it. If I'd known mother was going
to clean house I wouldn't have said anything about it," Elizabeth answered
sullenly.

"Sh!" John Hunter said in a low tone and with a look of anger that was
direct and full of meaning.

Elizabeth was ready to cry. She was angry. In every move she made she was
checkmated; not because it was not a good move, but because it was hers.
She could readily have given up any one thing as it came along, but the
true meaning and spirit of these interferences were beginning to dawn upon
her. However, once more she yielded to the unreasonable wishes of her
husband and the dinner was given up. She made no attempt to finish the
mincemeat they had planned to chop after dinner, but after putting the
baby to sleep threw a shawl about her and slipping out of the house ran to
the barn and down the creek in the pasture while John was helping his
mother rehang the freshly ironed curtains.

They were only having two meals a day now that the corn was all picked,
and dinner came so late in the afternoon that there was already a blaze of
sunset colour in the west as she passed around the barn and started down
the bank of the stream. The sun had set, but was still reflected on the
heaps of billowy gray clouds just above the horizon. It made the snow in
front of her a delicate pink. The girl had not got far enough from the
house to see a sunset for months. The freshness and keenness of the air,
the colours in the sky, the grandeur and sublimity of it all chased away
her anger and left her in a mood to reason over her situation. She
followed the cow-path down to the bed of the stream and then threaded her
way along its winding route for a greater distance than she had ever gone
before. A broken willow barred her way after a time, and she climbed up on
its swaying trunk and let her feet dangle over the frozen streamlet below.
The snow made lighter than usual the early evening and extended the time
she could safely stay so far from the house.

The colours faded rapidly from the sky and the bewildered girl returned to
her own affairs, which were puzzling enough. Of late she had found herself
unable to maintain her enthusiasm. She found herself increasingly
irritable--from her standpoint the one thing most to be despised in others
and which she had supposed most impossible in herself. There were so many
unforeseen possibilities within herself that she devoted her entire
attention to her own actions and impulses, and