinda remembered his taking her on his knee, the strong smell of his blue jeans overalls had frightened her to tears, and she had struggled and screamed. "I reckon my hands are too rough," he had said timidly, and after that he had never tried to lift her again. But whenever she thought of him now, his hands, gnarled, twisted, and earth-stained like the vigorous roots of a tree, and that penetrating briny smell, were the first things she remembered. His image was embalmed in that stale odour of the farm as in a preserving fluid.

"It's snowing faster," Dorinda said, "but it doesn't stay on the ground." Bending over her father, she covered the corn pone on his plate with brown gravy. "Maybe it will be clear again by to-morrow," she went on smoothly. "It's time spring was beginning."

Joshua's hand, which no amount of scrubbing could free front stain, closed with a heavy grip on the handle of his knife. "This brown gravy cert'n'y does taste good, honey," he said. "Yo' Ma's made out mighty well with no milk or butter."

A deep tenderness pervaded Dorinda's heart, and this tenderness was but a single wave of the emotion that flooded her being. "Poor Pa," she thought, "he has never known anything but work." Oh, how splendid life was and how hard! Aloud, she said, "I've saved up enough money to buy a cow in May. After I help you with the taxed and the interest on the mortgage, I'll still have enough left for the cow. Rose Emily says old Doctor Greylock will sell us his Blossom!"

"Then we can have butter and buttermilk with the ash cake!" exclaimed Rufus.

"I ain't so sure I'd want to buy that red cow of Doctor Greylock's," observed Josiah in a surly tone. That was his way, to make an objection to everything. He had, as his mother sometimes said of him, a good character but a mean disposition. At twenty he had married a pretty, light woman, who died with her first child; and now, after a widowerhood of ten years, he was falling in love with Elvira Snead, a silly young thing, the daughter of thriftless Adam Snead, a man with scarcely a shirt to his back or an acre to his name. Though Josiah was hardworking, painstaking, and frugal, he preferred comeliness to character in a woman. If it had been Rufus, Dorinda would have found an infatuation for Elvira easier to understand. Nobody expected Rufus to be anything but wild, and it was natural for young men to seek pleasures. The boy was different from his father and his elder brother, who required as little as cattle; and yet there was nothing for him to do in the long winter evenings, except sort potatoes or work over his hare traps. The neighbours were all too far away, and the horses too tired after the day's work to drag the buggy over the mud-strangled roads. Dorinda could browse happily among the yellowed pages in old Abernethy's library, returning again and again to the Waverley Novels, or the exciting Lives of the Missionaries; but Rufus cared nothing for books and had inherited his mother's dread of the silence. He was a high-spirited boy, and he liked pleasure; yet every evening after supper he would tinker with a farm implement or some new kind of trap until he was sleepy enough for bed. Then he would march upstairs to the fireless room under the eaves, where the only warmth came up the chimney from the kitchen beneath. That was all the life Rufus had ever had, though he looked exactly, Dorinda thought, like Thaddeus of Warsaw or one of the Scottish Chiefs.

In the daytime the kitchen was a cheerful room, bright with sunshine which fell through the mammoth scuppernong grapevine on the back porch. Then the battered pots and pans grew bright again, the old wood stove gave out a pleasant song; and the blossomless geraniums, in wooden boxes, decorated the window-sill. Much of her mother's life was spent in this room, and as a child Dorinda had played here happily with her corncob or hickory-nut dolls. Poor as they were, there was never a speck of dust anywhere. Mrs. Oakley looked down on the "poor white" class, though she had married into it; and her recoil from her husband's inefficiency was in the direction of a scrupulous neatness. She knew that she had thrown herself away, in youth, on a handsome face; yet she was just enough to admit that her marriage, as marriages go, had not been unhappy. Her unhappiness, terrible as it had been, went deeper than any human relation, for she was still fond of Joshua with the maternal part of her nature while she despised him with her intelligence. He had made her a good husband; it was not his fault that he could never get on; everything from the start had been against him; and he had always done the best that he could. She realized this clearly; but all the romance in her life, after the death of the young missionary in the Congo, had turned toward her religion. She could have lived without Joshua; she could have lived even without Rufus, who was the apple of her eye; but without her religion, as she had once confessed to Dorinda, she would have been "lost." Like her daughter, she was subject to dreams, but her dreams differed from Dorinda's since they came only in sleep. There were winter nights, after the days of whispering in the past, when the child Dorinda, startled by the flare of a lantern out in the darkness, had seen her mother flitting barefooted over the frozen ground. Shivering with cold and terror, the little girl had crept down to rouse her fathers who had thrown some garments over his nightshirt, and picking up the big raccoon-skin coat, had rushed out in pursuit of his demented wife. A little later Josiah had followed, and then Dorinda; and Rufus had brought sticks and paper from the kitchen and started a fire, with shaking hands, in their mother's fireplace. When at last the two men had led Mrs. Oakley into the house, she had, appeared so bewildered and benumbed that she seemed scarcely, to know where she had been. Once Dorinda had overheard Joshua whisper hoarsely to Josiah, "If I hadn't come up with her in the nick of time, she would have done it"; but what the thing was they, whispered about the child did not understand till long afterwards All she knew at the time was that her mother's "missionary" dream's had come back again; a dream of blue skies and golden sands, of palm trees on a river's bank, and of black babies thrown to crocodiles. "I am lost, lost, lost," Mrs. Oakley had murmured over and over, while she stared straight before her, with a prophetic gleam in her wide eyes, as if she were seeing unearthly visions.

They ate to-night, after Joshua had asked grace, in a heavy silence, which was broken only by the gurgling sounds Joshua and Josiah made over their coffee-cups. Mrs. Oakley, who was decently if not delicately bred, had become inured to the depressing tablet manners of her husband and her elder son. After the first disillusionment of her marriage, she had confined her efforts at improvement to the two younger children. They had both, she felt with secret satisfaction, sprung from the finer strain of the Abernethys; it was as if they had inherited from her that rarer intellectual medium in which her forbears had attained their spiritual being. There were hours when it seemed to her that the gulf between the dominant Scotch-Irish stock of the Valley and the mongrel breed of "poor white" which produced Joshua was as wide as the abyss between alien races. Then the image of Joshua as she had first known him would appear to her, and she would think, in the terms of theology which were natural to her mind, "It must have been intended, or it wouldn't have happened."

While the others were still eating, Mrs. Oakley rose from the food she had barely tasted, and began to clear the table. The nervous affection from which she suffered made it impossible for her to sit in one spot for more than a few minutes. Her nerves jerked her up and started her on again independently of her will or even of any physical effort. Only constant movement quieted the twitching which ran like electric wires through her muscles.

"Go and lie down, Ma. I'll clear off and wash up," Dorinda said. Her pity for her mother was stronger to-night than it had ever been, for it had become a part of the craving for happiness which was overflowing her soul. Often this starved craving had made her bitter and self-centred because of the ceaseless gnawing in her breast; but now it was wholly kind and beneficent. "If you would only stop and rest," she added tenderly, "your neuralgia would be better."

"I can't stop," replied Mrs. Oakley, with wintry calm. "I can't see things going to rack and ruin and not try to prevent it." After a minute, still moving about, she continued hopelessly, "It rests me to work."

"I brought the butter for you," returned Dorinda, in hurt tones, "and you didn't even touch it."

Mrs. Oakley shook her head. "I don't mind going without," she responded. "You must keep it for the boys."

It was always like that. The girl had sometimes felt that the greatest cross in her life was her mother's morbid unselfishness. Even her nagging—and she nagged at them continually—was easier to bear.

"I've got the water all ready," Mrs. Oakley said, piling dishes on the tin tray. "I'll get right through the washing up, and then we can have prayers."

Family prayers in the evening provided the solitary emotional outlet in her existence. Only then, while she read aloud one of the more belligerent Psalms, and bent her rheumatic knees to the rag carpet in her "chamber," were the frustrated instincts of her being etherealized into spiritual passion. When the boys rebelled, as they sometimes did, or Dorinda protested that she was "too busy for prayers," Mrs. Oakley contended with the earnestness of a Covenanter: "If it wasn't for the help of my religion, I could never keep going."

Now, having finished their meal in silence, they gathered in the chamber, as the big bedroom was called, and waited for evening prayers. It was the only comfortable room in the house, except the kitchen, and the family life after working hours was lived in front of the big fireplace, in which chips, lightwood knots, and hickory logs were burned from dawn until midnight. Before the flames there was a crooked brass footman, and the big iron kettle it supported kept up an uninterrupted hissing noise. In one corner of the room stood a tall rosewood bookcase, which contained the romantic fiction Dorinda had gleaned from the heavy theological library in the parlour across the hall. Between the front windows, which looked out on a cluster of old lilac bushes, there was the huge walnut bed, with four stout posts and no curtains, and facing it between the windows, in the opposite walls, a small cabinet of lacquer-ware which her great-grandfather had brought from the East. In the morning and afternoon the sunlight fell in splinters over the variegated design of the rag carpet and the patchwork quilt on the bed, and picked out the yellow specks in the engravings of John Knox admonishing Mary Stuart and Martyrs for the Covenant.

"The heavens declare the glory of God; and the firmament sheweth his handywork," read Mrs. Oakley in her high thin voice, with her mystic gaze passing over the open Bible to the whitewashed wall where the shadows of the flames wavered.

Motionless, in her broken splint-bottom chair, scarcely daring to breathe, Dorinda felt as if she were floating out of the scene into some world of intenser reality. The faces about her in the shifting firelight were the faces in a dream, and a dream that was without vividness. She saw Joshua bending forward, his pipe fallen from his mouth, his hands clasped between his knees, and his eyes fixed in a pathetic groping stare, as if he were trying to follow the words. The look was familiar to her; she had seen it in the wistful expressions of Rambler and of Dan and Beersheba, the horses; yet it still moved her more deeply than she had ever been moved by anything except the patient look of her father's hands. On opposite sides of the fireplace, Josiah and Rufus were dozing, Josiah sucking his empty pipe as a child sucks a stick of candy, Rufus playing with the knife he had used to whittle a piece of wood. At the first words of the Psalm he had stopped work and closed his eyes, while a pious vacancy washed like a tide over his handsome features. Curled on the rag carpet, Rambler and Flossie watched each other with wary intentness, Rambler contemplative and tolerant, Flossie suspicious and superior. The glow and stillness of the room enclosed the group in a circle that was like the shadow of a magic lantern. The flames whispered; the kettle hummed on the brass footman; the sound of Joshua's heavy breathing went on like a human undercurrent to the cadences of the Psalm. Outside, in the fields, a dog barked, and Rambler raised his long, serious head from the rug and listened. A log of wood, charred in the middle, broke in two and scattered a shower of sparks.

Prayers were over. Mrs. Oakley rose from her knees; Joshua prodded the ashes in his pipe; Josiah drew a twist of home-cured tobacco from his pocket, and cutting off a chew from the end of it, thrust it into his cheek, where it bulged for the rest of the evening; Rufus picked up a fishing pole and resumed his whittling. Until bedtime the three men would sprawl there in the agreeable warmth between the fireplace and the lamp on the table. Nobody talked; conversation was as alien to them as music. Drugged with fatigue, they nodded in a vegetable somnolence. Even in their hours of freedom they could not escape the relentless tyranny of the soil.

After putting away the Bible, Mrs. Oakley took out a dozen damask towels, with Turkey red borders and fringed ends, from her top bureau drawer and began to look over then. These towels were the possession she prized most, after the furniture of her grandfather, and they were never used except when the minister or a visiting elder came to spend the night.

"They're turning a little yellow," she remarked presently, when she had straightened the long fringe and mended a few places. "I reckon I might as well put them in soak to-night."

Rufus yawned and laid down his fishing-rod. "There ain't anything for me to do but go to bed."

"We all might as well go, I reckon," Joshua agreed drowsily. "It's gittin' on past eight o'clock, an' if the snow's off the ground, we've got a hard day ahead of us."

"I'll put these towels in soak first," his wife responded, "and I've got a little ironing I want to get through with before I can rest."

"Not to-night, Ma," Dorinda pleaded. While she spoke she began to yawn like the others. It was queer the way it kept up as soon as one of them started. Youth struggled for a time, but in the end it succumbed inevitably to the narcotic of dullness.

"I ain't sleepy," replied Mrs. Oakley, "and I like to have something to do with my hands. I never was one to want to lie in bed unless I was sleepy. The very minute my head touches the pillow, my eyes pop right open."

"But you get up so early."

"Well, the first crack of light wakes your father, and after he begins stirring, I am never able to get a wink more of sleep. He was out at the barn feeding the horses before day this morning." Dorinda sighed. Was this life?

"I don't see how you keep it up, Ma," she said, with weary compassion.

"Oh, I can get along without much sleep. It's different with the rest of you. Your father is out in the air all day, and you and the boys are young."

She went back to the kitchen, with the towels in her hand, while Dorinda took down one of the lamps from a shelf in the back hall, removed the cracked chimney, and lighted the wick, which was too short to burn more than an hour or two.

The evening was over. It was like every one Dorinda had known in the past. It was like every one she would know in the future unless—she caught her breath sharply—unless the miracle happened!

[V]

The faint grey light crept through the dormer-window and glimmered with a diffused wanness over the small three-cornered room. Turning restlessly, Dorinda listened, half awake, to the sound of her mother moving about in the kitchen below. A cock in the henhouse crowed and was answered by another. "It isn't day," she thought, and opening her eyes, she gazed through the window at the big pine on the hill. The sun rose over the pine; every morning she watched the twisted black boughs, shaped like a harp, emerge from obscurity. First the vague ripple of dawn, spreading in circles as if a stone had been cast into the darkness; then a pearly glimmer in which objects borrowed exaggerated dimensions; then a blade of light cutting sharply through the pine to the old pear orchard, where the trees still blossomed profusely in spring, though they bore only small green pears out of season. After the edge of brightness, the round red sun would ride up into the heavens and the day would begin. It was seldom that she saw the sunrise from her window. Usually, unless she overslept herself and her mother got breakfast without waking her, the men were in the fields and the two women were attending to the chickens or cleaning the house before the branches of the big pine were gilded with light.

"Poor Ma," Dorinda said, "she wouldn't wake me." But she was not thinking of her mother. Deep down in her being some blissful memory was struggling into consciousness. She felt that it was floating there, just beyond her reach, dim, elusive, enchantingly lovely. Almost she seized it; then it slipped from her grasp and escaped her, only to return, still veiled, a little farther off, while she groped after it. A new happiness. Some precious possession which she had clasped to her heart while she was falling asleep. Then suddenly the thing that she had half forgotten came drifting, through unclouded light, into her mind. "Don't forget me. I shall see you soon."

The sounds in the kitchen grew louder, and the whole house was saturated with the aroma of coffee and frying bacon. Beyond these familiar scents and sounds, it seemed to her that she smelt and heard the stirring of spring in the fields and the woods, that the movement and rumour of life were sweeping past her in waves of colour, fragrance, and music.

Springing out of bed, she dressed hurriedly, and decided, while she shivered at the splash of cold water, that she would clean her shoes before she went back to the store. The day was just breaking, and the corner where her pine dressing-table stood was so dark that she was obliged to light the lamp, which burned with a dying flicker, while she brushed and coiled her hair. Beneath the dark waving line on her forehead, where her hair grew in a widow's peak, her eyes were starry with happiness. Though she was not beautiful, she had her moments of beauty, and looking at herself in the greenish mirror, which reminded her of the water in the old mill pond, she realized that this was one of her moments. Never again would she be twenty and in love for the first time.

"If only I had something pretty to wear," she thought, picking up her skirt of purple calico and slipping it over her head. The longing for lovely things, the decorative instinct of youth, became as sharp as a pang. Parting the faded curtains over a row of shelves in one corner, she took down a pasteboard box, and selected a collar of fine needlework which had belonged to Eudora Abernethy when she was a girl. For a minute Dorinda looked at it, strongly tempted. Then the character that showed in her mouth and chin asserted itself, and she shook her head. "It would be foolish to wear it to-day," she murmured, and putting it back among the others, she closed the box and replaced it on the shelf.

"I'll black my shoes, anyway," she thought, as she hurried downstairs to breakfast. "Even if they do get muddy again as soon as I step in the road."

That was with the surface of her mind. In the depths beneath she was thinking without words, "Now that he has come, life will never again be what it was yesterday."

In the kitchen the lamp had just been put out, and the room was flooded with the ashen stream of daybreak. Mrs. Oakley was on her knees, putting a stick of wood into the stove, and the scarlet glare of the flames tinged her flesh with the colour of rusty iron. After a sleepless night her neuralgia was worse, and there was a look of agony in the face she lifted to her daughter.

"Why didn't you wake me, Ma?" Dorinda asked a little impatiently. "You aren't fit to get breakfast."

"I thought you might as well have your sleep out," her mother replied in a lifeless voice. "I'll have some cakes ready in a minute. I'm just making a fresh batch for Rufus."

"You oughtn't have made cakes, as bad as you feel," Dorinda protested. "Rufus could have gone without just as well as the rest of us."

Mrs. Oakley struggled to her feet, and picking up the cake lifter, turned back to the stove. While she stood there against the dull glow, she appeared scarcely more substantial than a spiral of smoke.

"Well, we don't have butter every day," she said. "And I can't lie in bed as long as I've got the strength to be up and doing. Wherever I turn, I see dirt gathering."

"No matter how hard you work, the dirt will always be there," Dorinda persisted. It was useless, she knew, to try to reason with her mother. One could not reason with either a nervous malady or a moral principle; but, even though experience had taught her the futility of remonstrance, there were times when she found it impossible not to scold at a martyrdom that seemed to her unnecessary. They might as well be living in the house, she sometimes thought, with the doctrine of predestination; and like the doctrine of predestination, there was nothing to be done about it.

With a sigh of resignation, she turned to her father, who stood at the window, looking out over the old geraniums that had stopped blooming years ago. Against the murky dawn his figure appeared as rudimentary as some prehistoric image of man.

"Do you think it is going to clear off, Pa?" she asked.

He looked round at her, prodding the tobacco into his pipe with his large blunt thumb. "I ain't thinkin', honey," he replied in his thick, earthy drawl. "The wind's settin' right, but thar's a good-size bank of clouds over toward the west."

"You'd better make Rufus take a look at those planting beds up by Hoot Owl Woods," said Josiah, pushing back his chair and rising from the table. "One of Doctor Greylock's steers broke loose yesterday and was tramplin' round up there on our side of the fence."

Rufus looked up quickly. "Why can't you attend to it yourself?" he demanded in the truculent tone he always used to his elder brother.

Josiah, who had reached the door on his way out, stopped and looked back with a surly expression. With his unshaven face, where the stubby growth of a beard was just visible, and his short crooked legs, he bore still some grotesque resemblance to his younger brother, as if the family pattern had been tried first in caricature.

"I've got as much as I can do over yonder in the east meadow," he growled. "You or Pa will have to look after those planting beds." Rufus frowned while he reached for the last scrap of butter. There would be none for his mother and Dorinda; but if this fact had occurred to him, and it probably had not, he would have dismissed it as an unpleasant reflection. Since he was a small child he had never lacked the courage of his appetite.

"What's the use of my trying to do anything when you and Pa are so set you won't let me have my way about it?" he asked. "I'd have moved those tobacco beds long ago, if you'd let me."

"Well, they've always been thar, son," Joshua observed in a peaceable manner. He stood in the doorway, blowing clouds of smoke over his pipe, while he scraped the caked mud from his boots. His humble, friendly eyes looked up timidly, like the eyes of a dog that is uncertain whether he is about to receive a pat or a blow. "Besides, we ain't got the manure to waste on new ground," Josiah added, with his churlish frown. "We need all the stable trash we can rake and scrape for the fields."

Mrs. Oakley, bringing a plate of fresh cakes as a peace offering, came over to the table. "Don't you boys begin to fuss again," she pleaded wearily. "It's just as much as I can do to keep going anyway, and when you start quarrelling it makes me feel as if I'd be obliged to give up. You'd just as well take all these cakes, Rufus. I can make some more for Dorinda by the time she is ready."

Dorinda, who was eating dry bread with her coffee, made a gesture of exasperated sympathy. "I don't want any cakes, Ma. I'm going to start washing up just as soon as you sit down and eat your breakfast. If you'd try to swallow something, whether you want it or not, your neuralgia would be better."

Mrs. Oakley shook her head, while she dragged her body like an empty garment back to the stove. From the way she moved she seemed to have neither bone nor muscle, yet her physical flabbiness was sustained, Dorinda knew, by a force that was indomitable.

"I don't feel as if I could touch a morsel," she answered, pressing her fingers over her drawn brow and eyes.

"Oh, Rufus can eat his head off, but he'll never work to earn his keep," Josiah grumbled under his breath.

"Well, I'm not a slave, anyway, like you and Pa," Rufus flared up. "I'd let the farm rot before it would be my master."

Josiah had pushed past his father in the doorway. A chill draught blew in, and out of the draught his slow, growling voice floated back. "Somebody's got to be a slave. If Ma didn't slave for you, you'd have to, I reckon, or starve."

He went out after his father, slamming the door behind him, and Dorinda, hurriedly finishing her breakfast, rose and began to clear the table. The sallow light at the window was growing stronger. Outside, there was the sound of tramping as the horses were led by to the trough at the well, and the crowing in the henhouse was loud and insistent. The day had begun. It was like every other day in the past. It would be like every other day in the future. Suddenly the feeling came over her that she was caught like a mouse in the trap of life. No matter how desperately she struggled, she could never escape; she could never be free. She was held fast by circumstances as by invisible wires of steel.

Several hours later, when she started to the store, the trapped sensation vanished, and the gallant youth within her lifted its head. There was moisture that did not fall in the air. A chain of sullen clouds in the west soared like peaks through a fog. Straight before her the red road dipped and rose and dipped again in the monotonous brown of the landscape. A few ragged crows flapped by over the naked fields.

Turning at the gate, which was never closed, she looked back at the house huddled beneath its sloping shingled roof under the boughs of the old locust trees. The narrow dormer-windows stared like small blinking eyes, shy and furtive, down on the square Georgian porch, on the flagged walk bordered by stunted boxwood, on the giant lilac bushes which had thriven upon neglect, and on the ruined lawn with its dead branches and its thicket of unmown weeds. In recent years the whitewashed walls had turned yellow and dingy; the eaves were rotting away where birds nested; and in June the empty chimneys became so alive with swallows that the whole place was faintly murmurous, as if summer stirred in the dead wood as well as in the living boughs.

Whenever she looked back upon it from a distance, she was visited again by the image of the house as a frightened thing that waited, shrinking closer to the earth, for an inevitable disaster. It was, as if the place had preserved unaltered a mood from which she herself had escaped, and occasionally this mood awoke in her blood and nerves and flowed through her again. Recollection. Association. It was morbid, she told herself sternly, to cherish such fancies; and yet she had never been able entirely to rid her memory of the fears and dreads of her childhood. Worse than this even was the haunting thought that the solitude was alive, that it skulked there in the distance, like a beast that is waiting for the right moment to spring and devour.

Bleak, raw, windswept, the morning had begun with a wintry chill. The snow of yesterday was gone; only an iridescent vapour, as delicate as a cobweb, was spun over the ground. Already, as she turned and went on again, the light was changing, and more slowly, as if a veil fluttered before it was lifted, the expression of the country changed with it. In the east, an arrow of sunshine, too pallid to be called golden, shot through the clouds and flashed over the big pine on the hill at the back of the house. The landscape, which had worn a discouraged aspect, appeared suddenly to glow under the surface. Veins of green and gold, like tiny rivulets of spring, glistened in the winter woods and in the mauve and brown of the fields. The world was familiar, and yet, in some indescribable way, it was different, shot through with romance as with the glimmer of phosphorescence. Life, which had drooped, flared up again, burning clear and strong in Dorinda's heart. It had come back, that luminous expectancy, that golden mist of sensation. "Don't forget me. I shall see you soon," repeated an inner voice; and immediately she was lost in an ecstasy without words and without form like the mystic communion of religion. Love! That was the end of all striving for her healthy nerves, her vigorous youth, the crown and the fulfilment of life! At twenty, a future without love appeared to her as intolerable as the slow martyrdom of her mother.

Beyond the gate there was the Old Stage Road, and across the road, in front of the house, ran the pasture, with its winding creek fringed by willows. Though this stream was smaller than Gooseneck Creek on the Greylocks' farm, the water never dried even in the severest drought, and a multitude of silver minnows flashed in ripples over the deep places. For a quarter of a mile the road divided the pasture from the wide band of woods on the left, and farther on, though the woods continued, the rich grass land was fenced off from several abandoned acres, which had been once planted in corn, but were now overgrown with broomsedge as high as Dorinda's waist. Sprinkled over the fields, a crop of scrub pine, grown already to a fair height, stood immovable in the ceaseless rise and fall of the straw. Though her eyes wandered over the waste ground as she passed, Dorinda was blind to-day to the colour and the beauty. What a pity you could never get rid of the broomsedge, she thought. The more you burned it off and cut it down, the thicker it came up again next year.

For a quarter of a mile the road was deserted. Then she came up with a covered wagon, which had stopped on the edge of the woods, while the mules munched the few early weeds in the underbrush. She had seen these vehicles before, for they were known in the neighbourhood as Gospel wagons. Usually there was a solitary "Gospel rider," an aged man, travelling alone, and wearing the dilapidated look of a retired missionary; but to-day there were two of them, an elderly husband and wife, and though they appeared meagre, chilled and famished, they were proceeding briskly with their work of nailing texts to the trees by the wayside. As Dorinda approached, the warning, "Prepare to Meet Thy God," sprang out at her in thick charcoal. The road to the station was already covered, she knew, and she wondered if the wagon had passed Jason at the gate by the fork.

Hearing her footsteps, one of the missionaries, a woman in a black poke bonnet, turned and stared at her.

"Good morning, sister. You are wearing a gay shawl."

Dorinda laughed. "Well, it is the only gay thing you will find about here."

With the hammer still in her hand, the woman, a lank, bedraggled figure in a trailing skirt of dingy alpaca, scrambled over the ditch to the road. "Yes, it's a solemn country," she replied. "Is there a place near by where we can rest and water the mules?"

"Old Farm is a little way on. I live there, and Ma will be glad to have you stop."

Such visitors, she knew, though they made extra work, were the only diversion in her mother's existence. They came seldom now; only once or twice in the last few years had the Gospel wagon driven along the Old Stage Road; but the larger trees still bore a few of the almost obliterated signs.

"Then we'll stop and speak a word to her. We'd better be going on, Brother Tyburn," observed the woman to her companion, who was crawling over the underbrush. "This don't look as if it was a much travelled road. Brother Tyburn is my husband," she explained an instant later. "We met when we were both doing the Lord's work in foreign fields."

Golden sands. Ancient rivers. Black babies thrown to crocodiles. Her mother's missionary dream had come to life.

"Were you ever in Africa?" asked Dorinda.

"Yes, in the Congo. But we were younger then. After Brother Tyburn lost his health, we had to give up foreign work. Did you say your house was just a piece up the road?"

"A quarter of a mile. After that you won't find anything but a few negro cabins till you come to the Garlicks' place, three miles farther on."

The man had already climbed into the wagon and was gathering up the reins; the mules reluctantly raised their heads from the weeds; and the woman lifted her skirt and stepped nimbly up on the wheel. After she had seated herself under the canvas, she leaned down, gesticulating with the hammer which she still held.

"Thank you, sister. Have you given a thought to your soul?" Wrapped in her orange shawl, Dorinda lifted her head with a spirited gesture.

"I joined the church when I was fifteen," she answered.

While she spoke she remembered vividly the way grace had come to her, a softly glowing ecstasy, which flooded her soul and made her feel that she had entered into the permanent blessedness of the redeemed. It was like the love she felt now, only more peaceful and far less subject to pangs of doubt. For a few months this had lasted, while the prosaic duties of life were infused with a beauty, a light. Then, suddenly, as mysteriously as it had come, the illumination in her soul had waned and flickered out like a lamp. Religion had not satisfied.

The wagon joggled on its way, and floating back, above the rumble of the wheels, there came presently the words of a hymn, at first clear and loud, and then growing fainter and thinner as the distance widened. Often Dorinda had sung the verses in Sunday School. The hymn was a favourite one of her mother's, and the girl hummed it now under her breath:

"Res-cue the per-ish-ing, care for the dy-ing,
Snatch them in pity from sin and the grave;
Weep o'er the err-ing one, lift up the fall-en,
Tell them of Je-sus, the migh-ty to save.
Res-cue the per-ish-ing, care for the dy-ing,
Je-sus is mer-ci-ful, Je-sus will save."

No, religion had not satisfied.

She was still humming when she reached the fork of the road. Then, glancing at the red gate of Five Oaks, she saw that Jason Greylock stood there, with his hand on the bar.

"I'd just got down to open the gate, when I looked up the road and saw you coming," he said. "I knew there wasn't another woman about who was wearing an orange shawl, and if there were, I'd wait for her just out of curiosity."

Though he spoke gaily, she felt, without knowing why, that the gaiety was assumed. He looked as if he had not slept. His fresh colour had faded; his clothes were rumpled as if he had lain down in them; and while she walked toward him, she imagined fancifully that his face was like a drowned thing in the solitude. If she had been older it might have occurred to her that a nature so impressionable must be lacking in stability; but, at the moment, joy in his presence drove every sober reflection from her mind.

"Is there anything the matter?" she asked, eager to help.

He looked down while the gate swung back, and she saw a quiver of disgust cross his mouth under the short moustache. Before replying, he led his horse into the road and turned back to lower the bar. Then he held out his hand to help her into the buggy.

"Do I look as if I'd had no sleep?" he inquired. "Father had a bad night, and I was up with him till daybreak."

Then she understood. She had heard tales from Aunt Mehitable, whose daughter worked at Five Oaks, of the old man's drunken frenzies, and the way his mulatto brood ran shrieking about the place when he turned on them with a horsewhip. Would Jason be able to rid the house of this half-breed swarm and their mother, a handsome, slatternly yellow woman, with a figure that had grown heavy and shapeless, and a smouldering resentful gaze? Well, she was sorry for him if he had to put up with things like that.

"I am sorry," she responded, and could think of nothing to add to the words, which sounded flat and empty. In front of her on the blasted oak she saw the staring black letters of the Gospel riders, "After Death Comes the Judgment." Depression crept like a fog into her mind. If only she could think of something to say! While they drove on in silence she became aware of her body, as if it were a weight which had been fastened to her and over which she had no control. Her hands and feet felt like logs. She was in the clutch, she knew, of forces which she did not understand, which she could not even discern. And these forces had deprived her of her will at the very moment when they were sweeping her to a place she could not see by a road that was strange to her.

"I suppose my nerves aren't what they ought to be," he said presently, and she knew that he was miles away from her in his thoughts. "They've always been jumpy ever since I was a child, and a night like that puts them on edge. Then everything is discouraging around here. I thought when I first came back that I might be able to wake up the farmers, but it is uphill ploughing to try to get them out of their rut. Last night I had planned a meeting in the schoolhouse. For a week I had had notices up at the store, and I'd got at least a dozen men to promise to come and listen to what I had to tell them about improved methods of farming. I intended to begin with crops and sanitation, you know, and to lead off gradually, as they caught on, to political conditions;—but when I went over," he laughed bitterly, "there was nobody but Nathan Pedlar and that idiot boy of John Appleseed's waiting to hear me."

"I know." She was sympathetic but uncomprehending. "They are in a rut, but they're satisfied; they don't want to change." He turned to look at her and his face cleared. "You are the only cheerful sight I've seen since I got here," he said.

The light had changed again and her inner mood was changing with the landscape. A feeling of intimate kinship with the country returned, and it seemed to her that the colour of the broomsedge was overrunning the desolate hidden field of her life. Something wild and strong and vivid was covering the waste places.

"I am glad," she answered softly.

"It does me good just to look at you. I ought to be able to do without companionship, but I can't, not for long. I am dependent upon some human association, and I haven't had any, nothing that counts, since I came here. In New York I lived with several men (I've never been much of a woman's man), and I miss them like the devil. I was getting on well with my work, too, though I never wanted to study medicine—that was Father's idea. At first I hoped that I could distract myself by doing some good while I was here," he concluded moodily; "but last night taught me the folly of that."

Though he seemed to her unreasonable, and his efforts at philanthropy as futile as the usual unsettling processes of reform, she felt passionately eager to comfort him in his failure. That she might turn his disappointment to her own advantage had not occurred to her, and would never occur to her. The instinct that directed her was an unconscious one and innocent of design.

"Well, you've just begun," she replied cheerfully. "You can't expect to do everything in the beginning."

He laughed. "I knew you'd say that. Even in New York they tell me I try to hurry nature. I'm easily discouraged, and I take things too hard, I suppose. Coming back here was a bitter pill, but I had to swallow it. If I'd been a different sort of chap I might have gone on with my work in New York, and let Father die alone there at Five Oaks. But when he sent for me I hadn't the heart or the courage to refuse to come. The truth is, I've never been able to go ahead. It seems to me, when I look back, that I've always been balked or bullied out of having what I wanted in life. I remember once, when I was a little child, I went out with Mother to gather dewberries, and just as I found the finest briar, all heavy with fruit, and reached down to pick it, a moccasin snake struck out at my hand. I got a fit, hysterics or something, and ever since then the sight of a snake has made me physically sick. Worse than that, whenever I reach out for anything I particularly want, I have a jumping of the nerves, just as if I expected a snake to strike. Queer, isn't it? I wonder how much influence that snake has had on my life?"

Though he laughed, his laugh was not a natural one and she asked herself if he could be in earnest. She was still young enough to find it difficult to distinguish between the ironically wise and the incredibly foolish.

"I wish I could help you. I'll do anything in the world I can to help you," she murmured in a voice as soft as her glance.

Their eyes met, and she watched the bitterness, the mingling of disappointment and mortification, fade in the glow of pleasure—or was it merely excitement?—that flamed in his face.

"Then wear a blue dress the colour of your eyes," he rejoined with the light-hearted audacity of the day before.

The difference in his tone was so startling that she blushed and averted her gaze.

"I haven't a blue dress," she replied stiffly, while her troubled look swept the old Haney place as they went past. In a little while they would reach the station. Even now they were spinning up the long slope, white as bone dust, that led to the store.

The change in his tone sent the blood in quivering rushes to her cheeks. She felt the sound beating in her ears as if it were music.

"Then beg, borrow, or steal one," he said gaily, "before I see you again."

His smile died quickly, as if he were unable to sustain the high note of merriment, and the inexplicable sadness stole into his look. Was it substance or shadow, she wondered. Well, whatever it was, it stirred a profound tenderness in her heart.

[VI]

When they parted at the station there was a dreaming smile on her lips; and though she tried to drive it away as she entered the store, she felt that the smile was still there, hovering about her mouth. A physical warmth, soft and penetrating, enveloped her like sunshine. And the miracle (for it was a miracle) had changed her so utterly that she was a stranger to the Dorinda of yesterday. Where that practical girl had been, there was now a tremulous creature who felt that she was capable of unimaginable adventures. How could she reflect upon the virtues of the red cow she would buy from old Doctor Greylock when she could not detach her mind from the disturbing image of Doctor Greylock's son? Over and over, she repeated mechanically, "Thirty dollars for the red cow"; yet the words might have been spoken by John Appleseed or his idiot boy, who was lounging near the track, so remote were they from her consciousness. Thirty dollars! She had saved the money for months. There would be just that much after the interest on the mortgage was paid. She had it put away safely in the best pickle-dish in the china press. Ten dollars a month didn't go far, even if it was "ready money." Then wear a blue dress the colour of your eyes. Beg, borrow, or steal one before I see you again. From whom or where had the words come? Something within herself, over which she had no control, was thinking aloud. And as if her imagination had escaped from darkness into light, a crowd of impressions revolved in her mind like the swiftly changing colours of a kaleidoscope. His eyes, black at a distance, brown when you looked into them. The healthy reddish tan of his skin. The white streak on his neck under his collar. The way his hair grew in short close waves like a cap. His straight red lips, with their look of vital and urgent youth. The fascinating curve of his eyebrows, which bent down when he smiled or frowned over his deep-set eyes. The way he smiled. The way he laughed. The way he looked at her.

Nathan had opened the store and was already sweeping the tracks of mud from the platform. Somebody was in the store behind him. He talked while he swept, jerking his scraggy shoulders with an awkward movement. Poor Nathan, he had as many gestures as a puppet, and they all looked as if they were worked by strings.

Then, as she hastened up the steps of the store, there occurred one of those trivial accidents which make history. Miss Seena Snead, attired for travelling in her best navy blue lady's cloth and her small lace bonnet with velvet strings, came out of the door.

"I'm runnin' down to Richmond to buy some goods and notions," she said. "Is there any errand I can do for you or yo' Ma?"

Out of that golden mist, the strange Dorinda who had taken the place of the real Dorinda, spoke eagerly: "I wonder—oh, I wonder, Miss Seena, if you could get me a blue dress?"

"A blue dress? Why, of course I can, honey. Do you want gingham or calico? I reckon Nathan has got as good blue and white check as you can find anywhere. I picked it out for him myself."

Dorinda shook her head. Her eyes were shining and her voice trembled; but she went on recklessly, driven by this force which she obeyed but could not understand. "No, not gingham or calico. I don't want anything useful, Miss Seena. I want cashmere—or nun's veiling. And I don't want dark blue. I want it exactly the colour of my eyes."

"Well, I declare!" Miss Seena looked as if she could not believe her ears. "Whoever heard of matchin' material by yo' eyes?" Then turning the girl round, she examined her intently. "I ain't never paid much attention to yo' eyes," she continued, "though I always thought they had a kind, pleasant look in 'em. But when I come to notice 'em, they're jest exactly the shade of a blue jay's wing. That won't be hard to match. I can carry a blue jay's wing in my mind without a particle of trouble. You want a new dress for spring, I s'pose? It don't matter whether a girl's a Methodist or an Episcopalian, she's mighty sure to begin wantin' a new dress when Easter is comin'. Geneva Ellgood ordered her figured challis yestiddy from one of them big stores in New York. She picked the pattern out of a fashion paper, and when the goods come, I'm goin' to spend a week at Green Acres, an' make it up for her. It is a real pretty pattern, and it calls for yards and yards of stuff. They say young Doctor Greylock was a beau of hers when she was in New York last summer, an' I reckon that's why she's buyin' so much finery. Courtin' is good for milliners, my Ma used to say, even if marriage is bad for wives. She had a lot of dry fun in her, my Ma had. Geneva is gettin' a mighty pretty hat too. She's bought a wreath of wheat and poppies, an' I'm takin' it down to Richmond to put on one of them stylish new hats with a high bandeau."

For an instant Dorinda held her breath while a wave of dull sickness swept over her. At that moment she realized that the innocence of her girlhood, the ingenuous belief that love brought happiness, had departed for ever. She was in the thick of life, and the thick of life meant not peace but a sword in the heart. Though she scarcely knew Geneva Ellgood, she felt that they were enemies. It was not fair, she told herself passionately, that one girl should have everything and one nothing! A primitive impulse struggled like some fierce invader in her mind, among the orderly instincts and inherited habits of thought. She was startled; she was frightened; but she was defiant. In a flash the knowledge came to her that habit and duty and respectability are not the whole of life. Beyond the beaten road in which her ideas and inclinations had moved, she had discovered a virgin wilderness of mystery and terror. While she stood there, listening to the gossip of the dressmaker, the passion that abides at the heart of all desperation inflamed her mind. She had learned that love casts its inevitable shadow of pain.

"I want a hat too, Miss Seena," she said quickly. "A white straw hat with a wreath of blue flowers round the crown."

Miss Seena lifted her spectacles to her forehead, and gazed at the girl inquiringly with her small far-sighted eyes. "I always thought you had too much character to care about clothes, Dorinda," she said, "but that jest proves, I reckon, that you never can tell. I s'pose youth is obleeged to break out sooner or later. But it will cost a good deal, I'm afraid. Wreaths are right expensive, now that they're so much worn. Yo' Ma told me the last time I was over thar that you were savin' all you made to help yo' Pa with the farm."

Her glance was mild, for she was not unsympathetic (when was a dressmaker, especially a dressmaker who was at the same time a sentimental spinster, unsympathetic about clothes?) but she wished to feel sure that Dorinda would not regret her extravagance after it was too late.

"You mustn't think that you can keep up with Geneva, honey," she added kindly but indiscreetly. "You're prettier than she is, but her Pa's the richest man anywhar about here, an' I reckon thar ain't much ugliness that money ain't able to cure."

The advice was wholesome, but Dorinda frowned and shook her head stubbornly. The shawl had slipped to her shoulders, and the sunlight, which was struggling through the clouds, brought out a bluish lustre on her black hair. Miss Seena, watching her closely, reflected that hair and eyes like those did not often go together. With this vivid contrast and the high colour in her lips and cheeks the girl appeared almost too conspicuous, the dressmaker decided. "It always seemed to me mo' refined when yo' eyes and hair matched better," she thought, "but I s'pose most men would call her handsome, even if her features ain't so small as they ought to be."