ght of it.

"There ain't," she said, "two nicer folks in this township than
Charlotte an' Jerry, nor two that's readier to turn a hand."

Tenney was silent, and Jerry did the chores and went home. Sometimes he
came to the house to ask how Tenney was getting on, but to-day he had to
get back to his own work.

This was perhaps a week after Tenney's accident, when he was getting
impatient over inaction, and next day the doctor came and pronounced the
wound healing well. If Tenney had a crutch, he might try it carefully,
and Tenney remembered Grandsir had used a crutch when he broke his hip
at eighty-two, and healed miraculously though tradition pronounced him
done for. It had come to the house among a load of outlawed relics, too
identified with the meager family life to be thrown away, and Tira found
it "up attic" and brought it down to him. She waited, in a sympathetic
interest, to see him try it, and when he did and swung across the
kitchen with an angry capability, she caught her breath, in a new fear
of him. The crutch looked less a prop to his insufficiency than like a
weapon. He could reach her with it. He could reach the child. And then
she began to see how his helplessness had built up in her a false
security. He was on the way to strength again, and the security was
gone.

The first use he made of the crutch was to swing to the door and tell
Jerry he need not come again. Tira was glad to hear him add:

"Much obleeged. I'll do the same for you."

Afterward she went to the barn with him and fed and watered while he
supplemented her and winced when he hurt himself, making strange sounds
under his breath that might have been oaths from a less religious man.
And Tira was the more patient because the doctor had told her the foot
would always trouble him.

It was two days after he had begun to use his crutches, that Tira, after
doing the noon chores in the barn and house, sat by the front window in
her afternoon dress, a tidy housewife. The baby was having his nap and
Tenney, at the other window, his crutch against the chair beside him,
was opening the weekly paper that morning come. Tira looked up from her
mending to glance about her sitting-room, and, for an instant, she felt
to the full the pride of a clean hearth, a shining floor, the sun lying
in pale wintry kindliness across the yellow paint and braided rugs. If
she had led a gypsy life, it was not because her starved heart yearned
the less tumultuously fo