est I can and earn money to help keep him but I want he should
come and live with you...."

"I won't have him!" said Mary Chavah, aloud.

"... he could come alone with a tag all right and I could send his
things by freight. He ain't got much. You couldn't help but like
him and I hate for him to get rough. Please answer and oblige your
loving Nephew,
"JOHN BLOOD."

Mary kept reading the letter and staring out into the snow. Her sister
Lily's boy--they wanted to send him to her. Lily's boy and Adam
Blood's--the man whose son she had thought would be her son. It was
twenty years ago that he had been coming to the house--this same
house--and she had thought that he was coming to see her, had never
thought of Lily at all till Lily had told her of her own betrothal to
him. It hurt yet. It had hurt freshly when he had died, seven years ago.
Now Lily was dead, and Adam's eldest son, John, wanted to send this
little brother to her, to have.

"I won't take him," she said a great many times, and kept reading the
letter and staring out into the snow.

For Lily she had no tears--she seldom had tears at all. But after a
little while she was conscious of a weight through her and in her,
aching in her throat, her breast, her body. She rose and went near to
the warmth of the fire, then to the freedom of the window against which
the snow lay piled, then she sat down in the place where she worked,
beside her patterns. The gray shawl still bound her head, and it was
still in her mind that she must go to the barn and lock it. But she did
not go--she sat in the darkening room with all her past crowding it....

... That first day with Adam at the Blood's picnic, given at his
home-coming. They had met with all that perilous, ready-made intimacy
which a school friendship of years before had allowed. As she had walked
beside him she had known well what he was going to mean to her. She
remembered the moment when he had contrived to ask her to wait until the
others went, so that he might walk home with her. And when they had
reached home, there on the porch--where she had just shaken the rugs in
the snow--Lily had been sitting, a stool--one of the stools now at
length banished to the shed--holding the hurt ankle that had kept her
from the picnic. Adam had stayed an hour, and they had sat beside Lily.
He had come again and again, and they had always sat beside