below. It required every ounce of strength she had to throw the hay
clear of the stack and in line with the racks where the cattle could reach
it, but the girl worked with a will, while the cattle fought for best
places, or any place at all, and reached hungry tongues for the sweet
hay.

Elizabeth worked with joy and energy. The mood of the storm was upon the
girl. Not before in all the months she had been married had she ever moved
in perfect freedom in her native out-of-doors element. It was a gift of
the gods and not to be despised or neglected, for to-morrow would come
John--and prison bars. Before she had begun, she faced the wind, and with
bounding joy looked over the drifted fields toward the north and
northeast. The air was clearing. The world looked different from this
lofty position. She was Elizabeth again, Elizabeth transformed and made
new. The lethargy of recent months had slipped away; something about the
rush and motion of things in the last twenty-four hours inspired her; the
fierce winds of yesterday and to-day stirred her spirit to do, to be in
motion herself. They had communicated their energy, their life, their free
and ungoverned humour. Elizabeth's thoughts ran on as fast as her blood.
She thought of Luther, and of all he had said to her, of her neglected
opportunities which he had pointed out to her, and wondered modestly if he
were right, and then knew that he was. She thought of how she, the
out-of-door prisoner of her father's home, had become the indoor prisoner
of her husband's home. She had thought that to marry and escape her
father's grasp was to possess herself; but Elizabeth Hunter saw that as a
wife she was really much less free. She thought of the sacrifices she had
made in the hope of securing harmony, and she thought of the futility of
it all. She decided that if a woman were enslaved it was because she
herself permitted it, that to yield where she should stand fast did not
secure a man's love, it only secured his contempt and increased his
demands. In the three years she had been married she had not been
permitted an hour of real companionship until the accident of this storm
had brought an old friend to her door and kept him there till she had had
a chance to realize the mental depths to which she had fallen in her
isolation. In all the time she had been married she had not thought of
anything but the bare details of their daily life. A woman had to have the
association of congenia