chair.

The county attorney did not heed her. "No sign at all of any one having
come in from the outside," he said to Peters, in the manner of
continuing an interrupted conversation. "Their own rope. Now let's go
upstairs again and go over it, piece by piece. It would have to have
been some one who knew just the--"

The stair door closed behind them and their voices were lost.

The two women sat motionless, not looking at each other, but as if
peering into something and at the same time holding back. When they
spoke now it was as if they were afraid of what they were saying, but as
if they could not help saying it.

"She liked the bird," said Martha Hale, low and slowly. "She was going
to bury it in that pretty box."

"When I was a girl," said Mrs. Peters, under her breath, "my
kitten--there was a boy took a hatchet, and before my eyes--before I
could get there--" She covered her face an instant. "If they hadn't held
me back I would have"--she caught herself, looked upstairs where
footsteps were heard, and finished weakly--"hurt him."

Then they sat without speaking or moving.

"I wonder how it would seem," Mrs. Hale at last began, as if feeling her
way over strange ground--"never to have had any children around?" Her
eyes made a slow sweep of the kitchen, as if seeing what that kitchen
had meant through all the years. "No, Wright wouldn't like the bird,"
she said after that--"a thing that sang. She used to sing. He killed
that too." Her voice tightened.

Mrs. Peters moved uneasily.

"Of course we don't know who killed the bird."

"I knew John Wright," was Mrs. Hale's answer.

"It was an awful thing was done in this house that night, Mrs. Hale,"
said the sheriff's wife. "Killing a man while he slept--slipping a thing
round his neck that choked the life out of him."

Mrs. Hale's hand went out to the bird-cage.

"His neck. Choked the life out of him."

"We don't _know_ who killed him," whispered Mrs. Peters wildly. "We
don't _know_."

Mrs. Hale had not moved. "If there had been years and years of--nothing,
then a bird to sing to you, it would be awful--still--after the bird was
still."

It was as if something within her not herself had spoken, and it found
in Mrs. Peters something she did not know as herself.

"I know what stillness is," she said, in a queer, monotonous voice.
"When we homesteaded in Dakota, and my first baby died--after he was two
years old--and me with no other then--"

Mrs. Hale