hment. His wife came to her place at the table when they were
almost through, and sat stirring a bowl of the mixture of bread and thin
soup, her eyes set in abstracted stare in the middle of the table, far
beyond the work of her hands. She did not speak to Joe; he did not
undertake any friendly approaches.

Joe never had seen Mrs. Chase before that day, neighbors though they had
been for months. She appeared unusually handsome to Joe, with her fair
skin, and hair colored like ripe oats straw. She wore a plait of it as
big as his wrist coiled and wound around her head.

For a little while after finishing his unsatisfying meal, Joe sat
watching her small hand turning the spoon in her soup. He noted the
thinness of her young cheeks, in which there was no marvel, seeing the
fare upon which she was forced to live. She seemed to be unconscious of
him and Isom. She did not raise her eyes.

Joe got up in a little while and left them, going to the porch to look
for his bundle and his book. They were gone. He came back, standing
hesitatingly in the door.

"They're in your room upstairs," said Mrs. Chase without turning her
head to look at him, still leaning forward over her bowl.

"I'll show you where it is," Isom offered.

He led the way up the stairs which opened from the kitchen, carrying a
small lamp in his hand.

Joe's room was over the kitchen. It was bleak and bare, its black
rafters hung with spiderwebs, plastered with the nests of wasps. A
dormer window jutted toward the east like a hollow eye, designed, no
doubt, and built by Isom Chase himself, to catch the first gleam of
morning and throw it in the eyes of the sleeping hired-hand, whose bed
stood under it.

Isom came down directly, took his lantern, and went to the barn to look
after a new-born calf. Where there was profit, such as he counted it, in
gentleness, Isom Chase could be as tender as a mother. Kind words and
caresses, according to his experience, did not result in any more work
out of a wife so he spared them the young woman at the table, as he had
denied them the old one in her grave.

As Isom hurried out into the soft night, with a word about the calf,
Ollie made a bitter comparison between her lot and that of the animals
in the barn. Less than six months before that gloomy night she had come
to that house a bride, won by the prospect of ease and independence
which Chase had held out to her in the brief season of his adroit
courtship. The meanes