s. You can bring
'em along with you, an' I'll have the pails out on the step so 't you
can start right off milkin'. An' when you've got through, you fetch the
milk into the house, same as usual."

As she was leaving the barn she turned and the breeze lifted those
little rings of her hair and Tenney, looking full at her now, groaned.
It was not, he felt, any of the other things that had happened to them:
only there was always breeze enough, even on the stillest day, to stir
her hair. Now it seemed to be the only thing in the world with life in
it.

"I shall tell 'em," she said clearly, as if she wanted him to understand
and remember--and she did not look at him, but across the road and up
the slope where the hut stood waiting for her--"the doctor an' all the
rest I've got to see, you was so sick over it, you couldn't come."

Then she stepped out of the picture she had made against the smiling
day, the dark interior of the barn framing her, and walked, with her
free-swinging step, to the house. And Tenney ate his breakfast, took his
luncheon box and axe, and started for the woods. But he had not got out
of the yard when she called to him. He stopped and she came running; she
was no longer pale, and her eyes were rimmed with red. She came up with
him.

"Isr'el," she said, "you think o' this. You think of it all day long.
'I'm goin' through it alone,' you says to yourself mebbe, after you've
got off there into the woods. 'But I ain't alone. He'll be with me, the
Lord Jesus Christ.' An' you remember there's that to think on. An'
there's forgiveness. Isr'el, you lay down your axe. You let me take holt
o' your hand."

He could only stare at her, and she took the axe from his hand and laid
it at their feet. She took his hand and put it to her cheek. Then she
took his other hand and laid that also on her cheek, and murmured a
little formlessly, but in a way he sharply remembered as a means of
stilling the baby. She lifted her head then, smiling a little, and still
holding the hands. But before releasing them she stroked them softly and
said, "There! there! Poor souls," she added, "poor souls!" Did she mean
the unhappy hands, or all souls of men caught in the network of
mysterious life? She picked up his axe and gave it to him as a mother
might dismiss a child who was going to a distasteful task. "There!" she
said again. "Now, you remember." She turned from him, and Tenney went,
head down, to his work.

That afternoon, ab