To her nervous mind, alive with the creations of
her fear, it seemed she could read the lines,

JAMES SLOAN
BORN SEPT. 14, 1857
DIED NOV. 12, 1915

and below it, stamped clearly and illumined by her fright,

HIS FAITHFUL WIFE
MARTHA SLOAN
BORN AUG. 9, 1871. DIED----

At the thought of the word "Died," followed by the dash, she recoiled.
The dash reaching out to her--reaching to her--swept into her mind all
the graspingness of James which had squeezed the sweetness out of
life--all the hardness which had marked his possession of her. Was it
her mind, prodded by terror, that visualized it? There, seeming to
advance from the hill, from the cemetery, from the very gravestone which
was beginning to blot and blurr in her vision, she saw a hand--his hand!
It was coming--coming to her, to crush what of life was left in her.

Even in her own mind, it was a miracle that she had survived Jim's
tenacity. When Jim had died, she began suddenly to recover her former
manner of life. She began to win back to herself. It was as if, the
siege of Winter having lifted, the breath and warmth of Spring might now
again prevail.

Then had come the horrors of uncontrollable dreams followed by the death
by fire of Dorothy. That had shaken her completely.

She recalled their rescuing Dorothy, how they had dragged her out of the
fire, her clothes all burned off. They had sought to nurse her back to
health, and in the week before her daughter died she had learned
something of what had happened the night of the fire. In her sleep
Dorothy had heard herself called and she thought it was her father's
voice. She had arisen when she seemed to see beside her her father as he
had looked in life.

She had followed him to the barn and suddenly he had told her that he
had come back to take her with him as he had promised to before his
death. In her struggle to escape him she had flung the lantern. In the
parlor they had laid out Dorothy--a blackened, burnt frame.

All her care and love and solicitude she concentrated on Joseph. She
thought that perhaps by an intenser, all embracing love for Joseph she
would be enabled to defeat the spell that she felt hanging over her
life. Then, when it seemed that life would begin anew to take on a
definite meaning--Joseph, grown up, was giving purpose to it--she
remembered that some one had knocked timidly on the door and had
announced in a frightened voice: "Mrs. Sloan! There's been a terrible
accident, the b