fine house!" But suddenly, as her peering gaze returned to the two
women, she was recalled to herself. "But you wanted to put me out--on a
night like this! Hear it!"

For a moment she looked at them in frank hatred. And on an impulse she
revenged herself upon them by sounding, in their very ears, the shrill
cry they had heard in the afternoon, and through the night, that had
mystified the villagers for years from the grove. The house rang with
it, and with the hard peal of laughter that finished it.

All three of them stood there, for an instant, viewing each other. But
at the end of it the weakest of them was the partly sibylline, partly
mountebank intruder. She swayed back against the wall. Her head rolled
limply to one side, and she moaned, "O God, how tired I am to-night!"

Frightened as they still were, their runaway hearts beating a tattoo
that was almost audible, the two other women made a move to support her.
But she waved them back with a suddenly returning air of command. "No!"
she said. "You wanted to put me out!"

The creature wore some sort of thin skirt whose color had vanished in
the blue-black of its wetness. Over her head and shoulders was thrown a
ragged piece of shawl. From under it dangled strands of grizzled gray
hair. Her dark eyes were hidden in the shadows of her impromptu hood.
The hollows of her cheeks looked deeper in its shadows.

She loosed the shawl from her head, and it dropped to the floor,
disclosing a face like one of the Fates. She folded her arms, and there
was a rude majesty in the massive figure and its bearing as she tried to
command herself and speak.

"I come here--in this storm. Hear it! Hear that! I want shelter. I want
comfort. And what do you say to me!... Well, then I take comfort from
you. You thought I was your husband. You called his name. Well, I saw
him this afternoon. He drove out. I called to him from the roadside.
'Let me tell your fortune! Only fifty cent!' But he whipped up his horse
and drove away. You are all alike. But I see him now--in Woodman's
Narrows. It rains there, same as here. Thunder and lightning, same as
here. Trees fall. The wind blows. The wind blows!"

The woman had tilted her head and fixed her eyes, shining and eager, as
if on some invisible scene, and she half intoned her words as if in a
trance.

"I see your husband now. His wagon is smashed by a tree. The horse is
dead. Your husband lies very still. He does not move. There!"--she
tur