spering together.

The next day, Sunday, Lois seemed about the same. She said once that
she was going to church, but she did not speak of it again. Mrs.
Field went. She suggested staying at home, but Lois was indignant.

"Stay at home with me, no sicker than I am! I should think you were
crazy, mother," said she.

So Mrs. Field got out her Sunday clothes and went to meeting. As soon
as she had gone, Lois coughed; she had been choking the cough back.
She stood at the window, well back that people might not see her, and
watched her mother pass down the street with her stiff glide. Mrs.
Field's back and shoulders were rigidly steady when she walked; she
might have carried a jar of water on her head without spilling it,
like an Indian woman. Lois, small and slight although she was, walked
like her mother. She held herself with the same resolute stateliness,
when she could hold herself at all. The two women might, as far as
their carriage went, have marched in a battalion with propriety.

Lois felt a certain relief when her mother had gone. Even when Mrs.
Field made no expression of anxiety, there was a covert distress
about her which seemed to enervate the atmosphere, and hinder the
girl in the fight she was making against her own weakness. Lois had a
feeling that if nobody would look at her nor speak about her illness,
she could get well quickly of herself.

As for Mrs. Field, she was no longer eager to attend meeting; she
went rather than annoy Lois. She was present at both the morning and
afternoon services. They still had two services in Green River.

Jane Field, sitting in her place in church through the long sermons,
had a mental experience that was wholly new to her. She looked at the
white walls of the audience-room, the pulpit, the carpet, the pews.
She noted the familiar faces of the people in their Sunday gear, the
green light stealing through the long blinds, and all these
accustomed sights gave her a sense of awful strangeness and
separation. And this impression did not leave her when she was out on
the street mingling with the homeward people; every greeting of an
old neighbor strengthened it. She regarded the peaceful village
houses with their yards full of new green grass and flowering bushes,
and they seemed to have a receding dimness as she neared some awful
shore. Even the click of her own gate as she opened it, the sound of
her own feet on the path, the feel of the door-latch to her hand--all
the