roof there was her
step-mother's voice now--the same old, querulous, nerve-racking voice
that had embittered all her childhood--calling her down into the old
mean round of drudgery that had bound forever the horizon of her narrow
life just as now it was shutting down like a sky of brass around her
own. And when the voice came, instead of bursting into tears as she was
about to do, she gave a hard little laugh and she lifted a defiant
face to the rising sun. There was a limit to the sacrifice for kindred,
brother, father, home, and that limit was the eternal sacrifice--the
eternal undoing of herself: when this wretched terrible business was
over she would set her feet where that sun could rise on her, busy with
the work that she could do in that world for which she felt she was
born. Swiftly she did the morning chores and then she sat on the porch
thinking and waiting. Spinning wheel, loom, and darning needle were
to lie idle that day. The old step-mother had gotten from bed and was
dressing herself--miraculously cured of a sudden, miraculously active.
She began to talk of what she needed in town, and June said nothing. She
went out to the stable and led out the old sorrel-mare. She was going to
the hanging.

"Don't you want to go to town, June?"

"No," said June fiercely.

"Well, you needn't git mad about it--I got to go some day this week,
and I reckon I might as well go ter-day." June answered nothing, but in
silence watched her get ready and in silence watched her ride away. She
was glad to be left alone. The sun had flooded Lonesome Cove now with a
light as rich and yellow as though it were late afternoon, and she could
yet tell every tree by the different colour of the banner that each yet
defiantly flung into the face of death. The yard fence was festooned
with dewy cobwebs, and every weed in the field was hung with them as
with flashing jewels of exquisitely delicate design: Hale had once told
her that they meant rain. Far away the mountains were overhung with
purple so deep that the very air looked like mist, and a peace
that seemed motherlike in tenderness brooded over the earth. Peace!
Peace--with a man on his way to a scaffold only a few miles away, and
two bodies of men, one led by her father, the other by the man she
loved, ready to fly at each other's throats--the one to get the
condemned man alive, the other to see that he died. She got up with
a groan. She walked into the garden. The grass was tall, t