Rosie
expected nothing--but she waited. She waited as watchers wait round a
death-bed for the possibility of one more breath; but none came. She
stirred then and rose. She rose mechanically, brushing the earth from
her clothing, and began again the interrupted task of picking the
superfluous female flowers and letting them flutter downward.

It was when she had come to the end of her third row and was about to
turn into the fourth that the sense of the impossibility of going on
swept over her. "Oh, I can't!" She dropped her arms to her side. "I
can't. I can't." She meant only that she couldn't go on just then; but
in the back of her mind there was the conviction that she would never go
on again.

She continued to stand with arms hanging and head drooped to one side,
closed in by vines, with flowers of the hue of light around her like a
halo, and bees murmuring among them. It was not merely that she was
listless and incapable; the world seemed to have dropped away. She was
marooned on a rock, with an ocean of nothingness about her. Everything
she wanted had gone--sunk, vanished. It had come within sight, like
mirage to the shipwrecked, only to torture her with what she couldn't
have. It was worse than if it had never shown itself at all. Love had
appeared with one man, money with the other. Love and money were two of
the three things she cared for; the poor, shiftless family was the
third. Since the first two had gone, the last must follow them. Quite
consciously and deliberately Rosie lifted her hands with a little
lamentable effort, letting them drop again, and so renounced her burden.

She crept back to the spot whence she had risen, and lay down. There was
a kind of ritual in the act. It was not now a mere stricken, physical
crouching as when she had turned away from Claude. It was something more
significant. It was withdrawal from work, from life, from all the
demands she had put forth so fiercely.

Renouncing these, Rosie also renounced Claude. It was a proof of the
degree to which she had dismissed him that when, a half-hour later, she
heard a rustling in the vines behind her it never occurred to her that
he might have come back. She knew already that he would never come back.
The fatalism of her little soul left her none of those uncertainties
which are safeguards against despair. She raised her head and looked;
but she saw exactly the person she knew she would see.

Antonio grinned, and announced dinner. Th