make out alone. Next thing
you'll die on me, and then I'll have the whole shebang on my hands."
At that he eyed her dumbly from his chair by the stove. His resistance
was wearing down. He knew it. He wasn't dying. He knew that, too.
But something in him was. Something that had resisted her all these
years. Something that had made him master and superior in spite of
everything.

In those days of illness, as he sat by the stove, the memory of Emma
Byers came to him often. She had left that district twenty-eight years
ago, and had married, and lived in Chicago somewhere, he had heard, and
was prosperous. He wasted no time in idle regrets. He had been a
fool, and he paid the price of fools. Bella, slamming noisily about
the room, never suspected the presence in the untidy place of a third
person--a sturdy girl of twenty-two or -three, very wholesome to look
at, and with honest, intelligent eyes and a serene brow.

"It'll get worse an' worse all the time," Bella's whine went on.
"Everybody says the war'll last prob'ly for years an' years. You can't
make out alone. Everything's goin' to rack and ruin. You could rent
out the farm for a year, on trial. The Burdickers'd take it, and glad.
They got those three strappin' louts that's all flat-footed or
slab-sided or cross-eyed or somethin', and no good for the army. Let
them run it on shares. Maybe they'll even buy, if things turn out.
Maybe Dike'll never come b----"

But at the look on his face then, and at the low growl of unaccustomed
rage that broke from him, even she ceased her clatter.

They moved to Chicago in the early spring. The look that had been on
Ben Westerveld's face when he drove Dike to the train that carried him
to camp was stamped there again--indelibly this time, it seemed.
Calhoun County in the spring has much the beauty of California. There
is a peculiar golden light about it, and the hills are a purplish haze.
Ben Westerveld, walking down his path to the gate, was more poignantly
dramatic than any figure in a rural play. He did not turn to look
back, though, as they do in a play. He dared not.

They rented a flat in Englewood, Chicago, a block from Minnie's. Bella
was almost amiable these days. She took to city life as though the
past thirty years had never been. White kid shoes, delicatessen
stores, the movies, the haggling with peddlers, the crowds, the
crashing noise, the cramped, unnatural mode of living--necessitated by
a fo