thing that was a menace while it existed. It was at the very bottom of
the box, caught in a corner. She took it out with fingers that
trembled, crumpled it into a little ball so that she could not read
what it said, straightened it immediately, and read it reluctantly from
the beginning to the end where the last word was clipped short with
hasty scissors. A paragraph cut from a newspaper, it was; yellow and
frayed from contact with other objects, telling of things--

Billy Louise bit her lips until they hurt, but she could not keep back
the tears that came hot and stinging while she read. She slid the
little heap of odds and ends to the middle of the bed, crushed the
clipping into her palm, and went out stealthily into the immaculate
kitchen. As if she were being spied upon, she went cautiously to the
stove, lifted a lid, and dropped the clipping in where the wood blazed
the brightest. She watched it flare and become nothing--not even a
pinch of ashes; the clipping was not very large. When it was gone, she
put the lid back and went tiptoeing to the door. Then she ran.

Phoebe was down by the creek, so Billy Louise went to the stable,
through that and on beyond, still running. Farther down was a grassy
nook--on, beyond the road. She went there and hid behind the willows,
where she could cry and no one be the wiser. But she could not cry the
ache out of her heart, nor the rebellion against the hurt that life had
given her. If she could only have burned memory when she burned that
clipping! She could still believe and be happy, if only she could
forget the things it said.

Phoebe called her, after a long while had passed. Billy Louise bathed
her face in the cold water of the Wolverine, used her handkerchief for
a towel, and went back to take up the duties life had laid upon her.
The doctor's team was hitched to the light buggy he drove, and the
doctor was standing in the doorway with his square medicine-case in his
hand, waiting to give her a few final directions before he left.

He was like so many doctors; he seemed to be afraid to tell the whole
truth about his patient. He stuck to evasive optimism and then
neutralized the reassurances he uttered by emphasizing the necessity of
being notified if Mrs. MacDonald showed any symptoms of another attack.

"Don't wait," he told Billy Louise gravely. "Send for me at once if
she complains of that pain again, or appears--"

"But what is it?" Billy Louise w