shoes; coarse black hair grew down upon
his broad, thick-jointed hands; a thicket of eyebrows presented, like a
_chevaux-de-frise_, bristling when he drew them down in his peering
squint.

Sarah Newbolt rose to meet him, tall in the vigor of her pioneer stock.
In her face there was a malarial smokiness of color, although it still
held a trace of a past brightness, and her meagerness of feature gave
her mouth a set of determination which stood like a false index at the
beginning of a book or a misleading sign upon a door. Her eyes were
black, her brows small and delicate. Back from her narrow forehead she
had drawn her plentiful dark hair in rigid unloveliness; over it she
wore a knitted shawl.

"Well, Mr. Chase, you've come to put us out, I reckon?" said she, a
little tremor in her chin, although her voice was steady and her eyes
met his with an appeal which lay too near the soul for words.

Isom Chase drew up to the steps and placed one knotted foot upon them,
standing thus in silence a little while, as if thinking it over. The
dust of the highroad was on his broad black hat, and gray upon his
grizzly beard. In the attitude of his lean frame, in the posture of his
foot upon the step, he seemed to be asserting a mastery over the place
which he had invaded to the sad dispersion of Sarah Newbolt's dreams.

"I hate to do it," he declared, speaking hurriedly, as if he held words
but frail vehicles in a world where deeds counted with so much greater
weight, "but I've been easy on you, ma'am; no man can say that I haven't
been easy."

"I know your money's long past due," she sighed, "but if you was to give
Joe another chance, Mr. Chase, we could pay you off in time."

"Oh, another chance, another chance!" said he impatiently. "What could
you do with all the chances in the world, you and him--what did your
husband ever do with his chances? He had as many of 'em as I ever did,
and what did he ever do but scheme away his time on fool things that
didn't pan out when he ought 'a' been in the field! No, you and Joe
couldn't pay back that loan, ma'am, not if I was to give you forty years
to do it in."

"Well, maybe not," said she, drawing a sigh from the well of her sad old
heart.

"The interest ain't been paid since Peter died, and that's more than two
years now," said Chase. "I can't sleep on my rights that way, ma'am;
I've got to foreclose to save myself."

"Yes, you've been easy, even if we did give you up our last c