The hardest thing, she knew, that she had to face was not the wreck of

her happiness, but the loss of a vital interest in life. Even people who

were unhappy retained sometimes sufficient interest in the mere husk of

experience to make life not only endurable but even diverting. With her,

however, she felt that she had nothing to expect and nothing to lose.

One idea had possessed her so completely that now, when it had been torn

out from the roots like a dying nerve, there was no substitute for

happiness that she could put in its place. "I've finished with love,"

she repeated over and over. "I've finished with love, and until I find

something else to fill my life, I shall be only an empty shell. . . ."

Rising from the bed, she opened her bag and unfolded her dresses. None

of them would do for New York, she realized. All of them, she saw now,

were absurd and countrified. As she shook out the blue nun's veiling,

she said to herself, "If I hadn't bought this dress, perhaps he would

never have fallen in love with me, and than I should still be living at

Old Farm, and Ma would have her cow and nothing would have happened that

has happened." She laughed with the perverse humour that she had brought

back out of the depths of unconsciousness. If only one could get outside

of it and stand a little way off, how ridiculous almost any situation in

life would appear! Even those moments when she had waited in anguish at

the fork of the road were tinged with irony when they revived now in her

memory. "All the same I wouldn't go through them again for anything that

life could offer," she thought.

IV

Dorinda stood in Doctor Faraday's office and looked out into East

Thirty-seventh Street. Beneath her there was a grey pavement swept by

wind and a few pale bars of sunshine. She saw the curved iron railing of

the porch and the steps of the area, where an ashcan, still unemptied,

awaited the call of the ashcart. A fourwheeler, driven by a stout,

red-faced driver, was passing in the street; at the corner an Italian

youth with a hunchback was selling shoe-strings; on the pavement in

front of the house, a maltese cat, wearing a bell on a red ribbon,

sunned himself lazily while he licked the fur on his stomach. Overhead,

the vault of the sky appeared remote, colourless, as impenetrable as

stone.

When she turned into the house, she knew to weariness what she should

find awaiting her. A narrow oval room, with sand-coloured walls,

curtains of brown damask, and furniture of weathered oak, which was

carved and twisted out of all resemblance to her mother's cherished

pieces of mahogany. On the long tables piles of old magazines lay in

orderly rows. In the fireplace three neat gas logs shed a yellow flame

shot with blue sparkles. Very far apart, three patients were sitting,

with strained expectant eyes turned in the direction of the folding

doors which led into the inner office. In the last two years she had

learned to know the office and the street outside as if they were books

which she had studied at school.

Standing there, she thought idly of her new dress of navy blue poplin.

She knew that she looked well in it, that the severe white linen collar

and cuffs suited the grave oval of her face. Though she had lost her

girlish softness and bloom, she had gained immeasurably in dignity and

distinction, and people, she noticed, turned to look at her now when she

went out alone in the street. The severe indifference of her expression

emphasized the richness of her lips and the vivid contrast of her

colouring. Her eyes had lost their springtime look, but they were still

deeply blue beneath the black, shadows of her lashes. Young as she was

she had acquired the ripe wisdom and the serene self-confidence of

maturity; she had attained the immunity from apprehension which comes to

those only who can never endure the worst again. Yet she was not

unhappy. In the security of her disenchantment there was the quiet that

follows a storm.

While she waited there for the sound of the doctor's bell, she thought

dispassionately of what the last two years had meant in her life.

Everything and nothing! Her outward existence had been altered by them,

but to her deeper self they had been scarcely more than dust blowing

across her face. Dust blowing, that was all they had meant to her!

She lived the period over again in her recollection, as she might have

lived over one of the plays she had seen. She thought of the Faradays;

of her diffidence, of their kindness; of the English governess and the

French teacher, neither of whose speech was intelligible to her. She

recalled the morning breakfasts; the walks in the Park in the afternoon;

her nervous dread of the office; her first mistakes; the patience of the

doctor and Mrs. Faraday; the way she had gradually become one of the

family circle; the six small children, and especially the little girl

Penelope, who had taken a fancy to her from the beginning; the two

summers when she had gone to Maine with the family; the bathing, and how

strange she had felt coming out on the beach with no shoes on and skirts

up to her knees. Then she thought of Penelope's illness; of the sudden

attack of pneumonia while Mrs. Faraday was in bed with influenza; of the

days and nights of nursing because Penelope cried for her and refused to

take her medicine from the trained nurse; of the night when they thought

the child was dying, and how she had sat by the bed until the crisis at

dawn. Then of the crisis when it came. The quieter breathing; the way

the tiny hand fluttered in hers; the band of steel that loosened about

her heart; and Mrs. Faraday crying from her bed, "Dorinda, we can never

forget what you have done! You must stay with us always!" After that she

had grown closer to them. Where else could she go? Nowhere, unless she

went back to Pedlar's Mill, and that, she felt, was still impossible.

Some day she might go back again. Not yet, but some day, when her hate

was as dead as her love. There were moments when she missed Old Farm,

vivid moments when she smelt growing things in the Park, when she longed

with all her heart for a sight of the April fields and the pear orchard

in bloom and the big pine where birds were singing. But the broomsedge

she tried to forget. The broomsedge was too much alive. She felt that

she hated it because it would make her suffer again.

They missed her at home, she knew. Her father had not been well. He was

getting old. Every month she sent him half of her salary. They would not

have had that much if she had stayed at Pedlar's Mill; and then there

was the extra money at Christmas. Last Christmas the doctor had given

her a check for fifty dollars, and after Penelope's illness, they had

wished to give her more, but she had refused to let them pay her for

nursing the child. . . . There was a cow at home now, not the red one of

Doctor Greylock's, but a Jersey her father had bought from James

Ellgood. Her father's tobacco crop had done well last year, and he had

mended some of the fences. When the mortgage came due, she hoped he

would be able to meet it. She wondered if life had changed there at all.

Rose Emily was dead--that would make a difference to her. And Jason's

father, that horrible old man, was actually dying, her mother had

written. . . .

The doctor's bell rang, and she turned, while the folding doors opened,

to usher the next patient into the private office. Two women went in

together, while the doctor's assistant, a young physician named Burch,

led the remaining patient away for examination. She had grown to know

the young doctor well, and since last summer, when he spent his vacation

in Maine, she had suspected that he was on the verge, of falling in love

with her. Cautious, deliberate, methodical, he was in no danger, she

felt, of plunging precipitately into marriage. Doctor Faraday approved,

she was aware, and his wife had done all in her power to make the match;

but Dorinda had felt nothing stronger than temperate liking. Richard

Burch was not ugly; he was even attractive looking after you got used to

his features. He had a short, rather stocky figure, and a square, not

uninteresting face, a good face, Mrs. Faraday called it. Almost any girl

who had the will to love might have argued herself into loving him. That

emotion was, in part at least, the result of a will to love, Dorinda had

learned in the last two years, since she had picked up more or less of

the patter of science; and the last thing she wished to do, she assured

herself, was ever to live through the destructive process again. With a

complete absence of self-deception, she could ask herself now if she had

been in love with love when she met Jason Greylock, and if any other

reasonably attractive man would have answered as well in his place. Was

it the moment, after all, and not the man, that really mattered? If Bob

Ellgood had shown that admiring interest in her the year before instead

of the day after she met Jason, would her life have been different? Did

the importunate necessity exist in the imagination, and were you

compelled to work it out into experience before you could settle down to

the serious business of life?

She looked round as the door opened, and saw Doctor Burch coming out

with the two women patients.

"At ten to-morrow," the elder woman said, as she slipped on her fur

coat.

"Ten to-morrow," Dorinda repeated mechanically, while she went over to

the desk and wrote down the appointment in the office book. When she

turned away, the woman had gone, and Doctor Burch was gazing at her with

his twinkling, near-sighted eyes from behind rimless eyeglasses.

"There's one more to come," she observed in a brisk, professional tone.

"One more?"

"Patient, I mean."

"Oh, yes. That will finish them till we go out. You ought to thank your

stars you don't have to make calls."

"Yes. I get tired listening to complaints."

He smiled. "You aren't sympathetic?"

She thought of Rose Emily. "Well, I've seen so much real misery."

"It's real enough everywhere."

"Yes, I know. I suppose the truth is that life doesn't seem to me to be

worth all the fuss they make over it. The more they suffer, the harder

they appear to cling to living. I believe in facing what you have to

face and making as little fuss about it as possible."

"I've noticed that. You hate fussiness."

She assented gravely. "When you've been very poor, you realize that it

is the greatest extravagance."

"You've been very poor, then?"

"Almost everybody is poor at Pedlar's Mill. The Ellgoods are the only

people who have prospered. The rest of us have had to wring whatever

we've had out of barren ground. It was a struggle to make anything

grow."

"Well, your face gives you away," he said thoughtfully. "Any nerve

specialist could tell you that you are made up of contradictions. You've

got the most romantic eyes I ever saw--they are as deep as an autumn

twilight--and the sternest mouth. Your eyes are gentle and your mouth is

hard--too hard, if you don't mind my saying so."

"Oh, I don't mind. People say we make our mouths. I heard Doctor Faraday

tell a woman that a few days ago. But it isn't true. Life makes us and

breaks us. We don't make life. The best we can do is to bear it."

"And you do that jolly well."

She did not smile as she answered. "Oh, I'm satisfied. I'm not

unhappy--except in spots," she corrected herself.

"Yet you have very little pleasure. You never go out."

"Yes, I do--sometimes. Every now and then Mrs. Faraday takes me to the

theatre."

"Do you ever go to hear music?"

"No, Mrs. Faraday doesn't care for it." She laughed. "The best I've ever

heard was a band in the street."

For an instant he hesitated, and she wondered what was coming. Then he

said persuasively: "There's a good concert to-morrow. Would you care to

come?"

She glanced at him inquiringly. "Sunday afternoon?"

"Yes, there's this new pianist, Krause. You aren't too pious, are you?"

"I'm not pious at all." A satirical memory sifted through her mind, and

she heard her own voice saying, "Will you let her die without giving her

time to prepare?"

"Then I'll come for you at half-past two. We'll hear the concert, and

then have tea somewhere, or a stroll in the Park."

When he had gone, she put the office in order, and then waited until the

last patient should leave. After all, why shouldn't she try to find some

pleasure in life? Her hesitation had come, she felt, from a nervous

avoidance of crowds, a shrinking from any change in her secluded manner

of living. She hummed a line from one of the Gospel hymns. "Rescue the

perishing, care for the dying."

"How ignorant he will think me when he discovers I have never heard any

music. I am ignorant, yet I am educated compared to what I was two years

ago. I know life now, and that is a great deal."

The patient came out and left, and in a few minutes Doctor Faraday

passed through the room on his way to put on his overcoat.

"Are you going out before lunch?" she asked, because she knew Mrs.

Faraday hated to have him miss his meals.

"Yes, I can't wait, but I'll light a cigar."

He took out one of the long slender cigars he preferred, and stopped in

front of her while she struck a match and held her hand by the flame.

"That's a suitable young man, Dorinda," he remarked irrelevantly, with

his whimsical smile.

"Young man?" She glanced up inquiringly. Though her sense of humour had

developed almost morbidly, she had discovered that it was of a wilder

variety than Doctor Faraday's.

"I think, my dear girl," he explained, "that you could go farther and do

worse than take Richard. If I'm not mistaken, he has a future before

him."

She laughed. "There wouldn't be much for me in that sort of future."

"But there might be in the results." Then he grew serious. "He is

interested in you, and I hope something will come of it."

A pricking sensation in her nerves made her start away from him.

"Don't," she said sharply. "I've finished with all that sort of thing."

"Not for good. You are too young."

"Yes, for good. I can't explain what I mean, but the very thought of

that makes me--well, sick all over."

Her face had gone white, and struck by the change, he looked at her

closely. "Some women," he said, "are affected that way by a shock."

"You mean by a blow on the head?"

"No, I don't mean a physical blow. I mean an emotional shock. Such a

thing may produce a nervous revulsion."

"Well, that has happened to me."

He laid his hand on her shoulder. "It will pass probably. You are

handsomer than ever. It is natural that you should need love."

A wave of aversion swept over her face. "But 'I don't need it. I am

through with all that."

He looked at her gravely. "And you will fill your life--with what?"

She laughed derisively. How little men knew! "With something better than

broomsedge. That's the first thing that puts out on barren soil, just

broomsedge. Then that goes and pines come to stay--pines and

life-everlasting. You won't understand," she explained lightly. "I was

talking to Doctor Burch about Pedlar's Mill just before you came in, and

I told him we had to get our living from barren ground."

He patted her shoulder. "Well, I hope that, too, will pass," he answered

as he turned to put on his overcoat.

She remembered his words the next day while she sat in the concert

hall waiting for the music to begin. At first she had tried to

make out the names on the programme, desisting presently because

they confused her. Beethoven. Bach. Chopin. She went over the

others again, stumbling because she could make nothing of the syllables.

A-p-p-a-s-s-i-o-n-a-t-a. What did the strange word mean?

P-a-t-h-é-tique--that she could dimly grasp. Sonata? Nocturne? What

did the strange words mean? How could she be expected to know she had

never heard them before?

Suddenly, while she struggled over the letters, the music floated toward

her from the cool twilight of the distance. This was not music, she

thought in surprise, but the sound of a storm coming up through the tall

pines at Old Farm. She had heard this singing melody a thousand times,

on autumn afternoons, in the woods. Then, as it drew nearer, the harmony

changed from sound into sensation; and from pure sensation, rippling in

wave after wave like a river, it was merged and lost in her

consciousness.

In the beginning, while she sat there, rapt in startled apprehension,

she thought of innumerable things she had forgotten; detached incidents,

impressions which glittered sharply, edged with light, against the

mosaic of her recollections. Mellow sunshine, sparkling like new cider,

streamed over her. Music, which she had imagined to be sound only, was

changing into colour. She saw it first in delicate green and amber; then

in violent clashes of red and purple; but she saw it always as vividly

as if it reached her brain through her eyes. She thought first of the

evening sky over the bulrushes; of the grass after rain in the pasture;

of the pear trees breaking with the dawn from palest green into white.

Then the colours changed, and she remembered sunsets over the

broomsedge. The glow cast upward from the earth as if the wild grass

were burning. The bough of a black-gum tree emblazoned in scarlet on the

blue sky. The purple mist of autumn twilight, like the bloom on a grape.

The road home through the abandoned fields. The solitary star in a sky

which was stained the colour of ripe fruit. The white farm-house. The

shingled roof like a hood. Swallows flying. Swallows everywhere, a world

of swallows spinning like curved blades in the afterglow.

With the flight of wings, ecstasy quivered over her, while sound and

colour were transformed into rhythms of feeling. Pure sensation held and

tortured her. She felt the music playing on her nerves as the wind plays

on a harp; she felt it shatter her nerves like broken string, and sweep

on crashing, ploughing through the labyrinth of her soul. Down there, in

the deep below the depths of her being, she felt it tearing her vitals.

Down there, in the buried jungle, where her thoughts had never

penetrated, she felt it destroying the hidden roots of her life. In this

darkness there was no colour; there was no glimmer of twilight; there

was only the maze of inarticulate agony. . . .

Now it was dying away. Now it was returning. Something that she had

thought dead was coming to life again. Something that she had buried out

of sight under the earth was pushing upward in anguish. Something that

she had defeated was marching as a conqueror over her life. Suddenly she

was pierced by a thousand splinters of crystal sound. Little quivers of

light ran over her. Beads of pain broke out on her forehead and her

lips. She clenched her hands together, and forced her body back into her

chair. "I've got to stand it. No matter what it does to me, I've got to

stand it."

V

"I am afraid you found it difficult," Doctor Burch said, when it was

over. "It wasn't an easy programme. I wish there had been more of

Krause."

"I'm not sure I liked it," she answered wearily. "I feel as if I had

ploughed a field. It made me savage, just the way moonlight used to when

I was growing up."

"That is the pure essence of sensation. Now, I never get that response

to music. To me it is little more than an intellectual exercise. The

greatest musician I ever knew told me once that his knowledge of the

theory of music had, in a way, spoiled his complete enjoyment of a

concert."

She had refused tea, and they had strolled in the direction of the Park.

As she left the concert hall, it had seemed to her that she was stifling

for air, and now, when they entered the Park, she threw back her head

and breathed quickly, with her gaze on the bright chain of sky threading

the tree-tops.

"This smells like November at Old Farm," she said. "Whenever I smell the

country, I want to go home."

"Yours is a large farm?"

She laughed. "A thousand acres and we couldn't afford to buy a cow. Do

you know what it means to be land poor? After the war my father couldn't

hire labour, so he had to let all the land go bad, as we say, except the

little he could cultivate himself. The rest has run to old fields.

Everything is eaten up by the taxes and the mortgage. There are pines,

of course, and Nathan Pedlar tells us if we let the timber stand, it

will one day be valuable. Now we can't get a good price because the

roads are so bad it takes too many mules to haul it away. Once in a

while, we sell some trees to pay the taxes, but they bring so little. My

father cut down seven beautiful poplars at Poplar Spring; but when he

sold them he couldn't get but a dollar and a half for each one where it

fell. It doesn't seem worth while destroying trees for that."

"What do you do with the abandoned fields?"

"Nothing. Some people turn sheep into them, but my father says that

doesn't pay. The fields run to broomsedge and life-everlasting, and in

time pine and scrub oak get a good start."

"But they can be reclaimed. The land can be brought back, if it is well

treated."

"I know, but that takes labour; and Father and Josiah have as much work

as they can manage. There isn't any money to pay the wages of hands.

We've got some good pastures too. If only there was something to begin

with, we might have a dairy farm. Nathan Pedlar says, or a stock farm

like James Ellgood's. I wish I knew the science of farming," she

concluded earnestly. "Doctor Faraday says it is as much a science as

medicine."

It was The first time he had seen her deeply interested. Strange, the

hold the country could get over one!

"Is there any way I could learn farming from books?" Dorinda asked

before he could reply. "I mean learn the modern ways of getting the best

out of the soil?"

He smiled. "It all comes back to chemistry, doesn't it? That, I imagine,

is what Doctor Faraday meant--the chemistry of agriculture. Yes, there

are books you can study. I'll get you a list from a friend of mine who

is a professor in the University of Wisconsin. By the way, he is to give

a lecture on that very subject in New York next month. There is to be a

series of lectures. I'll find out about it and take you if you'll go

with me. You must remember, though, that practical experience is always

the best teacher."

She shook her head. "We have the experience of generations, and it has

taught us nothing except to do things the way we've always done them.

Mother used to say that the only land she would ever cultivate, if she

had to choose over again, is the land of Canaan where

'generous fruits that never fail,

On trees immortal grow!'"

He laughed. "I think I'd like your mother."

The casual remark arrested her. Would he really like her mother, she

wondered, with her caustic humour, her driven energy, her periodical

neuralgia, and her perpetual melancholy? Had he ever known any one who

resembled her? Had he ever known any woman whose life was so empty?

"Poor Ma!"--She corrected herself: "Poor Mother, the farm has eaten away

her life. It caught her when she was young, and she was never able to

get free."

"Doesn't she care for it?"

"I don't know. I sometimes think she hates it, but I know it would kill

her to leave it. It is like a bad heart. You may suffer from it, but it

is your life, and it would kill you to lose it." She broke off, pondered

deeply for a few moments, and then added impulsively, "If I had the

money, I'd go back and start a dairy farm there."

While she spoke a vision glimmered between the windy dusk in the Park

and the orange light of the afterglow. She saw it with an intensity, an

eagerness that was breathless;--the fields, the roads, the white gate,

the long low house, the lamp shining in the front window. For the first

time she could think of Old Farm without invoking the image of Jason.

For the first time since she had left home, she felt that earlier and

deeper associations were reaching out to her, that they were groping

after her, like the tendrils of vines, through the darkness and violence

of her later memories. Earlier and deeper associations, rooted there in

the earth, were drawing her back across time and space and

forgetfulness. Passion stirred again in her heart; but it was passion

transfigured, recoiling from the personal to the impersonal object. It

seemed to her, walking there in the blue twilight, that the music had

released some imprisoned force in the depths of her being, and that this

force was spreading out over the world, that it was growing wider and

thinner until it covered all the desolate country at Old Farm. With a

shock of joy, she realized that she was no longer benumbed, that she had

come to life again. She had come to life again, but how differently!

"I feel as if the farm were calling to me to come back and help it," she

said.

That night she dreamed of Pedlar's Mill. She dreamed that she was

ploughing one of the abandoned fields, where the ghostly scent of the

life-everlasting reminded her of the smell of her mother's flowered

bandbox when she took it out of the closet on Sunday mornings--the aroma

of countless dead and forgotten Sabbaths. Dan and Beersheba were

harnessed to the plough, and when they had finished one furrow, they

turned and looked back at her before they began another. "You'll never

get this done if you plough a hundred years," they said, "because there

is nothing here but thistles, and you can't plough thistles under." Then

she looked round her and saw that they were right. As far as she could

see, on every side, the field was filled with prickly purple thistles,

and every thistle was wearing the face of Jason. A million thistles, and

every thistle looked up at her with the eyes of Jason! She turned the

plough where they grew thickest, trampling them down, uprooting them,

ploughing them under with all her strength; but always when they went

into the soil, they cropped up again. Millions of purple flaunting

heads! Millions of faces! They sprang up everywhere; in the deep furrow

that the plough had cut; in the dun-coloured clods of the upturned

earth; under the feet of the horses; under her own feet, springing back,

as if they were set on wire stems, as soon as she had crushed them into

the ground. "I am going to plough them under, if it kills me," she said

aloud; and then she awoke. A chill wind was blowing the white curtains

at the window. Was it only her imagination, or did the wind, blowing

over the city, bring the fragrance of pine and life-everlasting? For an

instant, scarcely longer than a quick breath, she felt a sensation of

physical nearness, as if some one had touched her. Then it vanished,

leaving her in a shudder of memory. It was not love; of this she was

positive. Was it hate which had assumed, in the moment between sleep and

waking, the physical intensity of love? It was the first time she had

dreamed of Jason. Long after she had ceased to think of him, she told

herself resentfully.

The next morning, when office hours were over, she went to the library

and asked for a list of books on dairy farming. She read with eagerness

every one that was given to her, patiently making notes, keeping in her

mind the peculiar situation at Old Farm. When Doctor Burch arranged for

the course of lectures, she attended them regularly, adding, with

diligence, whatever she could to her knowledge of methods; gleaning,

winnowing, storing away in her memory the facts which she thought might

some day be useful. Before her always were the neglected fields. She saw

the renewal of promise in the land; the sowing of the grain, the

springing up, the ripening, the immemorial celebration of the harvest.

She saw the yellowing waves of wheat, the poetic even swath falling

after the mower. "All that land," she thought, "all that land wasted!"

The possibility of the dairy farm haunted her mind. Enterprise,

industry, and a little capital with which to begin! That was all that

one needed. If she could start with a few cows, six perhaps, and do all

the work of the dairy herself, it might be managed. But Old Farm must be

made to pay, she decided emphatically. Old Farm with a thousand acres

could supply sufficient pasture and fodder for as many cows as she would

ever be likely to own. "If I could get the labour it wouldn't be so

hard," she thought one day, while she was sitting by the window in the

nursery. "If I could buy the cows and hire a little extra labour, it

wouldn't be impossible to make a success." Then her spirit drooped. "You

can't do anything without a little money," she thought, and laughed

aloud. "Not much, but a little makes all the difference."

"What are you laughing at, Dorinda?" asked Mrs. Faraday, turning from

the crib, where she was bending over the baby.

"I was thinking I'd give anything I've got for six--no, a dozen cows."

"Cows?"

"At Old Farm. It hurts me to think of all that land wasted."

"It is a pity. I suppose it was good land once?"

"In great-grandfather's day it was one of the best farms in that part of

the country. Of course he never cultivated much of it. He let a lot of

it stand in timber. That's what we paid the taxes with right after the

war. Father and Josiah do the best they can," she added, "but everything

is always against them. Some people are like that, you know."

"It's a bad way to be," commented Mrs. Faraday, and she asked presently,

"What would you like to do with the farm?"

Dorinda's cheeks flushed as she answered. "First, if I had the money,

I'd try to bring up the fields. I'd sow cowpeas and turn them under

this year wherever I could. Then I'd add to the pasture. We can easily

do that, and in a little while we could get a good stand of grass. Then

I'd buy some cows from James Ellgood, some of his Jerseys, and try to

set up a dairy farm, a very little one, but I wouldn't let anybody touch

the milk and butter except Mother and myself. I wouldn't be satisfied

with anything that wasn't better than the best," she concluded, with an

energy that was characteristic of the earlier Dorinda.

"And you'd sell your butter--where?"

For an instant this dampened the girl's enthusiasm. How funny that she

had never once thought of that!

"Oh, well, we're near enough to Richmond or Washington," she said. "The

road to the station is bad, but it is only two miles. We could churn one

day and send the butter out before sunrise the next morning."

Mrs. Faraday looked at her sympathetically. "I could help you in

Washington," she said. "I've a friend there who owns one of the biggest

hotels. The manager would take your butter, I know, and eggs too, if

they are the very best that can be bought. And you'd ask a large price.

People are always willing to pay for the best."

Dorinda sighed. "It's just like a fairy tale," she said, "but, of

course, it is utterly out of the question."

"Well, I don't see why." Mrs. Faraday lifted the baby from the crib and

sat down to nurse it. "We would lend you the money you needed to start

with. After all you've done for Penelope, we'd be only too glad to do

that in return. But it would be drudgery, even if you succeeded, and you

ought not to look forward to that. You ought to marry, my dear."

Dorinda flinched. "Oh, I've finished with all that!"

"But you haven't. You're too young to give up that side of life."

"I don't care. I'm through with it," repeated Dorinda, and she meant it.

"Well, just remember that we are ready to help you at any time. It would

mean nothing to us to invest a few thousand dollars in your farm. You

could pay us back when you succeeded."

"And I could pay you interest all the time."

"Of course--if it would make you feel easier. Only don't let your

foolish pride stand in the way of achieving something in the end."

Dorinda gazed thoughtfully out of the window. Her pride was foolish, she

supposed, but it was all that she had. With nothing else to fall back

on, she had taken refuge in an exaggerated sense of independence.

"You are so capable," Mrs. Faraday was saying, "that I am sure you will

never fail in anything that you undertake. The doctor was telling me

only yesterday that, for a woman without special training, your

efficiency is really remarkable. It isn't often the girls of your age

are so practical."

A laugh without merriment broke from Dorinda's lips. "That would please

my mother," she said. "They used to say at Old Farm that my head was

full of notions."

"Most young girls' are. But you were fortunate to settle down as

soon as you did."

Without replying, Dorinda stared at the baby in Mrs. Faraday's arms. It

was a fat, pink baby, with a round face in which the features were like

tiny flowers, and a bald head, as clear and smooth as an egg shell. When

it laughed back at her, the pink face crumpled up and it gurgled with

toothless gums.

"If you've ever been poor, you can't get over the dread of having to

borrow," she answered after a pause.

For the next few months, while she read books and attended lectures

without understanding them, the idea of the country worked like leaven

in Dorinda's imagination. Gradually, though she was unprepared for the

change in her attitude, some involuntary force was driving her back to

Old Farm. Problems that had appeared inexplicable became as simple as

arithmetic; obstacles that had looked like mountains evaporated into

mist as she approached them. "I couldn't let them do it," she would

declare, adding a minute later, with weakening obstinacy, "After all, it

isn't as if they were giving me the money. I can always pay them in the

end, even if I have to mortgage the farm."

As the winter passed, she saw more and more of Burch. She liked him; she

enjoyed her walks with him; his friendship had become a substantial

interest in her life; but she realized now and then, when he

accidentally touched her hand, that every nerve in her body said, "So

far and no farther" to human intercourse. Her revulsion from the

physical aspect of love was a matter of the nerves, she knew, for more

than two years under the roof of a great surgeon had taught her

something deeper than the patter of science. Yet, though her shrinking

was of the nerves only, it was none the less real. One side of her was

still dead. The insensibility of the last two years, which had made her

tell herself at moments that she could not feel the prick of a pin in

her flesh, had worn off slowly from that area of her mind which was

superior to the emotions. But the thought of love, the faintest reminder

of its potency, filled her with aversion, with an inexpressible

weariness. She simply could not bear, she told herself bluntly, to be

touched.

"There must be something in life besides love," she thought, in revolt

from the universal harping upon a single string. Watching the people in

the street, she would find herself thinking, "That woman looks as if she

lived without love, but she doesn't look unhappy. She must have found

something else." Then, with the vision of Old Farm in her mind, she

would reflect exultantly: "There is something else for me also. Love

isn't everything."

"Do you know, I've almost decided to go home," she said to Doctor Burch

one day in April, when they were sitting in the Park. "Did you see those

lilacs in the florists' windows as we passed? It is lilac time at Old

Farm now, and the big bushes in the corner of the west wing are all in

bloom. They are so old that they reach to the roof, and the catbirds

build in them every year." She lifted her head and looked at the

delicate pattern of the elms against the pale sky. How cold and thin

spring was in the North!

"You mean you'll go back and begin farming?"

"I mean I can't stay away any longer. I'm part of it. I belong to the

abandoned fields."

"Will you let me come?" he asked abruptly.

Her hand lay, palm upward, in her lap, and as he asked the question, his

fingers closed caressingly over hers. Instantly the alarm began in her

nerves; she felt the warning quiver dart through them like the vibration

in a wire. Her nerves, not her heart, repulsed him. She might even love

him, she thought, if only he could keep at a distance; if he would never

touch her; if he would remain contented and aloof, neither giving nor

demanding the signs of emotion. But at the first gesture of approach

every cell in her body sprang on the defensive.

"You wouldn't be comfortable," she said, while an expression that was

almost hostile crept over her full red mouth. "It is so different from

anything you have known."

His smile was winning. "I shouldn't mind that if you wanted me."

She looked over his head at the elm boughs arching against the sky. Yes,

it was lilac time in Virginia. She saw the rich clusters drooping beside

the whitewashed walls, under the grey eaves where wrens were building.

The door was open, and the fragrance swept the clean, bare hall, with

the open door at, the other end, beyond which the green slope swelled

upward to the pear orchard. Over all, there was the big pine on the

hill, brushing the quiet sky like a bird's outstretched wing. How

peaceful it seemed. After the storm through which she had passed,

tranquillity meant happiness.

The silence had grown intimate, tender, provocative; and for a moment

she had a feeling of relaxation from tension, as if the iron in her soul

were dissolving. Then the pressure of his fingers tightened, and she

shivered and drew away her hand.

"You don't like me to touch you?" he asked, and there was a hurt look in

his eyes.

She shook her head. "I don't like anybody to touch me."

"Are you as hard as that?"

"I suppose I am hard, but I can't change."

"Not if I wait? I can wait as long as you make me."

"It wouldn't make any difference. Waiting wouldn't change me. I've

finished with all that."

She rose because the thought of Jason had come to her out of the vision

of Old Farm; and though she no longer loved him, though she hated him,

this thought was so unexpected and yet so real that it was as if he had

actually walked into her presence. He was nothing to her, but his

influence still affected her life; he was buried somewhere in her

consciousness, like a secret enemy who could spring out of the

wilderness and strike when she was defenseless.

On the hall table, when she entered the house, she found a letter,

addressed in the pale, repressed handwriting of her mother. As she went

upstairs she tore it open, and dropping into a chair by the window of

her room, she read the closely written sheets by the last gleam of

daylight.

_My dear Daughter_:

I hate to have to send you bad news, but your father had a stroke last

Saturday while he was ploughing the tobacco field. He had not been well

for several days, but you know he never complains, and he did not stop

work till he dropped in the field. Josiah and Rufus had to pick him up

between them and bring him into the house.

We sent straight for the doctor. Rufus saddled Beersheba and rode to

Pedlar's Mill, and Nathan sent word to Doctor Stout up near the

Courthouse. It was more than two hours before the doctor got here, but

your father had not come to himself. The doctor says he will never be up

again, and if you want to see him alive, you had better come as soon as

you can. We do everything that is possible, and Nathan has been the

greatest help in the world. I don't know what I should do without him.

Josiah spends the nights here. Since his marriage he has lived, as I

wrote you, in that place over beyond Plumtree, but he is real good about

helping, and so is Elvira. She has offered to help me nurse, but she is

so flighty that I had rather have Aunt Mehitable's granddaughter,

Fluvanna Moody. Fluvanna comes every day. She is a mighty good nurse and

your father likes to have her around, even if she is one of the new

order of darkeys. I believe she takes after Aunt Mehitable more than any

of the other grandchildren. Your father does not give any trouble, and

he has not spoken but twice since his fall. It is right hard to

understand what he says--he speaks so thickly--but Fluvanna and I both

think he was asking for you.

The farm is going on just the same. Rufus hates the work here, and wants

to go to the city. A week before his stroke your father was offered a

thousand dollars for the timber between Poplar Spring and the back gate.

Nathan advised him to hold on a little longer, but I reckon we will have

to sell it now to pay for your father's sickness. The cow is a great

comfort. Your father cannot take any solid food. I give him a little

milk and a few swallows of chicken broth. Mrs. Garlick sent him some

chicken broth yesterday, and one of the Miss Sneads comes over with

something every day.

Your affectionate mother,

EUDORA ABERNETHY OAKLEY.

So, after all, the decision had been taken out of her hands. Life was

treating her still as if she were a straw in the wind, a leaf on a

stream. The invisible processes which had swept her away were sweeping

her back again. While she sat there with the letter in her hand, she had

the feeling that she was caught in the whirlpool of universal anarchy,

and that she could not by any effort of her will bring order out of

chaos.

"Poor Pa." This was her first thought, and she used instinctively the

name that had been on her lips as a child. So this was the end for him,

and what had he ever had? He had known nothing except toil. Suddenly, as

if the fact added an intolerable poignancy to her grief, she remembered

that he had never learned even to read and write. He could sign his

name, that was all. When he was a child the "poor white" was expected to

remain unlettered, and in later years the knowledge her mother had

taught him had not, as he used to say apologetically, "stuck by him."

Rising quickly, she put the letter aside and began folding her clothes.

VI

As the train rushed through the familiar country, Dorinda counted the

new patches of ploughed ground in the landscape. "James Ellgood must be

trying to reclaim all his old fields," she thought.

The sun had not yet risen above the fretwork of trees on the

horizon, but the broomsedge had felt the approach of day and was

flying upward to meet it. Out of the east, she saw gradually emerge

the serpentine curves of Whippernock River; then the clouds of blown

smoke, the irregular pattern of the farms, and the buildings of the

station, which wore a startled and half-awake air in the dawn.

After more than two years how strange it felt to be back again!

To be back again just as if nothing had happened! How small the

station looked, and how desolate, stranded like a wrecked ship

in the broomsedge. What isolation! What barrenness! In her memory

the horizon had been so much wider, the road so much longer, the band of

woods so much deeper. It seemed to her that the landscape must have

diminished in an incredible way since she had left it. Even the untidy

look of the station; the litter of shavings and tobacco stems; the

shabbiness and crudeness of the country people meeting the train; the

disreputable rags of Butcher, the lame negro, who lived in the freight

car; the very fowls scratching in the dust of the cleared space;--all

these characteristic details were uglier and more trivial than she had

remembered them. A sense of loneliness swept her thoughts, as if the

solitude had blown over her like smoke. She realized that the Pedlar's

Mill of her mind and the Pedlar's Mill of actuality were two different

places. She was returning home, and she felt as strange as she had felt

in New York. Well, at least she had not crawled back. She had returned

with her head held high, as she had resolved that she would.

The whistle was sounding again, and the brakeman was hastily gathering

her bags. She followed him to the platform, where the conductor stood

waiting, the same conductor who had helped her into the train the

morning she had gone away. He did not recognize her, and for some

obscure reason, she felt flattered because he had forgotten her.

The train was stopping slowly. The faces of the assembled farmers

started out so close to the track that they gave her a shock. There was

Jim Ellgood ready to leave for Richmond; there was Mr. Garlick meeting

somebody, his daughter probably; there was Mr. Kettledrum, looking as

stringy and run-to-seed, as if he had not moved out of his wheelrut

since the morning he had picked her up in the rain. In the little group

she saw Rufus, slender, handsome, sullen as ever. How black his eyes

were, and how becoming the dark red was in his cheeks! Then, as the

train reached the station, she saw Nathan Pedlar running down to the

track with the mail bag in his hand. Just at the last minute, but always

in time--how like Nathan that was!

The conductor, with one foot on the step, was swinging his free leg

while he felt for the ground. She put up her hand, hurriedly arranging

her small blue hat with the flowing chiffon veil. Then she lifted the

folds of her skirt as the conductor, who was firmly planted now on the

earth, helped her to alight. Her heart was sad for her father, but

beneath the sadness her indomitable pride supported her. Yes, she had

come back unashamed. She might not return as a conqueror, but she had

returned undefeated. They were looking at her as she stepped to the

ground, and she felt, with a thrill of satisfaction, that, in her navy

blue poplin with the chiffon veil framing her face (hanging veils were

much worn in New York that year) she was worthy of the surprised glances

they cast at her. A little thinner, a little paler, less girlish but

more striking, than she had been when she went away. Her height gave her

dignity, and this dignity was reflected in her vivid blue eyes, with

their unflinching and slightly arrogant gaze. Romantic eyes, Burch had

called them, and she had wondered what he meant, for surely there was

little romance left now in her mind. If experience had taught her

nothing else, it had at least made her a realist. She had learned to

take things as they are, and that, as Burch had once remarked

whimsically, "in the long run fustian wears better than velvet." She had

learned, too, she told herself in the first moments of her homecoming,

that so long as she could rule her own mind she was not afraid of the

forces without.

They had gathered round her. She was smiling and shaking the

outstretched hands. "Well, it looked as if we'd about lost you for

good." "You've been gone two years, ain't you?" "Hardly know Pedlar's

Mill, I reckon, since Nathan's painted the store red?" "I saw her

off," Mr. Kettledrum was saying over and over. "I saw her

off. A good long visit, warn't it?"

Moving out of the throng, she kissed Rufus, who looked dejected and

resentful.

"How is Pa, Rufus?"

"There ain't any change. The doctor says he may drag on this way for

several weeks, or he may go suddenly at any time."

"Well, we'd better start right on." Walking quickly up the slope to

where the old buggy was standing, she put her arms round Dan's neck and

laid her cheek against him. "He knows me," she said, "dear old Dan, he

hasn't forgotten me. Is there anything you want for Ma at the store?"

"She gave me a list. I left it with Minnie May."

"Minnie May doesn't work in the store, does she? Who looks after the

children?"

"She does. She does everything."

"Well, it's a shame. She oughtn't to, and only thirteen. I'll speak to

Nathan about it."

At her commanding tone, Rufus grinned. "You've come back looking as if

you could run the world, Dorinda," he observed, with envy. "I wish I

could go away. I'd start to-morrow, if it wasn't for Pa."

"Yes, that's why I came back. We can't leave Pa and Ma now. But it's

hard on you, Rufus."

"You bet it is! It's my turn to get away next."

She assented. "I know it. If the time comes when Pa can do without you,

I'll help you to go. You'll never make much of a farmer."

He stared moodily at the road, but she could see that her promise had

encouraged him. "There's nothing in it," he answered. "I believe it is

the meanest work ever made. You may slave till you drop, and there's

never anything to show for it. Look at Pa."

"Pa never had a chance. He grew up at the wrong time. But all farming

isn't bad. Suppose we had a dairy farm?"

He grinned again. "O Lord! with one cow! You're out of your head!"

"Perhaps. Anyway, I've come back to see what I can do."

Her glance wavered as Nathan, having dashed into the store with the mail

bag, came toward them with the kind of lope that he used when he was in

a hurry. "I didn't get a chance to speak to you at the train, Dorinda,"

he said, "but all the same I'm glad you're home again. The children want

to get a peek at you in your city clothes. Minnie May's gone crazy about

your veil."

In two years he had altered as little as the landscape. Lank,

sand-coloured, with his loping, stride, his hands that were all

knuckles, and his kindly clown's face under hair that was as short as

rubbed-off fur, he appeared to her, just as he used to do, as both

efficient and negligible. Poor Nathan, how unattractive he was, but how

good and faithful! Clean, too, notwithstanding the fact that he never

stopped working. His face and neck looked well scrubbed, and his blue

cotton shirt was still smelling of starch and ironing. The memory of the

lunch he had given her when she went away was in her mind as she held

out her hand to him and then stooped to kiss the children, one after

another. How they must miss their mother, these children! She must do

something for Minnie May, who had the stunted look of overworked

childhood. Nathan was well off for Pedlar's Mill, yet he let the little

girl work like a servant. It was simply that he did not know, and she

would make it her business, she told herself firmly, to instruct him.

Minnie May was a nice, earnest child, with the look of her mother. She

would be almost pretty, too, if she could get that driven expression out

of her pinched little face. Her hair was really lovely, wheaten red like

Rose Emily's, only it needed brushing, and she wore it dragged back from

her forehead where, at thirteen, wrinkles were already forming. Yes,

Dorinda decided, she would certainly speak to Nathan.

"You look fine, Dorinda," he was saying while he stared at her.

"She is like a paper doll in a book," Minnie May exclaimed. "One of

those fashion books Miss Seena Snead has."

The three smaller children were staring with wide open eyes and mouths,

and John Abner, the baby, she remembered, with the clubfoot, was holding

a slice of bread and butter in both hands. He limped badly when he

walked, she noticed. What a job it must be keeping these children washed

and dressed.

"Are you the nurse too, Minnie May?" she inquired.

"Yes, I do everything," the little girl replied proudly, wrinkling her

forehead. "We had a coloured girl, but the children didn't like her and

wouldn't mind her."

Dorinda turned to Nathan. "It's too much, Nathan. You oughtn't to let

her do it."

"I tell her not to slave so hard," he answered helplessly. "But it

doesn't do any good. She promised her mother that she would take care of

the children."

"But Rose Emily never meant this. It is making an old woman of the child

before she grows up."

"I can't help it. She's as stubborn as a mule about it. Maybe you can do

something."

Dorinda nodded with her capable air. "Well, I'll fix it." She looked

cool, composed, and competent, the picture of dignified self-reliance,

as she stepped between the muddy wheels of the dilapidated buggy.

"I hope you'll find your father better," Nathan said. "I'll come over

later in the day and see if there is anything I can help about." She

smiled gratefully over her shoulder, and Rufus remarked, in his sullen,

suppressed voice, as they drove off, "He's been over every single

evening since Pa had his stroke."

"Nobody ever had a kinder heart," Dorinda responded absently, for she

was not thinking of Nathan.

As the buggy jolted down the slope to the pine woods, a dogcart passed

them on the way to the station, and she recognized Geneva Greylock. She

was driving the dogcart with red wheels which she had used before her

marriage; she was wearing the same jaunty clothes; but the change in her

appearance made Dorinda turn to glance back at her. Though she was still

in her early twenties, she looked like a middle-aged woman. Her sallow

cheeks had fallen in, her long nose was bony and reddened at the tip,

and her abundant flaxen hair was lustreless and untidy.

"How soon blondes break," Dorinda said aloud, and she thought, "Two

years of marriage have made an old woman of her."

"Yes, she's lost what looks she ever had," returned Rufus. "She was

always delicate, they say, and now her health has gone entirely. It's

the life she leads, I reckon. Folks say he is beginning to follow in his

father's footsteps. That's why the new doctor up by the Courthouse is

getting all his practice." When he spoke of Jason he carefully refrained

from calling his name.

"Are there any children?" Dorinda asked. Her spirits were drooping; but

this depression, as far as she was aware, had no connection with Jason.

Not her own regret, but the futility of things in general, oppressed her

with a feeling of gloom.

"Not that I ever heard of," Rufus replied. "To tell the truth I never

hear anybody mention his name. You can ask Nathan. He knows everything

about everybody." He shut his sullen lips tight, and stared straight

ahead of him.

"Oh, it doesn't matter. I was merely wondering why her health had

failed."

They had come out of the woods, and the wheels were creaking over the

dried mudholes. The sun had risen through a drift of cloud, and beneath

the violet rim an iridescent light rained over the abandoned fields.

While they drove on, it seemed to Dorinda that it was like moving within

the heart of an opal. Every young green leaf, every dew-drenched weed,

every silken cobweb, every brilliant bird, or gauzy insect,--all these

things were illuminated and bedizened with colour. Only the immense

black shadow of the horse and buggy raced sombrely over the broomsedge

by the roadside.

"Nothing has changed," Dorinda thought. "Nothing has changed but

myself."

Yes, it was all familiar, but it was different, and this difference

existed only within herself. All that she had suffered was still with

her. It was not an episode that she had left behind in the distance; it

was a living part of her nature. Even if she worked her unhappiness into

the soil; even if she cut down and burned it off with the broomsedge,

it would still spring up again in the place where it had been. Already,

before she had reached the house, the past was settling over her like

grey dust.

They passed the Sneads' red brick house with white columns. The same

flowers bloomed in the borders; the same shrubs grew on the lawn; the

same clothes appeared to hang perpetually on the same clothes-line at

the corner of the back porch. In the pasture, the friendly faces of cows

looked at her over the rail fence, and she remembered that two years

ago, as she went by, she had seen them filing to the well trough. In a

few minutes she would pass the burned cabin and the oak with the fading

Gospel sign fastened to its bark. Her heart trembled. The racing shadow

by the road appeared to stretch over the sunrise. She felt again the

chill of despair, the involuntary shudder of her pulses. Then she lifted

her eyes with a resolute gesture and confronted remembrance.

The place was unchanged. The deep wheelruts where the road forked; the

flat rock on which the mare slipped; the cluster of dogwood which

screened the spot where she had waited for Jason's return; the very

branch she had pushed aside,--not one of these things had altered. Only

the fire in her heart had gone out. The scene was different to her

because the eyes with which she looked on it had grown clearer. The

stone was merely a stone; the road was nothing more than a road to her

now. Over the gate, she could see the willows of Gooseneck Creek. Beyond

them the tall chimneys of Five Oaks lay like red smears on the

changeable blue of the sky.

After they had left the fork, Dan quickened his pace.

"The fence has been mended, I see, Rufus."

"Yes, we had so much trouble with the cow straying. Pa was trying to get

all the fences near the house patched before fall. We were using the

rails that were left over from the timber he sold."

"Those weren't the woods Ma wrote me about?" She could never think of

living trees as timber.

"No, he is holding on to that in hope of getting a better price."

They travelled the last quarter of a mile without speaking, and not

until the buggy had turned in at the gate and driven up the rocky grade

to the porch, did Dorinda ask if her father expected her.

"Yes, Ma told him, but she wasn't sure that he understood. He was awake

before I left the place and Ma was seeing about breakfast."

"Haven't you had any yet?"

"Yes, I had a bite before I started. I'm no friend to an empty stomach,

and I reckon I can manage a little something after I've turned Dan into

the pasture. Pa was ploughing the tobacco field when he had his stroke,

but he had decided not to plant tobacco there this year. We're going to

try corn."

"I'm glad he's given up tobacco."

"He hasn't. Not entirely. But it takes more manure than he can spare

this year. Well, we're here at last. Is that you, Ma?" he shouted, as

the wheel scraped against the "rockery" by the steps.

At his second call, the door opened and Mrs. Oakley ran out on the

porch.

"So you've come, daughter," she said, and stood wiping her hands on her

apron while she waited for Dorinda to alight. How old she had grown,

thought the girl, with a clutch at her heart. Only the visionary eyes

looked out of the ravaged face through a film of despair, as stars shine

through a fog.

VII

Jumping out of the buggy, Dorinda took her mother into her arms; but

while she pressed her lips to the wrinkled cheek, it occurred to her

that it was like kissing a withered leaf.

"How is Pa?" she asked in an effort to conceal the embarrassment they

both felt.

"About the same. I don't see any change."

"May I speak to him now?"

"You'd better have your breakfast first. I've got breakfast ready for

you."

"In a minute, but I'd like just to say a word to him. Oh, there's dear

old Rambler." She stooped to caress the hound. "I don't see Flossie."

"I reckon she's up at the barn hunting mice. She had a new set of

kittens, but we had to drown all but one. We couldn't feed so many

cats."

Embarrassment was passing away. How much had her mother known, she

wondered; how much had she suspected?

"Well, I shan't be a minute," the girl said. "Is he in the chamber?"

"Yes, he hasn't been out of bed since his stroke. Go right in. I don't

know whether he'll recognize you or not."

Pushing the door open, Dorinda went in, followed by Rambler, walking

stiffly. The room was flooded with morning sunlight, for the green

outside shutters were open, and the window was raised that looked on the

pear orchard and the crooked path to the graveyard. It was all just as

she remembered it, except that in her recollection the big bed was

empty, and now her father lay supine on one side of it, with his head

resting upon the two feather pillows. There was a grotesque look in his

face, as if it had been pulled out of shape by some sudden twist, but

his inquiring brown eyes, with their wistful pathos, seemed to be

asking, "Why has it happened? What is the meaning of it all?" When she

bent over and touched his forehead with her lips, she saw that he could

not move himself, not even his head, not even his hand. Fallen and

helpless, he lay there like a pine tree that has been torn up by the

roots.

"I've come back to help take care of you, Pa."

His lips quivered, and she apprehended rather than heard what he said.

"I'm glad to see you again, daughter."

Dropping into the chair by the bedside, she laid her arms gently about

him. "You don't suffer, do you?"

How immeasurably far away he seemed! How futile was any endeavour to

reach him! Then she remembered that he had always been far away, that he

had always stood just outside the circle in which they lived, as if he

were a member of some affectionate but inarticulate animal kingdom.

He tried to smile, but the effort only accentuated the crooked line of

his mouth.

"No, I don't suffer." For a moment he was silent; then he added in an

almost inaudible tone: "It's sort of restful."

A leaden weight of tears fell on her heart. Not his death, but his life

seemed to her more than she could bear. What was her pain, her

wretchedness, compared to his monotony of toil? What was any pain, any

wretchedness, compared to the emptiness of his life?

For a little while she talked on cheerfully, telling him of the lectures

she had heard and the books she had read, and of all the plans she had

made to help him with the farm.

"I've borrowed some money to start with, and we'll make something of it

yet, Pa," she said brightly.

His lips moved, but she could not understand what he said. Straining her

ears, she bent over him. For an instant it seemed to her that his tone

became clearer, and that he was on the point of speaking aloud; then the

struggle ceased, and he lay looking at her with his expression of mute

resignation.

After this, though she tried to interest him in her plans, she saw that

his attention was beginning to wander. Every now and then he made an

effort to follow her, while a bewildered expression crept into his face;

but it was only for a minute at a time that he could fix his mind on

what she was saying, and when the strain became too great for him, his

gaze wandered to the open window and the harp-shaped pine, which

towered, dark as night, against the morning blue of the sky.

"Well, I'll go to breakfast now," she said, as carelessly as she could.

"Ma has it ready for me."

Rising from her chair, she stood looking down on him with misty eyes.

After all, the pathos of life was worse than the tragedy. "Is the light

too strong?" she asked, as she turned away. "Shall I close one of the

shutters?"

At first he did not follow her, his thoughts had roved so far away, and

she repeated her question in another form. "Does the sun hurt your

eyes?"

A smile wrung his lips. "No, I like to see the big pine," he answered;

and stealing out noiselessly, she left him alone with the tree and the

sky.

In the kitchen her mother stood over her while she ate, watching every

mouthful with the eyes of repressed and hungry devotion.

"You ain't so plump as you were, Dorinda, but you've kept your high

colour."

"Oh, I'm well enough, but you look worn out, Ma."

Mrs. Oakley hurried to the stove and back again. "Let me give you

another slice of bacon. You must be empty after that long trip. Well, of

course, I've had a good deal on me since your father got sick. Until

Fluvanna came, I didn't have anybody but Elvira to help me, and though

she was willing to do what she could, her fingers were all thumbs when

it came to making up a bed or moving things in a sickroom."

"I can take most of the burden off you now. You know I learned a good

deal about illness when I was with Doctor Faraday."

"Yes, you'll be a comfort, I know, but you're going back again as soon

as your father begins to mend, ain't you?"

Dorinda shook her head with a smile, which, she told herself, looked

braver than it felt. "No, I'm not going back. I'd sooner stay here and

try to make something out of the farm. A thousand acres of land ought

not to be allowed to run to broomsedge like an old field."

"Heaven knows we've tried, daughter. Nobody ever worked harder than your

father, and whatever came of it?"

"Poor Pa. I know, but he came after the war when there wasn't any money

or any labourers."

She told of the money Doctor Faraday would lend her, and of the hotel in

Washington which would take all the butter she could make. "But it must

be as good as the best," she explained, with a laugh. "I'm going over to

Green Acres to buy seven Jersey cows. Seven is a lucky number for me, so

I am going to start with it."

"You'll have to have some help, then."

"Not at first. Of course I'll need a boy for the barnyard, but I am

going to do the milking and all the work of the dairy myself. You can

help me with the skimming until we get a separator, and when Fluvanna

isn't waiting on Pa, she can lend a hand at the churning."

Mrs. Oakley shook her head drearily. "You haven't tried it, Dorinda."

"I know I haven't, but I'm going to. I learned a lot in the hospital,

and the chief thing was that it is slighting that has ruined us, white

and black alike, in the South. Hasn't Fluvanna got a brother Nimrod that

I could hire?" she asked more definitely.

"Yes, and he's a good boy too. Fluvanna had him over here one day last

week chopping wood when Rufus was out in the field ploughing. That's a

thrifty family, the Moodys. I never saw a darkey that had as much vim as

Fluvanna. And she belongs to the new order too. I always thought it

spoiled them to learn to read and write till I hired her. She's got all

the sense Aunt Mehitable had, and she's picked up some education

besides. I declare, she talks better than a lot of white people I know."

"I wonder if she'd stay on and help me with the farm?" Dorinda asked. "I

mean," she added, while her face clouded, "after Pa is up again." Though

she knew that her father would never be up again, she united with her

mother in evading the fact.

"Oh, I'm sure she will," Mrs. Oakley responded, with eagerness. "She has

been helping me with my white Leghorns. All the hens are laying well. I

am setting Eva and Ida now."

"You didn't have them when I was here."

"No, Juliet hatched them. You remember Juliet? She was the first white

Leghorn hen I ever had."

"Yes, I remember her. Have you got her still?"

Mrs. Oakley sighed. "No, a coon broke into the henhouse last winter and

killed her. She was a good hen, if I ever had one." It was amazing to

Dorinda the way her mother knew every fowl on the place by name. To be

sure, there were only a dozen or so; but these white Leghorns all looked

exactly alike to the girl, though Mrs. Oakley could tell each one at a

distance and was intimately acquainted with the peculiarities of every

rooster and hen that she owned.

"I'd like to get a hundred and fifty white Leghorns, if we could look

after them," Dorinda said thoughtfully. "That's one good way to make

money."

A ray of light, which was less a flush than a warmer pallor, flickered

across Mrs. Oakley's wan features. While her mother's interest was

awakening, Dorinda felt that her own was slowly drugged by the poverty

of her surroundings. The sunlight bathing the ragged lawn only

intensified the aspect of destitution. Colour, diversity, animation, all

these were a part of the world she had relinquished. Pushing her chair

away from the table, she went to the back door and stood gazing out over

the woodpile in the direction of the well-house. A few cultivated acres

in the midst of an encroaching waste land! From the broomsedge and the

flat horizon, loneliness rose and washed over her. Loneliness, nothing

more! The same loneliness that she had feared and hated as a child; the

same loneliness from which she had tried to escape in flights of

emotion. Food, work, sleep, that was life as her father and mother had

known it, and that life was to be hers in the future. For an instant it

seemed to her that she must break down. Then, lifting her head with a

characteristic gesture of defiance, she turned back into the room. "I'd

better start straight about it," she said aloud, smiling at Mrs.

Oakley's startled look.

"Did you say anything, Dorinda? I believe I've got something wrong with

my ears."

"I said I was going upstairs to change my dress. The same old room, I

suppose?"

"Yes, I fixed the same room for you."

While she cleared off the table, Mrs. Oakley gazed after her daughter

with a perplexed and anxious expression. Dorinda in her flowing veil,

with her air of worldly knowledge and disillusioned experience, had awed

and impressed her. Was it possible that she had created this superior

intelligence, that she had actually brought this paragon of efficiency

into the world? "Well, I hope it will turn out the way you want it," she

remarked presently to her daughter's retreating back, "but, in my time,

I've watched many a big bloom that brought forth mighty small fruit."

At sunset, when Nathan Pedlar came for his daily visit, Dorinda walked

over a part of the farm with him. He was wearing his Sunday suit of

clothes, and though this emphasized his grotesqueness, it increased also

the air of having been well scrubbed and brushed which had distinguished

him from the other farmers at the station. Since his wife's death he had

prospered, as widowers were so frequently known to do, Dorinda

reflected; and now that he was able to employ an assistant, he was not

closely confined to the store. Though his neighing laugh still irritated

the girl, she found herself regarding his deficiencies more leniently.

After all, he was not to blame for the way he looked; he was not even to

blame, she conceded less readily, for the things that he thought funny.

Since that fantastic humour had taken root in her mind, she had been

continually puzzled by the variety of obvious facts which people, and

especially men, found amusing. She could not, to save her life, laugh at

the spectacles they enjoyed, nor did the freakish destiny that provoked

her to merriment appear to divert them at all. From the cool and

detached point of view she had attained, life appeared to her to be

essentially comic; but comic acts, whether presented in the theatre or

in the waggish hilarity of Pedlar's Mill, seemed to her merely

depressing. She was not amused by the classic jokes of the period, which

were perpetually embodied in a married man who was too fat or an

unmarried woman who was too thin. Flesh or the lack of it, hats or the

pursuit of them, crockery or the breaking of it; none of these common

impediments to happiness possessed, for her, the genuine qualities of

mirth. But reprehensible though she knew it to be, she could not recall

the misguided earnestness of her girlhood without the pricking of

ridicule; and the image of mankind strutting with pompous solemnity into

the inevitable abyss impressed her as the very spirit of comedy. Tragic

but comic, too, as most tragedy was. Would it ever pass, she wondered,

this capricious and lonely laughter?

"I can't help it," she thought, walking by Nathan's side, and listening

soberly to his story of a coloured woman who had tried to make him pay

an additional price for a chicken with three legs. "I can't help it if

they, not the things they laugh at, seem funny to me."

It was a misty, lilac-scented afternoon in April. The sun shone softly

when it began to go down, as if it were caught in a silver scarf, and

the grass in the pear orchard was white with drifting blossoms. Those

old trees always bloomed late, she remembered, and the ground was still

snowy with fallen petals when the lilac bushes by the west wing were

breaking into flower.

As she followed the beaten track by the orchard, her gaze swept the

ploughed fields, where the upturned earth was changing from chocolate to

purple as the light faded. Around her the farm spread out like an open

fan, ploughed ground melting into waste land, fields sinking into

neglected pasture, pasture rising gradually into the dark belt of the

pines. She knew that the place was more to her than soil to be

cultivated; that it was the birthplace and burial ground of hopes,

desires, and disappointments. The old feeling that the land thought and

felt, that it possessed a secret personal life of its own, brushed her

mood as it sped lightly by.

"All this and just waste, waste, waste," she said slowly.

Nathan glanced up at the big pine on the hill. "Ever think of cutting

that tree down for timber?" he inquired.

She shook her head. "It's the only thing Pa likes to watch now. He loves

it."

Nathan neighed under his breath, with the sound Dan gave when he saw

clover.

"Well, I kind of know how he feels. I like a big tree myself."

"Sometimes in stormy weather that pine is like a rocky crag with the sea

beating against it," Dorinda said. "I used to remember it up in Maine. I

suppose that is why Pa likes to look at it. All the meaning of his life

has gone into it, and all the meaning of the country. Endurance, that's

what it is."

"What a fancy you've got," Nathan answered admiringly, "and always had

even when you were a child. But you're right about endurance. This farm

looks to me as if it had endured about as much as it can stand."

"Oh, I'm going to change all that."

"Then you'd better get busy."

"I'll begin to-morrow, if you'll send me some field hands." She stopped

and made a gesture, full of vital energy, in the direction of the road.

"I want to make a new pasture out of that eighteen-acre field next to

the old one."

"It has run to broomsedge now, hasn't it?"

"Yes, but it used to be a cornfield in great-grandfather's day. If you

can get me the hands, I'll start them clearing it off the first thing in

the morning."

He chuckled with enjoyment. "Oh, I'll get you anything you want, but the

niggers won't work for nothing, you know."

"I've borrowed two thousand dollars. That ought to help, oughtn't it?"

She wished he wouldn't say "niggers." That scornful label was already

archaic, except among the poorest of the "poor white class" at Pedlar's

Mill.

"Two thousand dollars!" he ejaculated. "Well, that ought to go some

way."

"I'll have to spend a good deal for cows," she explained. "How much will

they ask at Green Acres?"

For a minute he hesitated. "That's a fine Jersey herd," he replied

presently. "I don't reckon they'll take less than a hundred dollars for

a good cow. You can get scrub cows cheaper, but you want good ones."

"Oh, yes. I want good ones."

"Well, seeing it's you, Jim Ellgood may let you have them for less. I

don't know; but he got a hundred and fifty for those he sold at the

fair. One of his young bulls took the blue ribbon, you know."

She nodded. "I'm going over to see him to-morrow, if Pa doesn't get

worse."

"Jim's a first-rate land doctor. He'll tell you what to do with that old

field."

"Why, everybody says you're as good a farmer as James Ellgood."

"Oh, no, I'm not. Not by a long way. He spends a lot of money on

phosphate and nitrate of soda; but in the end he gets it back again. He

reclaimed some bad land several years ago and made it yield forty

bushels an acre. For several years he kept sowing cowpeas and turning

them under. Then he sowed sweet clover with lime, and when it was in

full bloom, he turned that under too. Takes money, his method, but it

pays in the long run. He has just begun using alfalfa; but you watch and

he'll get five cuttings from it in no time. I get four, and Jim always

goes me one better."

She was listening to him, for the first time in her life, with attention

and interest. It was surprising, she reflected, what a bond of sympathy

farming could make. He was as dull probably as he had ever been; but his

dullness had ceased now to bore her. "I'll find him useful, anyhow," she

thought; and usefulness, she was to discover presently, makes an even

firmer bond than an interest in farming. Her mind was filled with her

new vocation, and just as in that earlier period she had had ears for

any one who would speak to her of Jason, so she listened now to whoever

displayed the time and the inclination to talk of Old Farm. After all,

how much mental tolerance, she wondered, was based upon the devouring

egoism at the heart of all human nature? It was a question her

great-grandfather might have asked, for though she had burst the cocoon

of his theology, her mind was still entangled in the misty cobwebs of

his dialectics. Yes, she had always deluded herself with the belief that

the superior Rose Emily had made it possible for her to think tolerantly

of Nathan. Yet, deprived of that advantage, and left to flounder on

without intelligent guidance, he had become, Dorinda admitted

thoughtfully, more likable than ever. For the first time it occurred to

her that a marriage too much above one may become as great an obstacle

as a marriage too much below one.

"How big is Green Acres?" she asked, keenly interested.

Nathan's gaze sought the horizon. Before he replied he spat

a wad of tobacco from his mouth, while she looked vaguely over

the fields.

"Counting the

wasteland, it's near about fourteen hundred acres,

I reckon," he answered. "If Old Farm and Five Oaks were thrown

together, they'd more than balance Jim's land."

"Are they doing anything over at Five Oaks?"

"It don't look so, does it?" He waved his arm vaguely toward the blur of

spring foliage in the southeast. "I ain't heard any talk of it lately."

His tone had taken a sharper edge, and Dorinda knew he was thinking that

Jason had jilted her. People would always remember that whenever they

heard her name or Jason's. If they both lived to be old persons, and

never spoke to each other again, they could never dissolve that

intangible bond. In some subtle fashion, which she resented, she and

Jason were eternally joined together.

"If they don't look sharp," Nathan concluded without glancing at her,

"the place will slip through their fingers. The old man has a big

mortgage on it. I took a share of it myself, and some day, if Jason

keeps going downhill, there'll be a foreclosure right over his head."

A flame passed over Dorinda's face. So vivid was the sensation that she

felt as if they were encircled by burning grass. Ambition, which had

been formless and remote, became definite and immediate.

"I'd give ten years of my life to own Five Oaks," she said.

"You would?" The wish appeared to amuse him. "Looks as if you were

beginning to count your chickens before they're hatched."

"Yes, it's absurd; but all the same I'd give ten years of my life to own

Five Oaks."

The colour burned in her face and in her blue eyes which were looking

straight at the sunset. She appeared suddenly taller, stronger, more

imperious in her demands of life.

"If we ever foreclose the mortgage, I'll bid in the farm for you," he

returned, with admiring facetiousness. A flush like the stain of

pokeberry juice was spreading over his leathery skin.

She nodded gravely. "By that time I may be able to buy it. If hard work

can get you anywhere on a farm, I am going to be one of the best farmers

in this country."

"Is Rufus to have any hand in it? You won't get far with Rufus."

"No, he hates it. He is going to the city next winter. There won't be

anybody but Pa and me to manage." Her voice faltered from its dominant

note. Would there be her father?

"Well, I'll help you," he promised, "all' I can. I've learned a little

by failing. That's as much as most farmers can say." When he dropped the

personal tone and began to talk of the things he knew, there was a

rustic dignity in his ugliness. After all, she could depend on him, and

that meant a good deal to her as a farmer. Rose Emily, she remembered,

used to say that you never realized Nathan's value until you tried

depending upon other people. The vision of Rose Emily illuminated her

thoughts like the last flare of the sunset. How brave she was, and how

brilliant! Though Nathan had loved her and been faithful to her while

she lived, after her death he had ceased to think of her with the mental

alacrity which appeared to overtake the emotions of the faithful and the

unfaithful alike. Already, she felt, Rose Emily was becoming nearer to

her than to Nathan. Nathan had lost a wife; but as the years passed her

friend would begin to live more vitally in her memory.

They followed the band of pines and crossed an old hayfield, where a

flock of meadow-larks drifted up from the grass and scattered with a

flutter of white tail feathers. It was the thrushes' hour, and the

trees, reaching tall and straight up into the golden air, were as

musical as harps. She had forgotten Nathan now, and while she walked on

rapidly she was thinking that she would divide the farm into five

separate parts, leaving the larger part still abandoned. "I must go

slowly," she thought. "If I overdo it in the beginning, I'll spoil

everything."

"You're up against something," Nathan was saying facetiously but firmly.

"This used to be good land in your great-grandfather's day, and some of

it ain't gone so bad but a thorough fertilizing would bring it back.

Your father did all he could, but one man ain't a team. He had to work

uphill with every darn thing, including the elements, against him."

"Yes, of course Pa did all he could." She had spoken the words so often

that they sounded now as hollow as a refrain. Yet they were true. Her

father had done all that one man could do on the farm. Yet the farm had

conquered him in the end and eaten away his strength.

They were approaching Poplar Spring, where a silver vein of a stream

trickled over the flat grey rocks. The smell of wet leaves floated

toward her, and instantly the quiet moment snapped in two as if a blow

had divided it. Half of her mind was here, watching the meadow-larks

skimming over the fields, and the other half crouched under the dripping

boughs by the fork of the road. Only the imaginary half seemed more

real, more physical even, than the actual one. Not her mind, she felt

with horror, but her senses, her nerves, and the very corpuscles of her

blood, remembered the agony.

"I think I'll go back," she said, turning quickly. "Ma might want me to

help her."

"You look tired," he returned, with the consideration which Rose Emily

had disciplined into a habit. "Would you like to sit down and rest?"

"No, I'd better go back."

They walked to the house in silence, and she scarcely heard him when he

said, "Good night," at the porch.

"I hope you'll find your father better."

"Yes, I hope I'll find him better."

"If there's anything I can do, let me know."

"If there is, I'll let you know."

As he stepped into his buggy, he turned and called out, "I'll try to get

word to the hands to-night, and send them over the first thing in the

morning."

What hands? What did they matter? What did anything matter? It seemed to

her suddenly that, not only her love for Jason, but everything, the

whole of life, was a mistake. Even her best endeavours, even her return

to the farm--"It might have been better if I'd decided differently," she

thought wearily; but when she tried to be definite, to imagine some

other decision she might have made, nothing occurred to her. Something?

But what? Where? She saw no other way, and she felt blindly that she

should never see one.

"I'm tired," she thought, "and this makes me weak. Weakness doesn't help

anything." For an instant this thought held her; then it occurred to her

that, in the years to come, she would be continually tired; and that,

tired or not, she must fight against weakness. "I've got to go straight

ahead, no matter how I feel."

VIII

"Ebenezer Green?"

"Dat's me."

"Peter Plumtree?"

"Dat's me."

"Toby Jackson?"

"Dat's me, Miss D'rindy."

"Rapidan Finley?"

"Dat's me."

She was calling the names of the field hands, and while she went over

the list, her mind was busily assorting and grouping the faces before

her. Yes, she knew them all. Ever since she could remember they had been

a part of the country; she had passed them in the road every week, or

seen them in the vegetable patches in front of their cabins. Like her

mother, she was endowed with an intuitive understanding of the negroes;

she would always know how to keep on friendly terms with that immature

but not ungenerous race. Slavery in Queen Elizabeth County had rested

more lightly than elsewhere. The religion that made people hard to

themselves, her mother had often pointed out, made them impartially just

to their dependents; and like most generalizations, this one was elastic

enough to cover the particular instance. It was true that the coloured

people about Pedlar's Mill were as industrious and as prosperous as any

in the South, and that, within what their white neighbours called

reasonable bounds, there was, at the end of the nineteenth century,

little prejudice against them. Here and there a thriftless farmer, such

as Ike Pryde or Adam Snead, would display a fitful jealousy of Micajah

Green, who had turned a few barren acres into a flourishing farm; but

the better class of farmers preferred the intelligent coloured neighbour

to the ignorant white one. Both were social inferiors; but where the

matter was one solely of farming, the advantages would usually fall to

the more diligent. As for the negroes themselves, they lived contentedly

enough as inferiors though not dependents. In spite of the influence of

Aunt Mehitable Green, they had not yet learned to think as a race, and

the individual negro still attached himself instinctively to the

superior powers.

"I remember you well, Ebenezer," she said; "you have a sister, Mary Joe.

I want her to help look after my henhouse." She laughed as she spoke

because she knew that the negroes would work twice as well for an

employer who laughed easily; but she wondered if they detected the

hollowness of the sound. It occurred to her, as she looked at the doomed

broomsedge across the road, that farming, like love, might prove

presently to be no laughing matter.

Turning back toward the house, she met her mother, who was coming out

with a basin of cornmeal dough for the chickens. The sun had just risen,

and there was a sparkling freshness over the earth and in the luminous

globe of the sky. She had slept well, and with the morning weakness had

vanished. The wild part of her had perished like burned grass; out of

nothing, into nothing, that was the way of it. Now, armoured in reason,

she was ready to meet life on its own terms.

"Do you know where Rufus is?" she asked. "I want him to see the hands

start work in the eighteen-acre field."

Mrs. Oakley shook her head. "I don't know. I thought he was going to

finish ploughing the tobacco field, but I saw him start off right after

breakfast with Ike Pryde. It seems they found honey in a big oak over by

Hoot Owl Woods, and they've set off with an axe to cut down the tree."

"Oh, the fool, the fool!" Dorinda exclaimed, and determined that she

would expect nothing more from Rufus.

"Well, you know how men are," returned her mother, with unpolemical

wisdom. "They'll seize any excuse to stop work and cut down a tree."

"I do know. But to cut down a big oak, and for honey!"

The old woman scattered dough on the ground with an impartial hand.

"Rufus has got a mighty sweet tooth," she remarked.

"So has Pa, but you never found him making an excuse to stop work."

"I know. Your Pa always put his wishes aside. There ain't many men you

can say that of." Though she sighed over the fact, she accepted it as

one of the natural or acquired privileges of the male; and she felt that

these were too numerous to justify a special grievance against a

particular one. Even acquiescence with a sigh is easier than argument

when one is worn out with neuralgia and worse things. A frost had

blighted her impulse of opposition, and this seemed to Dorinda one of

the surest signs that her mother was failing. There were moments when it

would have been a relief to be contradicted.

"Well, I'll have to do it myself. Because I am a woman the hands will

expect me to shirk, and I must show them that I know what I am about."

"I'll help you all I can, daughter."

"I know you will." Dorinda's conscience reproached her for her

impatience. "You will be wonderful with the hens, and I'll get

Ebenezer's sister Mary Joe to help you. She must be fourteen or

fifteen."

"Yes, she's a real bright girl," Mrs. Oakley remarked, without

enthusiasm. She had scarcely closed her eyes all night, and bright

coloured girls, even when they helped in the henhouse, left her

indifferent. "I'm going down in the garden to see if I can find a mess

of turnip salad," she added after a pause, in which she scooped the last

remnant of dough out of the basin and flung it into the midst of the

brood of chickens.

"Let me go while you sit with Pa. I was coming in to see about him

before I went down to the field where they are working."

Mrs. Oakley shook her head. "No, I can't keep still in the daytime. It's

hard enough having to do it at night. Fluvanna couldn't get over early

to-day; but she sent her little sister Ruby, and she is keeping the

flies off your father's face. That's all anybody can do for him now."

"Well, I'll speak to him anyway. Then I'll see after the hands."

Mrs. Oakley raised her eyes to her daughter's face. "You've brought back

a heap of vim, Dorinda," she said dispassionately, "but I reckon you've

been away from the farm too long to know what it's like."

She put the basin down on a bench, picked up a blue gingham sunbonnet

she had laid there when she came out, and started, with her nervous

walk, to the garden at the end of the yard.

In her father's room, Dorinda found a small coloured girl, in a pink

calico slip, perched on a high stool by the bedside. Her bare feet

clutched the round of the stool; her eyes, like black beads, roved

ceaselessly from the wall to the floor; and her thin monkey-like hand

waved a palm-leaf fan to and fro over Joshua's immovable features.

"Good morning, Ruby. Has Pa moved since you've been here?"

"Gwamawnin'. Naw'm, he ain' don ez much ez bat 'is eyelids."

Dorinda caught the fan away from her. "Don't you go to school in the

mornings?" she inquired, after a pause in which she tried to think of

something to say.

"Dar ain' none."

"Aren't you learning to read and write?"

"Yes'm. Fluvanna she knows, en she's larnin' me."

"Well, run away now, and come back when I call you."

The little girl ran out gladly, and Dorinda took her place on the stool

and brushed the flies away with slow, firm waves of the fan.

Immediately, as soon as she had settled herself, something of her

mother's restlessness rushed over her, and she felt a hysterical longing

to get up and move about or to go out into the air. "If I feel this

way," she thought, "what must it mean to poor Pa to lie there like

that?"

Since the hour of her return he had not appeared to recognize her. He

was beyond reach of any help, of any voice, of any hand, lost in some

mental wilderness which was more impenetrable than the jungles of earth.

Though he was apparently not unconscious, he was beyond all awareness.

His eyes never left the great pine, and once when his wife had started

to close the shutters, a frown had gathered on his forehead and lingered

there until she had desisted and turned away from the window. Then his

face had cleared and the look of hard-earned rest had returned to his

features.

While she sat there, Dorinda began counting imaginary chickens, a method

of collecting her thoughts which she had learned as a child from Aunt

Mehitable. She was still counting the fictitious flock when Joshua

opened his eyes and looked straight up at her with an expression of

startled wonder and surprise, as if he were on the point of speaking.

"What is it?" she asked, bending nearer.

His lips moved, and for an instant she was visited by an indescribable

sensation. He was so near to her that she seemed, in the same moment,

never to have known him before and yet to know him completely. She felt

that he was trying to speak some words that would make everything clear

and simple between them, that would explain away all the mistakes and

misunderstandings of life.

"What is it?" she repeated, breathless with hope.

Again his lips moved slightly; but no sound came, and the look of wonder

and surprise faded slowly out of his face. His eyes closed, and a minute

later his heavy breathing told her that he had relapsed into stupor.

"I must ask him when he wakes," she thought. "I must ask him what he

wanted to tell me."

After dinner she hunted for Rufus again, but he had not, it appeared,

returned to the farm.

"I reckon he went home with Ike Pryde," his mother said. "He's been

seeing too much of Ike, and I'm afraid it ain't good for him. The last

time Almira was over here she told me Ike was drinking again." She was

worried and anxious, and the twitching was worse in her face. "I declare

I don't see how Almira can put up with him," she said.

"Then I'll have to harness Dan myself," Dorinda replied. "I've got on my

best dress, so I hoped Rufus would drag out the buggy. I'm going over to

Green Acres."

"I was wondering what you'd put on your blue poplin for," Mrs. Oakley

returned. "I'd think that hanging veil would get in your way; but if

you're going over to the Ellgoods', I'm glad you dressed up. Fluvanna, I

reckon, will hitch up the buggy for you."

Fluvanna, emerging from the kitchen, offered eagerly to look for Dan in

the pasture. "He ain't got away," she said, "for I saw him at the bars

jest a minute ago." She had gone to school whenever there was one for

coloured children in the neighbourhood, and though her speech was still

picturesque, she had discarded the pure dialect of Aunt Mehitable and

her generation. "Don't you worry, Miss Dorinda," she added, hurrying

down the path to the pasture.

"I tell Fluvanna that her sunny disposition is worth a fortune," Mrs.

Oakley remarked. "She never gets put out about anything."

"I believe she'll be a great comfort to us," Dorinda returned

thoughtfully. She liked the girl's pleasant brown face, as glossy as a

chestnut, her shining black eyes, and her perfect teeth, which showed

always, for she never stopped smiling. "Just to have anybody look

intelligent is a relief."

"Well, you'll find that Fluvanna has plenty of sense. Of course she

slights things when she can, but she is always willing and

good-humoured. You don't often find a hard worker, white or black, with

a sunny temper."

They were still discussing her when Fluvanna drove up in the buggy and

descended to offer the dilapidated reins to Dorinda.

"Thank you, Fluvanna. I declare this buggy looks as if it hadn't been

washed off for a year."

Fluvanna, who had not observed the mud, turned her beaming eyes on the

buggy and perceived that it was dirty.

"I'll come over the first thing in the mawnin' an' wash it for you," she

promised. "There ain't a bit of use dependin' on Mr. Rufus. He won't do

nothin'."

Dorinda gathered up the reins, settled herself on the bagging which

covered the seat, and turned Dan's head kindly but firmly away from the

pasture.

"I wonder if things used to look as dilapidated, only I didn't notice

them so much," she thought.

IX

Dan travelled slowly, and the Ellgoods lived three miles on the other

side of Pedlar's Mill. Green Acres was the largest stock farm in the

county; but what impressed Dorinda more than the size was the general

air of thrift which hovered over the pastures, the deep green meadows,

and the white buildings clustering about the red brick house.

"I couldn't have anything like this in a hundred years," she thought

cheerlessly. Her scheme, which had appeared so promising when she

surveyed it from Central Park, presented, at a closer view, innumerable

obstacles. There was not one chance in a thousand, she told herself now,

that the venture would lead anywhere except into a bog. "But I'm in it

now, and I must see it through," she concluded, with less audacity than

determination. "I'll not give up as long as there is breath left in my

body." Rolling in mud-caked wheels up the neat drive to the house, she

resolved stubbornly that no one, least of all James Ellgood, should

suspect that she had lost heart in her enterprise.

James Ellgood was at Queen Elizabeth Courthouse for the day; but Bob,

his son, who had recently brought home a dissatisfied and delicate wife

from a hospital in Baltimore, was on the front porch awaiting his

visitor. When she appeared in sight, he threw away the match he was

striking on his boot, and after thrusting his old brier pipe into his

pocket, descended the steps and came across the drive to the buggy.

Nathan would have smoked, or still worse have chewed, Dorinda knew,

while he received her; but inconsistently enough, she did not like him

the less for his boorishness. Utility, not punctilio, was what she

required of men at this turning point in her career.

While Bob Ellgood held out his hand, she could see her reflection in his

large, placid eyes as clearly as if her features were mirrored in the

old mill pond. It gave her pleasure to feel that she was more

distinguished, if less desirable, than she had been two years ago; but

her pleasure was as impersonal as her errand. She had no wish to attract

this heavy, masterful farmer, who reminded her of a sleek, mild-mannered

Jersey bull; no wish, at least, to attract him beyond the point where

his admiration might help her to drive a bargain in cows. Gazing

critically at his handsome face, she remembered the Sunday mornings when

she had watched him in church and had wished with all her heart that he

would turn his eyes in her direction. Then he had not so much as glanced

at her over his hymn book, his slow mind was probably revolving round

his engagement; but now she felt instinctively that he was ready to

catch fire from a look or a word. The absurd twist of an idea jerked

into her mind. "He would have suited me better than Jason, and I should

have suited him better than the woman he married." Well, that was the

way the eternal purpose worked, she supposed, but it seemed to her a

cumbersome and blundering method.

"Nathan told me you wanted to buy some cows," he was saying, for he was

as single-minded as other successful men, only more so. "I picked out

seven fine ones this morning and had them brought up to the small

pasture. They'll be at the bars now, and you can look them over. There

isn't a better breed than the Jersey, that's what we think, and these

young cows are as good as any you'll find."

At the bars of the pasture, where a weeping willow dipped over the

watering trough, the Jerseys were standing in a row, satin-coated,

fawn-eyed, with breath like new-mown hay. What beauties they were,

thought Dorinda, swept away in spite of her determination to bargain.

When Bob told her the names she repeated them in blissful accents.

"Rose. Sweetbriar. Hollyhock. Pansy. Daisy. Violet. Verbena." To think

that she, who had never owned anything, should actually possess these

adorable creatures! Even the price, which seemed to her excessively

high, could not spoil her delight. A hundred dollars for each cow, Bob

explained, was a third less than they would bring at the fair next

autumn.

"I am glad you are going into the dairy business," he proceeded. "I

always said this country would do for dairy farming, though it takes

more money, of course, to start a dairy farm than it does just to plant

crops. The cows ain't all of it, you know. You ought to raise your own

hay and the corn you need for silage. Borrow money, too, if you haven't

got it, to drain and tile your fields. It will pay you back in the long

run, for I doubt if you will get any good clover until you put ditches

in your land. All that takes money, of course," he continued, with

depressing accuracy, "but it is the only way to make anything out of a

farm. Father says there ain't but one way to learn to do anything, and

that's the right way."

"I know," Dorinda assented. Her tone was confident, but it seemed to her

while she spoke that she was being buried under the impoverished acres

of Old Farm.

"And there's machinery," he added. "Father borrowed money after the war

to buy new machinery. When he came home after Appomattox, all the farm

implements were either lost or good for nothing. He went in debt and

bought the newest inventions, and that was the beginning of his success.

The legacy from Uncle Mitchell came after he was well started, and he

always says he could have got on without it, though perhaps not on so

large a scale."

"Well, I'll borrow," said Dorinda defiantly. "We've always been afraid

of debt; but I've already borrowed two thousand dollars, and if I need

more, I'll try to get it. Nathan is going to pick up whatever machinery

he can at auction. That will be less than half the actual cost, he

says."

He was looking at her now with keen, impersonal admiration. Just as if

she had been a man, she thought, with a glow of triumph. Though the

sensation was without the excitement of sex vanity, she found that it

was quite as gratifying, and, she suspected, more durable. Already he

had forgotten the momentary physical appeal she had made to him in the

beginning; and she felt that his respect for her was based upon what he

believed to be her character. "It isn't what I am really that matters,"

she thought. "It is just the impression I make on his mind or senses.

Men are all like that, I suppose. They don't know you. They don't even

wish to know you. They are interested in nothing on earth but their own

reactions." And she remembered suddenly that Jason had once generalized

like this about women, and that she was merely copying what he had said.

How stupid generalizations were, and how deceptive!

"I hope you'll make a success of it," Bob said. "I like women who take

hold of things and aren't afraid of work when they have to do it. That's

the right spirit." A moody frown contracted his fore head, and she knew

that he was thinking of his wife, though he added after a moment's

hesitation, "Look at my sister now. She's as young as you are and she

lies round all day like an old woman."

"Perhaps it's her health," Dorinda suggested, moving away.

"Why shouldn't she be healthy? We're all healthy enough, Heaven knows!

Not that I wonder at it," he continued thoughtlessly, "when I remember

that she was such a fool as to fall in love with Jason Greylock." The

next instant a purple flush dyed his face, and she could see his

thoughts rising like fish to the fluid surface of his mind. "Not that he

ill-treats her. He knows Father wouldn't stand for that," he added

hurriedly, caught in the net he had unconsciously spread. "But his

laziness is bred in the bone, and he's the sort that will let apples rot

on the ground rather than pick them up."

"I know," Dorinda said, and she did. That was what her mother called the

mental malaria of the country.

"Well, it's the blood, I reckon," he conceded more tolerantly. "There's

enough to work against without having to struggle to get the better of

your own blood. Come this way," he continued, leading her to a different

pasture, "I want you to have a look at our prize bull. Five blue ribbons

already; and we've a yearling that promises to be still finer. A beauty,

isn't he?"

Dorinda gazed at the bull with admiration and envy, while he returned

her look with royal, inscrutable eyes. "I wonder if I shall ever own a

creature like that?" she thought. "He looks as if he owned everything

and yet despised it," she said aloud.

Bob laughed. "Yes, he's got a high-and-mighty air, hasn't he? By the

way, those Jerseys have never been milked by a woman. I don't know how

they'll take to it. Will you hire a man?"

"Not at first. Until I get started well, I'm going to do my own milking.

I can put on Rufus's overalls, and when I milk myself I can be sure of

the way the cows are handled. With negroes you can never tell. Nathan

says they let his cows go dry because they don't take the trouble to

milk them thoroughly. And they won't be clean, no matter how much you

talk to them. When I tell them I'm going to keep my cows washed and

brushed and the stalls free from a speck of dirt, they think it's a

joke."

"That's the trouble. Cleanliness is a joke with most of the farmers

about here, but it's the first step to success in dairy farming. It

keeps down disease, especially contagious abortion, better than anything

else. Yes, you've got the right idea. It means hard work, of course,

though you'll find it's worth while in the end."

"Oh, I don't mind work. What else is there in life?"

His eyes were shining as he looked at her. "Well, I wish my wife had a

little of your spirit. It isn't only that she's delicate. I believe that

she's afraid of everything in the country from a grasshopper to an ox."

"She didn't grow up on a farm. That makes a difference." He sighed.

"Yes, it does make a difference."

"Well, it's a pity. I'm glad I don't have to struggle with fear." A

little later, as she drove across the railway tracks and down the long

slope in the direction of Old Farm, she reflected dispassionately upon

the crookedness of human affairs. Why had that honest farmer, robust,

handsome, without an idea above bulls and clover, mated with a woman who

was afraid of a grasshopper? And why had she, in whom life burned so

strong and bright, wasted her vital energy on the mere husk of a man?

Why, above all, should Nature move so unintelligently in the matter of

instinct? Did this circle of reasoning lead back inevitably, she

wondered, to the steadfast doctrine of original sin? "The truth is we

always want what is bad for us, I suppose," she concluded, and gave up

the riddle.

Just beyond the station, in front of the "old Haney place," she met

William Fairlamb, and stopped to ask him about repairing the cow-barn

and the henhouse. He was a tall, stooped, old-looking young man, with

shaggy flaxen hair and round grey eyes as opaque as pebbles. Though his

expression was stupid, he had intelligence above the ordinary, and was

the best carpenter at Pedlar's Mill.

"If you're going to keep cows, you'd better see that Doctor Greylock

mends his fences," he said, after he had promised to begin on the

cow-barn as soon as he had finished his contract with Ezra Flower. "That

old black steer of his is a public nuisance. I've had him wandering over

my wheat-fields all winter. It's a mortal shame the way the Greylocks

are letting that farm peter out."

"Yes, it's a shame," she agreed, and drove on again. Wherever she

turned, it appeared that she was to be met by a reminder that Jason was

living so near her. "If only he were dead," she thought, as impersonally

as if she were thinking of the black steer that trampled the ploughed

fields. "I shall have to go on hearing about him now until the end of my

days."

There was no regret, she told herself, left in her memory; yet whenever

she heard his name, or recalled his existence, her spirits flagged

beneath an overpowering sense of futility. At such moments, she was

obliged to spur her body into action. "It will be like this always,

until one of us is dead," she reflected. Though she neither loved nor

hated him now, the thought of him, which still lived on in some obscure

chamber of her mind, was sufficient to disturb and disarrange her whole

inner life. The part of her consciousness that she could control she had

released from his influence; but there were innate impulses which were

independent of her will or her emotions; and in these blind instincts of

her being there were even now occasional flashes of longing. While she

was awake she could escape him; but at night, when she slept, she would

live over again all the happiest hours she had spent with him. Never the

pain, never the cruelty of the past; only the beauty and the

unforgettable ecstasy came back to her in her dreams.

As she drove out of the woods the sun was sinking beyond the cleft of

the road, and a slow procession of shadows was moving across the

broomsedge, where little waves of light quivered and disappeared and

quivered again like ripples in running water. While she passed on, the

expression of the landscape faded from tranquil brightness to the look

of unresisting fortitude which it had worn as far back as she could

remember. In her heart also she felt that the brightness quivered and

died. With her drooping energy, weariness had crept over her; but out of

weariness, she passed presently, like the country, into a mood of

endurance. She realized, without despair, that the general aspect of her

life would be one of unbroken monotony. Enthusiasm would not last.

Energy would not last. Cheerfulness, buoyancy, interest, not one of

these qualities would last as long as she needed it. Nothing would last

through to the end except courage.

Her gaze was on the horizon. The reins, tied together with a bit of

rope, were held loosely in her hands. With every turn of the wheel, a

shower of dried mud was scattered over her clothes. So completely lost

was she in memory that at first she barely heard the noise of an

approaching rider, and the hollow sound of horseshoes striking on rock.

Even before her mind became aware of Jason's approach, her startled

senses leaped toward him. Her body bent for an instant, and then sprang

back like a steel wire. With an impassive face, and a torment of memory

in her heart, she sat staring far ahead, at the blur of road by the

cabin. She was back again within the prison of that moment which was

eternal; yet there was no sign of suffering in the blank look of her

eyes. Her hand did not tremble; the loosened reins did not waver; and

when a voice called her name, she did not reveal by the quiver of an

eyelash that she listened.

"Dorinda! Dorinda, let me speak to you!"

She raised her eyes from the road and looked beyond the waving

broomsedge to the topaz-coloured light on the western horizon. The

longing to look in his face, to turn and rend him with her scorn, was as

sharp as a blade; but some deep instinct told her that if she yielded to

the impulse, the struggle was lost. To recognize his existence was to

restore, in a measure, his power over her life. Only by keeping him

outside her waking moments could she win freedom.

"Dorinda, you are hard. Dorinda----"

They were side by side now in the road. If he had reached out his hand,

he could have touched her. If she had turned her head, she might have

looked into his eyes. But she did not turn; she did not withdraw her

gaze from the landscape; she did not relax in the weakest muscle from

her attitude of unyielding disdain. Though he were to ride all the way

home with her, she told herself, he could not force her to speak to him.

No matter what he did, he could never make her speak to him or look at

him again!

The sunken places in the road retarded him, and when he reached her side

again, they were passing the burned cabin. For an instant, when they

approached the fork, he hesitated, as if he were tempted to follow her

still farther. Then, deciding abruptly, he wheeled about and alighted to

open the red gate of Five Oaks.

"I'll see you again," he called back.

For a few minutes after he had disappeared, she sat rigidly erect, as if

she had been frozen into her attitude of repulsion. Then, suddenly, she

gave way; a shudder seized her limbs, and the reins slipped from her

hands to the bottom of the buggy. She was like a person who has escaped

some fearful calamity, and who has not realized the danger until it is

over. When the trembling had passed, she stooped and picked up the

reins. "It will be easier next time," she said, and a moment later, "I

suppose I've got to get used to it. You can get used to anything if you

have to." A dull misery stupefied her thoughts, and she was without

clear perception of what the meeting had meant to her. "I can't

understand why I suffer so," she pondered. "I can't understand how a

person you despise can make you so unhappy."

As she drew nearer home, Dan quickened his pace, and the buggy rattled

over the bridge and up the rocky slope to the stable. The glow had faded

from the west, and the long white house glimmered through the twilight,

which was settling like silver dust over the landscape. A banner of

smoke drooped low over a single chimney. Beyond the roof the budding

trees appeared as diaphanous as mist against the greenish-blue of the

sky. In the window of the west wing a lamp was shining. So she had seen

it on innumerable evenings in the past; so she would see it, if she

lived, on innumerable evenings in the future.

Then, just as she was about to drive on to the stable, she observed that

shadows were moving to and fro beyond the single lighted window. Though

the outward aspect of the house was unchanged, there was, nevertheless,

a subtle alteration in its spirit. For an instant, while she hesitated,

there seemed to her an ominous message in these hurried shadows and this

absence of noise. Her throat tightened, and she sprang from the buggy as

the door opened and Rufus came out.

"He died a few minutes ago," he said.

A few minutes ago! "I'll never know now what he tried to tell me," she

thought. "No matter how long I live, I shall never know."

X

After the last prayer, the earth was shovelled back into the hollow

beneath the great pine in the graveyard, and the movement of the farm

began again with scarcely a break in its monotony. Joshua Oakley had

sacrificed his life to the land, and yet, or so it seemed to Dorinda,

his death made as little difference as if a tree had fallen and rotted

back into the soil. Even her own sorrow was a sense of pity rather than

a personal grief.

When the neighbours had driven solemnly out of the gate, the family

assembled in Mrs. Oakley's chamber and gazed through the window to the

graveyard on the hill, as if they were waiting expectantly for the dead

man to rise and return to his work. The only change would be, they

acknowledged, that two hired labourers would grumble over a division of

the toil which Joshua had performed alone and without a complaint. The

farm had always belonged to Mrs. Oakley; but in order that her authority

might be assured, Joshua had made a will a few months before his death

and had left her the farm implements and the horses. Dissimilar as her

parents had appeared to be, there was a bond between them which Dorinda

felt without comprehending. This was the growth of habit, she supposed,

or the tenacious clinging of happy memories which had survived the frost

of experience. In his dumb way, Joshua had been proud of his wife, and

Eudora had depended upon her husband for more substantial qualities than

those of sentiment. He had been useful to her in the practical details

of living, and she was feeling his loss as one feels the loss of a

faculty. Here was another proof, Dorinda reflected, of the varied

texture of life, another reminder of her folly in attempting to weave

durable happiness out of a single thread of emotion.

"I don't see how we'll manage to get on without him," said Mrs. Oakley,

who looked gaunt and bleached in the old mourning she had worn for her

dead children.

"I reckon it means I'll have to stay on here," Rufus muttered in a tone

of sullen rebellion. "I'll have to give up that job Tom Garlick promised

me next winter in New York. It's darn luck, that's what I call it."

"Oh, no, you mustn't stay," Dorinda urged. "Ma and I can get on

perfectly by ourselves. It won't make any difference if you go in the

fall."

"You'd better take Dorinda's advice and get away, Rufus." Though Mrs.

Oakley spoke in a quiet voice, her face had gone grey at the thought of

losing Rufus also.