or thirteen years.

In the front room a shaded lamp, turned low, threw a circle of light on
the table and floor, leaving the corners full of vague, uncertain
shadows. From the wide, black fireplace a pair of rusty and battered
andirons held out empty arms, and on the high stone shelf above the
opening, flanked on each side by a stuffed owl, was a tall, square-faced
clock, with the hour-hand missing. The minute-hand still went on its
useless round, and behind it, on the face of the clock, a tiny schooner
with all sail set rocked with the swinging of the pendulum.

The loud ticking of the clock, and the lamentations of the hound
without, were not the only sounds that disturbed the night. Before the
empty fireplace, in a high-backed, cane-bottomed chair, slept an old
negress, with head bowed, moaning and muttering as she slept. She was
bent and ashen with age, and her brown skin sagged in long wrinkles from
her face and hands. On her forehead, reaching from brow to faded turban,
was a hideous testimony to some ancient conflict. A large, irregular
hole, over which the flesh had grown, pulsed as sentiently and
imperatively as a naked, living heart.

A shutter slammed sharply somewhere in the house above, and something
stirred fearfully in the shadow of the room. It was a small figure that
crouched against the wall, listening and watching with the furtive
terror of a newly captured coyote--the slight figure of a woman dressed
as a child, with short gingham dress, and heelless slippers, and a
bright ribbon holding back the limp, flaxen hair from her strange,
pinched face.

Again and again her wide, frightened eyes sought the steps leading to
the room above, and sometimes she would lean forward and whisper in
agonized expectancy, "Daddy?" Then when no answer came, she would
shudder back against the wall, cold and shaking and full of dumb
terrors.

Suddenly the hound's howling changed to a sharp bark, and the old
negress stirred and stretched herself.

"What ails dat air dog?" she mumbled, going to the window, and shading
her eyes with her hand. "You'd 'low to hear him tell it he done heared
old master coming up de road."

That somebody was coming was evident from the continued excitement of
the hound, and when the gate slammed and a man's voice sounded in the
darkness, Aunt Tish opened the door, throwing a long, dim patch of light
out across the narrow porch and over the big, round stepping-stones
beyond.

Into the l