"Let her stay," she said. "I'd like her to."

Alvida, with her hand on the doorknob, turned to the girl. She could not thus easily relinquish dictatorship.

"You're let off Sundays for prayermeetin'," she said. "You've always gone with me till Luke Crosby broke in. I thought he was drivin' you to the village to-night same's he's been doin' for months back. Well," as the girl did not answer, "well, ain't he?"

"He can't. He's going away." Miss Cummings's perennial hunger for news drew her toward the table.

"Goin' away? Where's he goin'?" "Way off. Canada maybe, now their haying's done. I don't know where." "When'd he tell you?"

"When he brought in the milk, only I'd known it before."

Sarah Craig was hulling strawberries now. In some inexplicable way she knew that Martha Sutter needed her help. A louder clap of thunder crashed through the still, sultry air. Alvida Cummings opened the side door.

"So you'd known it before? But you don't know where he's goin'?”

Her expectant determination was drawing an unwilling answer. Sarah Craig saw how unrelaxed was the body of the girl pressed against the table. She knew how it felt to be bound like that. "I told you I didn't!" rushed into the tone. The silence grew tense. Alvida Cummings broke it.

Defiance had

"Well, there's one thing more I want to say. You ought-to-know!"

Her small brown eyes tried in vain to raise Martha Sutter's. Failing, she went

out.

Left mercifully alone, the two by the table finished the strawberries. Sarah Craig, as the significance of her neighbor's words slowly came to her, kept glancing at the girl, at the convulsive twitching of her shoulders inside the pink dress. When the last berry was in the yellow bowl, she examined them critically, moving the bowl in a revolving fashion upon the table. She must do something. Martha picked away some bits of the hulls which had fastened themselves to her stained fingers. The storm burst in a VOL. LXXVIII.—31

flash of blue lightning and a sudden blast of rain.

"It was nice of you to pick these for us," said Sarah Craig. "Where'd you find them, late like this?"

"On the ridge just above the house here. There's a glen where late ones grow."

She drew her breath in sharply. When she let it go, she came with it, falling on her knees beside the table, her arms outstretched upon it, her whole body shaken with a paroxysm of sobbing. Sarah Craig watched her, half-rising from her chair. Alarmed though she was at such display of feeling in her kitchen, which had never known such abandon, she would have given anything to have let herself go like that. But a long succession of years held her back. Still, as with the storm, now fully upon them, she was experiencing through Martha Sutter's sobbing a momentary relaxation and rest.

Ethan's step as he came from the barn through the carriage-house to the shed aroused Martha Sutter. Before he had reached the kitchen, pausing as he had done for years to gather up a few sticks of wood, she had washed and dried her face at the sink. Sarah Craig watched her gratefully as she took his hat and helped him off with his coat. Twenty years before she might have done it as easily.

They got supper together as the storm crashed overhead-cut the bread and cake, portioned the strawberries, got doughnuts from the cellarway, made the tea.

Ethan watched the barn from the back window. Sarah's occasional comments upon the force of the wind or an unusually vivid flash broke a silence less cruel than she had feared. Martha Sutter did her part. She asked Ethan if he thought the hay would be spoiled, and contributed the information that Jason Webber had lost a calf that morning. Sarah did not tell Ethan that Luke Crosby had gone-perhaps to Canada.

The storm continued throughout their supper. The dining-room was at the back of the house, its two windows facing the western spruce ridge. Lightning so continuous as to seem a shimmering yet unbroken glare threw the dark spruces and pines into blue relief. Martha Sutter, from her chair opposite the windows, saw

them bend toward the earth in one gust of wind and then in another toss imprecating arms toward heaven. Once she started from her chair, stifling a cry, as a red ball of fire seemed to cleave a great gray boulder below the trees.

"That struck somewhere on the ridge," said Ethan as the simultaneous thunder shook the house. "A tree, most likely." With a quick glance at Sarah he passed his cup for more tea. She had loosened a yarn in the tea-cozy and was ravelling it absently.

Suddenly Martha Sutter seized her plate, knife, and spoon and moved to the other side of the table with her back to the window. It was Jarvis Craig's place that she had taken, but the grief of his father and mother in its dull, aching monotony was not pierced by any sudden or more poignant anguish.

In the evening, after the dishes were washed, they sat in the sitting-room, Ethan at his side of the table, Sarah at hers, Martha Sutter in a chair by the stove. Ethan glanced once at the weekly paper, still folded, in the middle of the table. He did not touch it. That would have suggested his longing to think of other things. Martha Sutter held the white kitten which had whimpered to be let in. It was forlorn and wet. Once it cried out piteously. Sarah Craig started in her chair, and Martha Sutter flushed. She had not known she had been holding it so closely.

The rumbling of the thunder became more distant, though the lightning still played in the air.

They're getting it over in Petersport now, I guess," said Sarah Craig.

The days that followed seemed to Sarah Craig in their dreary level the advent of nothingness. She was like one on a high, limitless desert, hot and windswept, the unchanging sky over her. She was choked with sand and thirst, weary from lifting her heavy feet. An impassable distance shut the past from her. There was nothing ahead but sand, and hot, unyielding sky.

She remembered that one of her neighbors, on that day a fortnight since when they had brought Jarvis home from beneath the load of hay, had prophesied a

swift coming of pain to her pain which should cut sharply through this steady, dull torment, superseding this heavy, monotonous ache with knifelike thrusts of anguish. But the prophecy had not been fulfilled, though as July gave way to August with its noonday droning of insects, she found herself still looking and longing for it. It would not only concentrate the protracted agony which she had endured so long, but it would, perhaps, by its very sharpness tear from her the garments in which she seemed so swathed and bound and set her spirit free.

Even before Jarvis's death she had wanted that. Evenings when the three of them had watched the moon make vineshadows on the porch; nights when she and Ethan had listened to the whip-poorwills at their very window; mist-hung mornings when she had put up the bars for Jarvis and watched him following the cows down the lane. What was this thing, she asked herself for the hundredth time, that so early began to lace itself about them all, that held so closely all the people whom she knew? It hovered over the North Dorset farmers and their wives like a mocking fiend as they drove to the village on Saturdays, enjoining silence upon them or forcing them to an occasional, strained remark; it reigned triumphant over their supper-tables and their evenings; it added torture to torment when grief came to them.

Was it engendered and nourished by the rocky acres of North Dorset, the long, silent winters, the six months' fight each year against the land? Was youth its enemy, that it sought to shackle it? It had early seized and bound her and Ethan, slowly, to be sure, but irrevocably, turning their speech into silence, transforming their early confidence in each other into a taciturn and necessary dependence, substituting for happiness a kind of inevitable content. In pathetic helplessness she had watched Jarvis fall an early prey to it, had seen him draw within himself while still a little boy, had recognized his restless suffering as he grew older, and yet had been unable to help him.

Pain, such as she longed for, must, at least for the moment, loosen or break those cruel bonds, must give to her as it

had given to Martha Sutter on that Sunday evening freedom to fall by the table and sob, freedom to do for Ethan unnecessary, tender things when he had come for supper after another day's fight, single-handed, against the land. Waiting for that merciful hour, she could but substitute the material for the spiritual, make the pies he liked best, carry a jug of cold molasses drink to the garden or hay field, place a pillow in his chair on the porch. Not infrequently, as the August fogs lessened and the evenings grew clear and cool, Martha Sutter came from Miss Alvida Cummings's to sit on the porch with them. Once Sarah, washing the dishtowels at the sink by the back window, was startled to see her poised in her pink dress on a boulder half-way up the spruce ridge, looking like some gigantic flower sprung into sudden bloom. She would have mentioned it as Martha came on the porch a few minutes later, but something in the girl's face made her hesitate.

To Sarah Craig there was something approaching peace in those evenings, silent as they were. Ethan smoked in his corner, gazing defiantly now and then at the dim outlines of his cornstalks or at his sparse rows of potatoes. Sarah in her chair by the door commented now and again upon some neighborhood happening, contributed by Martha, who sat on the doorstep, the white kitten in her arms. At nine, while the insects droned in the air and the spikes of larkspur by the porch were like still, thin threads of blue smoke in the gathering darkness, Martha Sutter put down the white kitten and went back, through the pasture lane and over the spruce ridge, to Alvida Cummings's.

It was on a Tuesday in late September following one of these evenings that Sarah Craig, coming down-stairs at five to begin the ironing, found Martha Sutter already at work in her kitchen. She was ironing a shirt of Ethan's, and she did not look up as Sarah passed her to put her lamp on its shelf above the sink. In the corner by the stove were a battered straw suit-case and some bundles. As Sarah turned slowly from the sink, the girl, still busy with the shirt, began to speak in a hard, dry voice. "Alvida Cummings won't let me stay with her any longer. She sent me away last night. I stayed on your porch. She

wouldn't have kept me this long only I lied to her and she couldn't get any one else. I can go to the canning-factory at Petersport. They need girls and they don't care who they get. She laughed nervously. "But I'd rather stay here. I'll work for my board, and I've got fifty dollars saved, so I won't be any cost to you when-when I'm sick. And you're tired out. You need some help."

Sarah Craig took her apron from a hook on the cellar door and put it on. Then she sat down and began fingering it. She was surprised at the ease with which she made up her mind.

"You can stay here," she said. "I'm alone lots. I'll be glad of company. When-?" She hesitated. It was hard to frame the question.

Martha Sutter hung the shirt upon the rack and reached for another. A flush colored her neck and face.

"I don't know exactly. In January, I guess. What'll Mr. Craig say? Folks 'll talk, and I can't have you and him suffer."

"Suffer!" said Sarah Craig. She kept absently repeating the word under her breath as she went toward the back stairs. Once in the darkness there she sat down in the middle of the stairway. There had suddenly come to her consciousness something of the magnitude of what she had promised Martha Sutter.

She would be harboring a girl who, in North Dorset parlance, had "gone wrong." Such a situation was frowned upon by the countryside, and her harborage might well be interpreted as her countenance of such behavior. But the girl could not be bad, Sarah Craig argued with herself. She had picked strawberries for them on the afternoon of Jarvis's funeral, had staid with them that evening, had sat with them in summer twilights, and more than all else had brought with her from some strange source an assurance of hidden powers which, one day freed, would bring security and peace. These were not the accompaniments of sin.

They would be less lonely with her there. It would be easier to talk at meals and in the evenings. If they talked of Jarvis, who, Sarah remembered, had been sorry for her if she could induce the girl to prick her with questions about him

that pain might come which was some day to set her free.

Lastly-Sarah Craig clutched her knees in the darkness-lastly, there was to be a child, an unwelcome child in place of the one she had dreamed of for years past. If its father did not come back to do the right thing by Martha Sutter, its mother must work. It might be then that the child would stay with them during those early years before chains were forged for it, might save others though it could not save itself. It might be the floor in the hall above creaked under Ethan's heavy tread, and she went up the stairs to meet him on the landing. Necessity lent her courage necessity, the darkness of the narrow hall, and the knowledge that Ethan, like Jarvis, had always hated Alvida Cummings.

The fall was long and quiet with days that began in gold and ended in blue haze. Even North Dorset, its uncompromising fields and rocky, angular pastures, became under the autumn sun a land that would have tempted the spies of Israel. For the first time in twenty years Sarah Craig felt herself distantly related to the full-bosomed contentment of October. Although no swift pain had as yet come to set her free, she was gratefully aware of a new sense of peace as she sat with Martha Sutter sewing on the porch on still, amber afternoons. It more than compensated for the curiosity and disapproval which she intuitively felt when she met her North Dorset neighbors.

Strangely enough, Martha Sutter, too, seemed at peace. Not since that Sunday evening in July had Sarah Craig seen her give way. If she sobbed by herself in her room at night or during the hours in which she climbed to the spruce ridge, she gave no sign. Nor was her peace negative. To Sarah Craig, incomprehensible as it seemed, she was like one who, having discovered something of inestimable value, has locked it away forever.

Then the short, mellow, sunlit days ceased as abruptly as one extinguishes the light of a candle in a dusky room. North Dorset again became a bleak land, a prey to November winds and low, gray clouds. Late autumn was always its hour of triumph, Sarah Craig thought. Then, se

cure in its colorless fields, its stark, bare pastures, and the surety of a long winter close at hand, it could mock those who, allured by its October mood, had been tempted to dream of plenty and content.

Martha Sutter, gazing from the window one November morning, as they prepared the vegetables for dinner, at the first snowflakes powdering the spruces on the ridge, spoke suddenly to Sarah Craig. "North Dorset's a cruel place, isn't it?"

Sarah Craig dropped the potato from which she had been removing the scabs with a knife. At that moment she heard herself speaking, herself thirty years ago standing at that kitchen table and looking out upon those bare hills. Those words were her own which she had never uttered.

Martha Sutter did not wait for an answer. "They're all cruel-places like this. West Stetson was where I came from, and Morgan's Bay and the Falls. I know about all of them. They hold you in close so's you can't get away."

Had Sarah Craig known of Greek drama, she might have heard in Martha Sutter's words a chorus, accompanying and interpreting her own tragedy. The idea of her girlhood ghost persisted. She did not speak.

"They hold you in close," repeated the girl. There was no anger in her voice. It was dry and even as though she were but giving tangible form to thoughts she had long held. "They tie you all up like as if there were ropes about you, and then they make you want things just like other people. When you can't stand it any more and break the things they tie you with"-her words came slowly-"when you do that, they call it wrong."

Sarah Craig felt a sense of wonder that the clock upon the mantel above the sink kept on ticking.

"I've thought it all out these last months, and I don't think it's wrongleastways not in North Dorset." She let her hands play in the pan of brown, dirtfilled water. "You can't stay tied up that way forever. You've got to have some way out. If you don't, after a time you just die, inside."

"Yes," said Sarah Craig. A sudden bitterness had discovered her voice for her. "Yes, I died twenty years ago!"