from her bedroom, she found Claude
asleep on the lounge, dressed, with his overcoat on. She had a
moment of terror and bent over him, but she could not detect any
smell of spirits. She began preparations for breakfast, moving
quietly.

Having once made up her mind to go out to her sister, Enid lost
no time. She engaged passage and cabled the mission school. She
left Frankfort the week before Christmas. Claude and Ralph took
her as far as Denver and put her on a trans-continental express.
When Claude came home, he moved over to his mother's, and sold
his cow and chickens to Leonard Dawson. Except when he went to
see Mr. Royce, he seldom left the farm now, and he avoided the
neighbours. He felt that they were discussing his domestic
affairs,--as, of course, they were. The Royces and the Wheelers,
they said, couldn't behave like anybody else, and it was no use
their trying. If Claude built the best house in the
neighbourhood, he just naturally wouldn't live in it. And if he
had a wife at all, it was like him to have a wife in China!

One snowy day, when nobody was about, Claude took the big car and
went over to his own place to close the house for the winter and
bring away the canned fruit and vegetables left in the cellar.
Enid had packed her best linen in her cedar chest and had put the
kitchen and china closets in scrupulous order before she went
away. He began covering the upholstered chairs and the mattresses
with sheets, rolled up the rugs, and fastened the windows
securely. As he worked, his hands grew more and more numb and
listless, and his heart was like a lump of ice. All these things
that he had selected with care and in which he had taken such
pride, were no more to him now than the lumber piled in the shop
of any second-hand dealer.

How inherently mournful and ugly such objects were, when the
feeling that had made them precious no longer existed! The debris
of human life was more worthless and ugly than the dead and
decaying things in nature. Rubbish... junk... his mind
could not picture anything that so exposed and condemned all the
dreary, weary, ever-repeated actions by which life is continued
from day to day. Actions without meaning.... As he looked out
and saw the grey landscape through the gently falling snow, he
could not help thinking how much better it would be if people
could go to sleep like the fields; could be blanketed down under
the snow, to wake with their hurts healed and their defeat