she got her
strength up."

He put a hand on her brow, and felt it cool.

"Glory! You're mendin' fast, Nancy gal. You'll be well in time to can
the berries that the childern's picked." He fished from below the bed a
pair of skin brogues and slipped them on his feet. "I'll be back before
night."

"I want Abe," she moaned.

"I'll send him to you," he said as he went out

Left alone the woman lay still for a little in a stupor of weariness.
Waves of that terrible lassitude, which is a positive anguish and not
a mere absence of strength, flowed over her. The square of the doorway,
which was directly before her eyes, began to take strange forms. It
was filled with yellow sunlight, and a red glow beyond told of the
sugar-maples at the edge of the clearing. Now it seemed to her unquiet
sight to be a furnace. Outside the world was burning; she could feel
the heat of it in the close cabin. For a second acute fear startled her
weakness. It passed, her eyes cleared, and she saw the homely doorway as
it was, and heard the gobble of a turkey in the forest.

The fright had awakened her mind and senses. For the first time she
fully realised her condition. Life no longer moved steadily in her body;
it flickered and wavered and would soon gutter out.... Her eyes marked
every detail of the squalor around her--the unwashed dishes, the foul
earthen floor, the rotting apple pile, the heap of rags which had been
her only clothes. She was leaving the world, and this was all she had
won from it. Sheer misery forced a sigh which seemed to rend her frail
body, and her eyes filled with tears. She had been a dreamer, an adept
at make-believe, but the poor coverings she had wrought for a dingy
reality were now too threadbare to hide it.

And once she had been so rich in hope. She would make her husband a
great man, and--when that was manifestly impossible without a rebirth
of Tom Linkhorn--she would have a son who would wear a black coat like
Lawyer Macneil and Colonel Hardin way back in Kentucky, and make fine
speeches beginning "Fellow countrymen and gentlemen of this famous
State." She had a passion for words, and sonorous phrases haunted her
memory. She herself would have a silk gown and a bonnet with roses in
it; once long ago she had been to Elizabethtown and seen just such a
gown and bonnet.... Or Tom would be successful in this wild Indiana
country and be, like Daniel Boone, the father of a new State, and have
places and towns call