him that the first time he had seen her
she was walking along the road with young Kennedy one Sunday afternoon,
and they were holding hands. When they saw him they let go suddenly,
and grew very red, giggling in a half-hearted way to hide their
embarrassment. And he remembered that he had passed them by without
saying anything, but with a good-humored, sly smile on his face, and
a mellow feeling within him, and a sage reflection to himself that
young folks will be young folks, and what harm was there in courting
a little on a Sunday afternoon when the week's work had been done?

And he remembered other days on which he had met her and Kennedy;
and then how the conviction had come into his mind that here was a
girl for him to marry; and then how, quietly and equably, he had gone
about getting her and marrying her, as he would go about buying a team
of horses or make arrangements for cutting the hay.

Until the day he married her he felt as a driver feels who has his team
under perfect control, and who knows every bend and curve of the road
he is taking. But since that day he had been thinking about her and
worrying and wondering exactly where he stood, until everything in
the day was just the puzzle of her, and he was like a driver with a
restive pair of horses who knows his way no farther than the next bend.
And then he knew she was the biggest thing in his life.

The situation as it appeared to him he had worked out with difficulty,
for he was not a thinking man. What thinking he did dealt with the
price of harvest machinery and the best time of the year for buying
and selling. He worked it out this way: here was this girl dead, whom
he had married, and who should have married another man, who was coming
to-night to kill him. To-night sometime the world would stop for him.
He felt no longer a personal entity--he was merely part of a situation.
It was as if he were a piece in a chess problem--any moment the player
might move and solve the play by taking a pawn.

Realities had taken on a dim, unearthly quality. Occasionally a sound
from the kitchen would strike him like an unexpected note in a harmony;
the whiteness of the bed would flash out like a piece of color in a
subdued painting.

There was a shuffling in the kitchen and the sound of feet going toward
the door. The latch lifted with a rasp. He could hear the hoarse, deep
tones of a few boys, and the high-pitched sing-song intonations of
girls. He knew they w