every instant growing colder, she wondered if what was before them
filled them with terror. Sometimes she could not keep away and went
nearer and looked at them; they were unbearably pitiful to her, their
necks wrapped around each other's necks, trying to get from one another
the only warmth there was for them, so helpless, so patient, they,
play-loving creatures, gentle things, bearing these lives that men might
finally use them for clothing and for food. There were times when the
pathos of them was a thing she could not bear. They seemed to represent
the whole cruelty of life, made real to her the terrible suffering of
the world that winter of the war.

She watched the sheep until the quick dusk had fallen, and then stood
thinking of them huddled over there in the frigid darkness. When she
found that her face was wet and realized that she had sobbed aloud she
turned from the window to the stove, drew a chair up close to it and put
her feet on the fender. It was so bitterly cold that the room was warm
only near the stove; over there by the window she had grown chilled. And
as the heat enveloped her ankles she thought of the legs of those poor
frightened things that had been the last comers and not able to get to
the inside of the circle--that living outer rim which was left all
exposed to the frigid January night in that high mountain valley. She
could feel the cold cutting against their legs, could see their
trembling and their vain, frantic efforts to get within the solidly
packed mass. She was crying, and she said to herself, her fingers
clenched down into her palm, "_Stop that! Stop that!_" She did not know
what might not happen to her if she were unable to stop such thinking as
that.

To try and force herself away from it she got up and lighted a lamp. She
looked about on her desk for a magazine she had put there. She would
make herself read something while waiting for Stuart. He had had to
drive into town. He would be almost frozen when he got back from that
two-mile drive. She paused in her search for the magazine and went into
the kitchen to make sure that the fire there was going well. Then she
put some potatoes in to bake; baked potatoes were hot things--they would
be good after that drive. The heat from the oven poured out to her, and
it swept her again to the thought of the living huddled mass out there
in the frigid darkness. The wind beat against the house; it was beating
against them. She bit her lip h