about her the solidity and permanency of the
old house, her father's and her grandfather's home, with the joy in
protected security of her young married life; and through it all there ran
a heavy sick realization that she was, in fact, a helpless old woman,
grown too feeble to conduct her own life, and who was to be forced to die
two deaths, one of the spirit and one of the body.

"Come, mother," said Nathaniel, rising, "we'd better go to bed. We both of
us get notiony sitting here in the moonlight."

He helped her raise her weighty body with the deftness of long practice
and they both went dully into the house.

The knowledge of the sky and of the signs of weather which was almost an
instinct with the descendant of generations of farmers, was put to an
anxious use during the days which followed.

Not since the days when, as a young girl, she had roamed the mountains, as
much a part of the forest and fields as any wild inhabitant, had she so
scanned the face of the valley which was her world.

She had stopped hoping for any release from her sentence. She only prayed
now for one more day of grace, and into each day she crowded a fullness of
life which was like a renewal of her vigorous youth.

Of late years, existence had flowed so uniform a passage through the
channels of habit that it had become but half sentient. The two old people
had lived in almost as harmoniously vacant and vital a silence as the old
trees in the forest back of the house. In the surroundings which
generations of human use had worn to an exquisite fitness for their needs,
and to which a long lifetime had adjusted their every action, they
convicted their life with the unthinking sureness of a process of Nature.
But now the old woman, feeling exile close upon her, drew from every
moment of the familiar life an essential savor.

She knew there was no hope for her; the repeated visits of the doctor and
his decided judgments left her no illusions as to the possibility of
escape. "The very first cold snap you must certainly go," he said, with
the inflexibility of the young. "Mr. Prentiss is likely to have one of his
bad turns and you simply cannot give him the are he must have. Besides,
when he is sick, you will have to look after the fires, and the slightest
exposure would mean pneumonia. I've just written your son so." He drew on
his overcoat. He was so recently from the hospital that it was still of a
fashionable cut and texture. "_I_ can't see