ion.

That week Jombatiste shut the door to his house. The children reported
that he would not even let them in, and that they could see him through
the window stitching away in ominous silence, muttering to himself.

Eight days after Cousin Tryphena had gone away, I had a telegram from her,
which read, "Build fires in both my stoves to-morrow afternoon."

The dark comes early in the mountains, and so, although I dare say there
was not a house in the village without a face at the pane after the late
evening train came up, none of us saw anything but our usual impenetrable
December darkness. That, too, seemed, to my perhaps overwrought
consciousness of the problem, highly suggestive of the usual course of our
lives. At least, I told myself, Cousin Tryphena had taken her absurd
little lantern and gone forth.

The next morning, soon after breakfast, I set off for the other end of the
street. Cousin Tryphena saw me coming and opened the door. She did not
smile, and she was still very pale, but I saw that she had regained her
self-control, "Come right in," she said, in rather a tense voice, and, as
I entered she added, in our rustic phrase for introduction, "Make you
'quainted with my friend, Mrs. Lindstrom. She's come up from the city to
stay with me. And this is her little boy, Sigurd, and this is the baby."

Blinking somewhat, I shook hands with a small, stoop-shouldered woman, in
a new, ready-made dress, with abundant yellow hair drawn back from the
thinnest, palest, saddest little face I had ever seen. She was holding an
immaculately clean baby, asleep, its long golden lashes lying on cheeks as
white and sunken as her own. A sturdily built boy of about six scrambled
up from where he lay on the floor, playing with the cat, and gave me a
hand shyly, hanging down his head. His mother had glanced up at me with a
quick, shrinking look of fright, the tears starting to her eyes.

Cousin Tryphena was evidently afraid that I would not take her cue and
sound the right note, for she went on hastily, "Mrs. Lindstrom has been
real sick and kind o' worried over the baby, so's she's some nervous. I
tell her Hillsboro air is thought very good for people's nerves. Lots of
city folks come here in summer time, just for that. Don't you think Sigurd
is a real big boy for only six and a half? He knows his letters too! He's
goin' to school as soon as we get settled down. I want you should bring
over those alphabet blocks that your Peggy d