ke to see virtue.
There's my road," he said, pointing to the gate. "I must bid you
good-bye."

CHAPTER XIX.

A WOMAN'S THREAT.

A cow that had been hurt by a falling tree went limping down the road,
and Milford, looking at her, said that she pictured the passing of time.
And when at evening he saw her again, he said that she was the same
hour, passing twice. In the woods he met the girl from the poor-house,
and she told him that Mrs. Blakemore was gone. One afternoon Mrs. Stuvic
sent for him, and when he went she scolded him for not having come
sooner to lighten the dark hour of her loneliness. She was afraid of
solitude. In the bustle of a boarding-house, in fault-finding, in all
annoyances, there was life, with no time to muse upon the soul's fall of
the year; but in the empty rooms, the quiet yard, the hushed piano,
there was a mocking stillness, the companion of death. She hated death.
It had a cold grip, and old Lewson had proved that there was no breaking
away from it. To her it was not generous Nature's humane leveler; it was
vicious Nature giving one's enemies an opportunity to exult. She
declared that if all her enemies were dead, she would not oppose death.
A woman in the neighborhood had sworn that she would drag a dead cat
over her grave; she was a spiteful wretch, and she would do it. Years
ago there had been a fight over a line fence, and Mrs. Stuvic had won
the suit, hence the only proper thing to do was to wait till she was
buried and then to drag a dead cat over her grave. A terrible triumph!
The old woman shuddered as she spoke of it. She had a premonition that
she was to die in the winter, alone, at night, while creaking wagons
passed the gate and stiff-jointed dogs bayed the frozen moon. They would
cut away the snow and bury her--and then at night would come the woman
with the dead cat. She could see it all, the frozen clods, the pine
head-board with her name in pencil upon it, the cat left lying there,
the woman returning home to gloat in the light of a warm room. Upon a
bench on the veranda Milford sat and listened and did not smile, and
accepting his grimness as a sympathy, her hard eye grew moist, a
flint-stone wet with dew. She asked him if he had an idea as to who that
woman was; and when he answered that he did not, she said:

"Nobody but my own sister. Now, you keep still. And that's the reason I
was so quick to let you have that farm almost at your own terms. I was
afraid some o