n doin', Paw?"

"Just putterin' 'round the barn. What you been doin', Maw?"

"Just putterin' 'round the kitchen gettin' supper started. I went
up-stairs and knocked at Stevie's door. He didn't answer. Guess he's
asleep."

"Guess so."

"It seems awful good, Paw, to be back in this old place, don't it?--you
and me just settin' here and our boy safe and sound asleep up-stairs."

"That's so. As the fellow says in the circus, here we are again, Maw."

"Here we are again, Paw."

AND THIS IS MARRIAGE

His soul floated upward from the lowermost depths of oblivion, slowly,
as a water-plant, broken beneath, drifts to the surface. And then he was
awake and unutterably afraid.

His soul opened, as it were, its eyes in terror and his fleshly eyelids
went ajar. There was nothing to frighten him except his own thoughts,
but they seemed to have waited all ready loaded with despair for the
instant of his waking.

The room was black about him. The world was black. He had left the
window open, but he could not see outdoors. Only his memory told him
where the window was. Never a star pinked the heavens to distinguish it.
He could not tell casement from sky, nor window from wall, nor wall from
ceiling or floor. He was as one hung in primeval chaos before light had
been decreed.

He could not see his own pillow. He knew of it only because he felt it
where it was hot under his hot cheek. He could not see the hand he
raised to push the hair from his wet brow. He knew that he had a hand
and a brow only from their contact, from the sense of himself in them,
from the throb of his pulse at the surface of himself.

He felt almost completely disembodied, poised in space, in infinite
gloom, alone with complete loneliness. As the old phrase puts it, he was
all by himself.

The only sound in his universe, besides the heavy surf of his own blood
beating in his ears, was the faint, slow breathing of his wife, asleep
in the same bed, yet separated from him by a sword of hostility that
kept their souls as far apart as planets are.

He laughed in bitter silence to think how false she was to the devoted
love she had promised him, how harsh her last words had been and how
strange from the lips that used to murmur every devotion, every
love-word, every trust.

He wanted to whirl on her, shake her out of the cowardly refuge of
sleep, and resume the wrangle that had ended in exhaustion.

He wanted to gag her so that she would hear hi