had interrupted Minnie Foster? Why had that work been left half done?
She made a move as if to finish it,--unfinished things always bothered
her,--and then she glanced around and saw that Mrs. Peters was watching
her--and she didn't want Mrs. Peters to get that feeling she had got of
work begun and then--for some reason--not finished.

"It's a shame about her fruit," she said, and walked toward the cupboard
that the county attorney had opened, and got on the chair, murmuring: "I
wonder if it's all gone."

It was a sorry enough looking sight, but "Here's one that's all right,"
she said at last. She held it toward the light. "This is cherries, too."
She looked again. "I declare I believe that's the only one."

With a sigh, she got down from the chair, went to the sink, and wiped
off the bottle.

"She'll feel awful bad, after all her hard work in the hot weather. I
remember the afternoon I put up my cherries last summer."

She set the bottle on the table, and, with another sigh, started to sit
down in the rocker. But she did not sit down. Something kept her from
sitting down in that chair. She straightened--stepped back, and, half
turned away, stood looking at it, seeing the woman who had sat there
"pleatin' at her apron."

The thin voice of the sheriff's wife broke in upon her: "I must be
getting those things from the front room closet." She opened the door
into the other room, started in, stepped back. "You coming with me, Mrs.
Hale?" she asked nervously. "You--you could help me get them."

They were soon back--the stark coldness of that shut-up room was not a
thing to linger in.

"My!" said Mrs. Peters, dropping the things on the table and hurrying to
the stove.

Mrs. Hale stood examining the clothes the woman who was being detained
in town had said she wanted.

"Wright was close!" she exclaimed, holding up a shabby black skirt that
bore the marks of much making over. "I think maybe that's why she kept
so much to herself. I s'pose she felt she couldn't do her part; and
then, you don't enjoy things when you feel shabby. She used to wear
pretty clothes and be lively--when she was Minnie Foster, one of the
town girls, singing in the choir. But that--oh, that was twenty years
ago."

With a carefulness in which there was something tender, she folded the
shabby clothes and piled them at one corner of the table. She looked up
at Mrs. Peters and there was something in the other woman's look that
irritated her.