oken crates,
straw and boxes--the debris of unpacking. And there he saw a youthful
woman sitting with her head turned partially from the road. As he passed a
suppressed sob shook her. It captured his attention, and, with a slight,
involuntary gasp, he saw her face. The memories returned in a tumultuous,
dark tide--she reminded him vividly of Lettice. It was in the young curve
of her cheeks, the blue of her eyes, and a sameness of rounded
proportions, that the resemblance lay.

He stopped, without formulated reason, and in spite of her obvious desire
for him to proceed.

"It's hardly fit to sit here and cry before the whole County," he
observed.

"The whole County knows," she returned in the egotism of youthful misery.

Her voice, too, was like Lettice's--sweet with the premonition of the
querulous note that, Rutherford Berry had once said, distinguished all
good women.

A sudden intuition directed his gaze upon the Courthouse lawn.

"They're selling you out," he hazarded, "for debt."

She nodded, with trembling lips. "Cannon is," she specified.

Cannon was the storekeeper for whom his brother-in-law clerked. He thought
again, how monotonous, how everlastingly alike, life was. "You just let
the amount run on and on," he continued; "you got this and that. Then,
suddenly, Cannon wanted his money."

Her eyes opened widely at his prescience. "But there was sickness too,"
she added; "the baby died."

"Ah," Gordon said curtly. The lines in his worn face deepened, his mouth
was inscrutable.

"If it hadn't been for that," she confided, "we could have got through.
Everything had started fine. Alexander's father had left him the place:
there isn't a better in the Bottom. Alexander says Mr. Cannon has always
wanted it. Now ... now ..." her blue gaze blurred with slow tears.

Her similarity to Lettice grew still more apparent--she presented the same
order, her white shirtwaist had been crisply ironed, her shoes were
rubbed bright and neatly tied. He recalled this similitude suddenly, and
it brought before him a clearly defined vision of Lettice, not as his
wife, but of the girl he had driven to and from the school at Stenton. He
had not thought of that Lettice for months, for three years; not since
before she had died; not, he corrected himself drearily, since he had
killed her. He had remembered the last phase, of the glazed and bloodless
travesty of her youth. But even that lately had been lost in the fog of
nothing