long, with but half an hour's interval for lunch,
which she herself prepared upon the oil stove. In the evening they were
both so tired that they were in no mood for conversation, and went to
bed early, worn out, harried, nervous, and cross.

Trina was not quite so scrupulously tidy now as in the old days. At one
time while whittling the Noah's ark animals she had worn gloves. She
never wore them now. She still took pride in neatly combing and coiling
her wonderful black hair, but as the days passed she found it more and
more comfortable to work in her blue flannel wrapper. Whittlings and
chips accumulated under the window where she did her work, and she was
at no great pains to clear the air of the room vitiated by the fumes of
the oil stove and heavy with the smell of cooking. It was not gay, that
life. The room itself was not gay. The huge double bed sprawled over
nearly a fourth of the available space; the angles of Trina's trunk and
the washstand projected into the room from the walls, and barked shins
and scraped elbows. Streaks and spots of the "non-poisonous" paint that
Trina used were upon the walls and wood-work. However, in one corner of
the room, next the window, monstrous, distorted, brilliant, shining with
a light of its own, stood the dentist's sign, the enormous golden tooth,
the tooth of a Brobdingnag.

One afternoon in September, about four months after the McTeagues had
left their suite, Trina was at her work by the window. She had whittled
some half-dozen sets of animals, and was now busy painting them and
making the arks. Little pots of "non-poisonous" paint stood at her elbow
on the table, together with a box of labels that read, "Made in France."
Her huge clasp-knife was stuck into the under side of the table. She was
now occupied solely with the brushes and the glue pot. She turned the
little figures in her fingers with a wonderful lightness and deftness,
painting the chickens Naples yellow, the elephants blue gray, the horses
Vandyke brown, adding a dot of Chinese white for the eyes and sticking
in the ears and tail with a drop of glue. The animals once done, she put
together and painted the arks, some dozen of them, all windows and no
doors, each one opening only by a lid which was half the roof. She had
all the work she could handle these days, for, from this time till a
week before Christmas, Uncle Oelbermann could take as many "Noah's ark
sets" as she could make.

Suddenly Trina paused in