young ones."

She neither moved nor made a sound. With an oath he turned on his heel
and went out to the table. Eating his breakfast in his usual wolfish
fashion, he went out into the hot sun with his team and ridding
plow, not a little disturbed by this new phase of his wife's
"cantankerousness." He plowed steadily and sullenly all the forenoon,
in the terrific heat and dust. The air was full of tempestuous
threats, still and sultry, one of those days when work is a
punishment. When he came in at noon he found things the same,--dinner
on the table, but his wife out in the garden with the youngest child.

"I c'n stand it as long as _she_ can," he said to himself, in the
hearing of the children. When he finished the field of corn it was
after sundown, and he came up to the house, hot, dusty, his shirt
wringing wet with sweat, and his neck aching with the work of looking
down all day at the cornrows. His mood was still stern. The
multitudinous lift, and stir, and sheen of the wide green field had
been lost upon him.

"I wonder if she's milked them cows," he muttered to himself. He gave
a sigh of relief to find she had. But she had done so not for his
sake, but for the sake of the poor, patient, dumb brutes.

When he went to the bedroom after supper, he found that the cradle and
his wife's few little boxes and parcels--poor pathetic properties--had
been removed to the garret which they called a chamber, and he knew he
was to sleep alone again.

"She'll git over it, I guess." He was very tired but he didn't feel
quite comfortable enough to sleep. The air was oppressive. His shirt
wet in places, and stiff with dust in other places, oppressed him more
than usual, so he rose and removed it, getting a clean one out of a
drawer. This was an unusual thing for him, for he usually slept in the
same shirt which he wore in his day's work, but it was Saturday night,
and he felt justified in the extravagance.

In the meanwhile poor Lucretia was brooding over her life in a most
dangerous fashion. All she had done and suffered for Simeon Burns came
back to her till she wondered how she had endured it all. All day long
in the midst of the glorious summer landscape she brooded.

"I hate him," she thought with a fierce blazing up through the murk of
her musing, "I hate t' live. But they aint no hope. I'm tied down. I
can't leave the children, and I aint got no money. I couldn't make a
living out in the world. I aint never seen anyth