when the house
was still and Isom was asleep, he heard her moaning and sobbing, her
head on the kitchen table.

These bursts of anguish were not the sudden gusts of a pettish woman's
passion, but the settled sorrow of one who suffered without hope.
Many a time Joe tiptoed to the bottom of the staircase in his bare
feet and looked at her, the moonlight dim in the cheerless kitchen, her
head a dark blotch upon the whiteness of her arms, bowed there in
her grief. Often he longed to go to her with words of comfort and let
her know that there was one at least who pitied her hard fate and
sad disillusionment.

In those times of tribulation Joe felt that they could be of mutual help
and comfort if they could bring themselves to speak, for he suffered
also the pangs of imprisonment and the longings for liberty in that
cruel house of bondage. Yet he always turned and went softly, almost
breathlessly, back to his bed, leaving her to sob and cry alone in the
struggle of her hopeless sorrow.

It was a harder matter to keep his hands from the gristly throat of grim
old Isom Chase, slumbering unfeelingly in his bed while his young wife
shredded her heart between the burr-stones of his cruel mill. Joe had
many an hour of struggle with himself, lying awake, his hot temples
streaming sweat, his eyes staring at the ribs of the roof.

During those months Joe had set and hardened. The muscles had thickened
over his chest and arms; his neck was losing the long scragginess of
youth; his fingers were firm-jointed in his broadening hands. He knew
that Isom Chase was no match for him, man to man.

But, for all his big body and great strength, he was only a boy in his
sense of justice, in his hot, primitive desire to lunge out quickly and
set the maladjustments of that household straight. He did not know that
there was a thing as old as the desires of men at the bottom of Ollie's
sorrow, nor understand the futility of chastisement in the case of Isom
Chase.

Isom was as far as ever from his hope of a son or heir of any
description--although he could not conceive the possibility of fathering
a female child--and his bitter reproaches fell on Ollie, as they had
fallen upon and blasted the woman who had trudged that somber course
before her into the grateful shelter of the grave. It was a thing which
Ollie could not discuss with young Joe, a thing which only a sympathetic
mother might have lightened the humiliation of or eased with tender
c