, washed out the pails, and, after bathing her tired feet in
a tub that stood there, she put on a pair of horrible shoes, without
stockings, and crept stealthily into the house. Sim did not hear her as
she slipped up the stairs to the little low, unfinished chamber beside
her oldest children. She could not bear to sleep near _him_ that
night,--she wanted a chance to sob herself to quiet.

As for Sim, he was a little disturbed, but would as soon have cut off
his head as acknowledge himself in the wrong. As he went to bed, and
found her still away, he yelled up the stairway:

"Say, o' woman, ain't ye comin' to bed?" Upon receiving no answer he
rolled his aching body into the creaking bed. "Do as y' damn please
about it. If y' want to sulk y' can." And in such wise the family grew
quiet in sleep, while the moist, warm air pulsed with the ceaseless
chime of the crickets.

II.

When Sim Burns woke the next morning he felt a sharper twinge of
remorse. It was not a broad or well-defined feeling--just a sense that
ho had been unduly irritable, not that on the whole he was not in the
right. Little Pet lay with the warm June sunshine filling his baby eyes,
curiously content in striking at flies that buzzed around his little
mouth.

The man thrust his dirty, naked feet into his huge boots, and, without
washing his face or combing his hair, went out to the barn to do his
chores.

He was a type of the average prairie farmer, and his whole surrounding
was typical of the time. He had a quarter-section of fine level land,
bought with incredible toil, but his house was a little box-like
structure, costing, perhaps, five hundred dollars. It had three rooms
and the ever-present summer kitchen attached to the back. It was
unpainted and had no touch of beauty--a mere box.

His stable was built of slabs and banked and covered with straw. It
looked like a den, was low and long, and had but one door in the end.
The cow-yard held ten or fifteen cattle of various kinds, while a few
calves were bawling from a pen near by. Behind the barn, on the west and
north, was a fringe of willows forming a "wind-break." A few broken and
discouraged fruit trees standing here and there among the weeds formed
the garden. In short, he was spoken of by his neighbors as "a
hard-working cuss, and tol'ably well fixed."

No grace had come or ever could come into his life. Back of him were
generations of men like himself, whose main business had been