her. But it isn't much later than
usual; it's the clouds. Here's some good kindling for you in the
morning and a basket of cobs," he added tenderly.

She received in silence the feed basket he held out to her, and watched
him as he kneeled, busily piling up the last of the fagots.

"I hope you haven't cut any more of that green oak; your father
couldn't keep warm."

"This is hickory, dead hickory, with some seasoned oak. Father'll have
to take his coat off and you'll have to get a fan."

There was a moment of silence.

"Supper's over," she said simply.

She held in one hand a partly eaten biscuit.

"I'll be in soon now. I've nothing to do but kindle my fire."

After another short interval she asked:

"Is it going, to snow?"

"It's going to do something."

She stepped slowly back into the warm room and closed the door.

David hurried to the woodpile and carried the sticks for his own grate
upstairs, making two trips of it. The stairway was dark; his room dark
and damp, and filled with the smell of farm boots and working clothes
left wet in the closets. Groping his way to the mantelpiece, he struck
a sulphur match, lighted a half-burned candle, and kneeling down, began
to kindle his fire.

As it started and spread, little by little it brought out of the
cheerless darkness all the features of the rough, homely, kind face,
bent over and watching it so impatiently and yet half absently. It gave
definition to the shapeless black hat, around the brim of which still
hung filaments of tow, in the folds of which lay white splinters of
hemp stalk. There was the dust of field and barn on the edges of the
thick hair about the ears; dust around the eyes and the nostrils. He
was resting on one knee; over the other his hands were
crossed--enormous, powerful, coarsened hands, the skin so frayed and
chapped that around the finger-nails and along the cracks here and
there a little blood had oozed out and dried.

XII

When David came down to his supper, all traces of the day's labor that
were removable had disappeared. He was clean; and his working clothes
had been laid aside for the cheap black-cloth suit, which he had been
used to wear on Sundays while he was a student. Grave, gentle, looking
tired but looking happy, with his big shock head of hair and a face
rugged and majestical like a youthful Beethoven. A kind mouth, most of
all, and an eye of wonderfully deep intelligence.

The narrow, uncarpeted stairwa