lled her, Johnnie," he cried in agony, "and that's the God's truth
of it."

Another long silence.

The lamp guttered but didn't go out. A moth had flown down its chimney,
was sizzling, charring, inside ... Paul lifted off the globe. Burnt his
hands, but said nothing ... flicked the wingless, blackened body to the
floor....

"But the baby?--it lived?"

"Yes, it lived ... a girl ... if it hadn't of lived ... if it had gone,
too, I wouldn't of wanted to live, either!..."

"That's why I'm workin' so hard, these days, with no lay-offs fer
huntin' or fishin' or anything."

* * * * *

The next day I learned more from Rachel of how Paul had agonized over
the death of his tiny wife ... "'she was that small you had a'most to
shake out the sheets to find her,' as Josh useter say," said Rachel
gravely and unhumorously ... and she told how the bereaved husband
savagely fought off all his womenfolk and insisted on mothering, for a
year, the baby whose birth had killed its mother.

"At last he's gittin' a little cheer in his face. But every so often the
gloomy fit comes over him like it did last night at supper. I keep
tellin' him it ain't Christian, with her dead two years a'ready--but he
won't listen ... he's got to have his fit out each time."

* * * * *

As if this had not been enough of the tragic, the next day when I asked
about Phoebe, Aunt Rachel started crying.

"Phoebe's gone, too," she sobbed.

"O, Aunt Rachel, I'm so sorry ... but I didn't know ... nobody told me."

"That's all right, Johnnie. Somehow it relieves me to talk about
Phoebe." She rose from her rocker, laid down her darning, and went to a
dresser in the next room. She came out again, holding forth to me a
picture ... Phoebe's picture....

A shy, small, oval, half-wild face like that of a dryad's. Her chin
lifted as if she were some wood-creature listening to the approaching
tread of the hunter and ready on the instant to spring forth and run
along the wind....

An outdoor picture, a mere snapshot, but an accidental work of art.

Voluminous leafage blew behind and above her head, splashed with the
white of sunlight and the gloom of swaying shadow.

"Why, she's--she's beautiful!"

"Yes--got prettier and prettier every time you looked at her...."

"But," and Aunt Rachel sighed, "I couldn't do nothin' with her at all.
An' scoldin' an' whippin' done no good, neither. Josh useter wh