preted the most familiar sights and sounds.

If the days were hard, the nights were torture. Even that poor,
tormenting, futile hope that left her sick and shaken was better than
hopelessness. There were no stars in the darkness that brooded over
her heart after the sun went down. As she lay with clenched hands,
counting the ten thousand woolly sheep whose agility in overleaping an
obstructive wall is for some mysterious reason assumed to be soporific
in its influence, she was conscious of a sort of terror of the thoughts
lurking in ambush, ready to spring out upon her if she were off her
guard for an instant. It was useless to tell herself that she was no
poorer than before, that nothing had changed. In her heart she knew
better. She had worked on through the gray years, facing a colorless
future, without a word from her one-time lover, to tell her that he
lived or ever thought of her, and yet a dream, too vague and illusory
to be named hope, had been her stay and solace. Now as she stared
wide-eyed into the dark, she asked herself what was left.

It was no wonder that the gray crepe grew apace. For the first time in
her well-disciplined life, Persis gave up the struggle with refractory
nerves, left her bed night after night and sewed till daybreak. For
whatever might fail, her work was left, that grim consoler, who,
masking benignity by a scowl, has kept ten million hearts from breaking.

The gown was finished at daybreak, one bright October morning, and that
evening Persis tried it on, in the apathetic mood that mercifully
relieves tense feelings when the limit of endurance has been reached.
It was late, according to Clematis standards. For almost twenty-four
hours that dreadful, unbeaten hopefulness would be quiescent. Thomas
Hardin had come and gone. Joel was in bed. Persis Dale put on her new
gray gown and scrutinized herself in the mirror. She had lost interest
in her personal appearance, but her professional instinct told her that
the dress was a success.

"It would be real becoming if my hair wasn't strained back so. A dress
can't do much for you when you look like a skinned rabbit, all on
account of your hair." She recalled the coiffure in which Annabel
Sinclair had presented herself the previous day, and loosening the coil
of her hair, as glossy and abundant as ever, she imitated with a skill
which surprised herself, Annabel's version of the latest mode. She was
studying the effect when so