ere again, or was it Raven? But, after all, nothing seemed
to matter: only the queer state of his hands. That was the trouble now.

All through the next day he hung about the place, doing the barn work,
milking, taking the milk to the house, but stopping there, for Tira met
him at the door, took the pails from him, and carried them in without a
word. He wondered vaguely whether, having denied him entrance to his own
house, she meant to refuse him food also, but presently she appeared
with a tray: meat and vegetables carefully arranged and the coffee he
depended on. Then she pointed out a wooden box, a little chest that had
lived up in the shed chamber, lifted the lid and bade him note the
folded garments within: he must change to-morrow, and these were his
clean clothes. Occasionally he glanced at her, but he could not see that
she looked very different. She was always pale. Early in the morning of
the third day she appeared with hot water and a basket filled with what
seemed to him at first a queer assortment of odds and ends.

"Here," she said, "here's your shavin' things. I'll set the little
lookin' glass up ag'inst the beam. Here's your razor. I'll fill the mug.
Now, you shave you. If anybody should happen to see you, they'd say
'twa'n't fittin' for a man to have his baird all over his face, day of
his baby's funeral."

The glass, with its picture of a red and blue house and a cedar tree,
she set against a beam, but it escaped her fingers and fell forward and
cracked straight across the little house. She picked it up, balanced it
against the beam and held it, with a frowning care, until it was secure.

"Sign of a death!" she said, as if to herself, but indifferently.
"There! you shave you now, an' then I'll bring you out your breakfast
an' carry in the things."

Tenney shaved before the little mirror with its crack across the house,
and, as if she had been watching him, she appeared at the minute of his
finishing. Now she was carrying a breakfast tray, poising it absorbedly,
with the intentness of a mind on one thing only. It was a good
breakfast, eggs and coffee and bacon, and the thick corn-cake he liked;
also, there was his tin lunch box. She pulled out the little table, set
the tray on it and brought his chair.

"There!" said she. "Now soon as ever you've finished eatin' you take
your luncheon an' your axe an' go over to the long pastur' an' don't you
show your head back here till it's time to fetch the cow