."

"I reckon I'll shift."

She drew a chair towards the bed and sat beside him. He seemed drowsy,
and after a while stretched out an arm over the coverlet and fell
asleep. 'Lizabeth took his hand, and sat there listlessly regarding the
still shadows on the wall. The sick man never moved; only muttered
once--some words that 'Lizabeth did not catch. At the end of an hour,
alarmed perhaps by some sound within the bed's shadow, or the feel of
the hand in hers, she suddenly pushed the curtain back, and, catching up
the candle, stooped over the sick man.

His lids were closed, as if he slept still; but he was quite dead.

'Lizabeth stood for a while bending over him, smoothed the bedclothes
straight, and quietly left the room. It was a law of the house to doff
boots and shoes at the foot of the stairs, and her stocking'd feet
scarcely raised a creak from the solid timbers. The staircase led
straight down into the kitchen. Here a fire was blazing cheerfully, and
as she descended she felt its comfort after the dismal room above.

Nevertheless, the sense of being alone in the house with a dead man, and
more than a mile from any living soul, was disquieting. In truth, there
was room for uneasiness. 'Lizabeth knew that some part of the old man's
hoard lay up-stairs in the room with him. Of late she had, under his
eye, taken from a silver tankard in the tall chest by the bed such
moneys as from week to week were wanted to pay the farm hands; and she
had seen papers there, too--title-deeds, maybe. The house itself lay in
a cup of the hill-side, backed with steep woods--so steep that, in
places, anyone who had reasons (good or bad) for doing so, might well
see in at any window he chose. And to Hooper's Farm, down the valley,
was a far cry for help. Meditating on this, 'Lizabeth stepped to the
kitchen window and closed the shutter; then, reaching down an old
horse-pistol from the rack above the mantelshelf, she fetched out powder
and bullet and fell to loading quietly, as one who knew the trick of it.

And yet the sense of danger was not so near as that of loneliness--of a
pervading silence without precedent in her experience, as if its
master's soul in flitting had, whatever Scripture may say, taken
something out of the house with it. 'Lizabeth had known this kitchen
for a score of years now; nevertheless, to-night it was unfamiliar, with
emptier corners and wider intervals of bare floor. She laid down the
loade