ind,
or has none to know. You are laughing at me--playing with me; you have
shown me that you despise me."

He actually laughed. "Well, you've shown that you are not afraid of me.
Why are you not afraid?"

"Because," she answered, and she dealt the blow now without pity, "I'm
engaged,--engaged to Mr. Libby!" She whirled about and vanished through
the door, ashamed, indignant, fearing that if she had not fled, he would
somehow have found means to make his will prevail even yet.

He stood, stupefied, looking at the closed door, and he made a turn
or two about the room before he summoned intelligence to quit it. When
death itself comes, the sense of continuance is not at once broken in
the survivors. In these moral deaths, which men survive in their own
lives, there is no immediate consciousness of an end. For a while, habit
and the automatic tendency of desire carry them on.

He drove back to Corbitant perched on the rickety seat of his rattling
open buggy, and bowed forward as his wont was, his rounded shoulders
bringing his chin well over the dashboard. As he passed down the long
sandy street, toward the corner where his own house stood, the brooding
group of loafers, waiting in Hackett's store for the distribution of the
mail, watched him through the open door, and from under the boughs of
the weatherbeaten poplar before it. Hackett had been cutting a pound of
cheese out of the thick yellow disk before him, for the Widow Holman,
and he stared at the street after Mulbridge passed, as if his mental eye
had halted him there for the public consideration, while he leaned over
the counter, and held by the point the long knife with which he had cut
the cheese.

"I see some the folks from over to Jocelyn's, yist'd'y," he said, in
a spasm of sharp, crackling speech, "and they seemed to think 't Mis'
Mulbridge'd got to step round pretty spry 'f she did n't want another
the same name in the house with her."

A long silence followed, in which no one changed in any wise the posture
in which he found himself when Hackett began to speak. Cap'n George
Wray, tilted back against the wall in his chair, continued to stare at
the store-keeper; Cap'n Jabez Wray, did not look up from whittling the
chair between his legs; their cousin, Cap'n Wray Storrell, seated on a
nailkeg near the stove, went on fretting the rust on the pipe with the
end of a stiff, cast-off envelope; two other captains, more or less akin
to them, continued their g