hing to point that way, but a woman and a mother must
vindicate her claims to religion, and Mrs. Farnshaw refused to give her
consent to the Sunday harvesting.

Torn between her desire to save every grain of the precious crop and the
fear of a hell that burned with fire and brimstone, her husband's scorn
did what neither had been able to do. Mrs. Farnshaw forbade the machine
being taken to the field, and then cried herself into a headache.

"Do as you please; it's your lookout, but I tell you It'll be a sick
lookin' field by to-morrow mornin'," was Mr. Farnshaw's final shot.

When her decision was finally reached, Mr. Farnshaw became alarmed. He
knew he had let the flax go too long uncut. He had half believed in the
reasons he had given for delay up to this point, but suddenly realizing
that the overripe grain would suffer great loss if left another day in the
hot sun, he reasoned with real earnestness that it must be cut if it were
to be saved. His wife, thoroughly convinced that he was still tormenting
her and that he would never let her hear the last of the matter if she
gave up, closed her lips down firmly and declined to allow it to be done.

All this the child had heard argued out that morning. It was a cruel
position in which to place one of her years. Part of it she had
comprehended, part had escaped her, but she was sensitive to the
atmosphere of suffering. The details of past elements in the tragedy she
could not be expected to understand. The stunted, barren life of her
mother was but half guessed. What child could know of the heartsick
longing for affection and a but little understood freedom, the daily
coercion, the refusal of her husband to speak kindly or to meet her eye
with a smile?

The sorely puzzled and bewildered woman thought affection was withheld
from her because of something done or undone, and strove blindly to
achieve it by acts, not knowing that acts have little, if anything, to do
with affection. She strove daily to win love, not knowing that love is a
thing outside the power to win or bestow. Had she had understanding she
would have spared the child with whom she worked; instead, she talked on
with her dreary whine, morbidly seeking a sympathy of which she did not
know how to avail herself when it was so plainly hers.

With a lump in her throat of which the mother did not even suspect, Lizzie
Farnshaw set the table, cut the bread, brought the water, "put up the
chairs," and, when her f