d and had a hard day before him to-morrow, and thought he'd go to
bed.

Long after he had fallen into immobile slumber Annie lay beside him,
awake, marvelling how suddenly he had become a stranger, almost an
ogre. Yet she loved him and yearned to him. The impulse that had made
her finish the letter to Cousin Lorena in the same spirit in which she
had begun it called her to pity and help him. She must conceal his
weakness from their world. She listened to his deep, regular
breathing, she put her hand against his hard palm.

"I'm his wife," thought Annie Dean with inarticulate tenderness. "I'm
going to try to be everything a wife ought to be."

The next morning he was his old self again, laughing, joking, teasing
her as usual. The scene of yesterday seemed to have gone utterly from
his memory, though he must have known that she had seen and heard it.
But he made no allusion to it, nor did she. The farm work was
pressing; the warm spring days foretold an early season.

As he went whistling out toward the barn Annie heard him salute Unc'
Zenas with familiar friendliness:

"How's tricks this morning? Think the Jersey'll be fresh next week?"

Aunt Dolcey heard him, too, and she and Annie exchanged long glances.
The old woman's said, "You see--what I told you was true"; and the
young woman's answered, "Yes, I see, and I understand. I'm going to
see it through."

But something in her youth had definitely vanished, as it always does
when responsibility lays its heavy hand on us. She went about her new
life questioningly eager for understanding. There was so much for her
to see and learn--the erratic ways of setting hens, the care of
foolish little baby chicks; the spring house, cool and damp and
gray-walled, with its trickle of cold water forever eddying about the
crocks of cream-topped milk; the garden making, left to her and Aunt
Dolcey after the first spading; the various messes and mashes to be
prepared for cows with calf; the use of the stored vegetables and
fruits, and meat dried and salted in such generous quantity that she
marvelled at it. All the farm woman's primer she learned, bit by bit,
seeing how it supplemented and harmonized with that life of the fields
that so engrossed and commanded Wes.

But through it all, beneath it all, she found herself waiting, with
dread, for another outburst. Against whom would it be this time--Unc'
Zenas again--Aunt Dolcey--one of the animals--or perhaps herself? She
wondered