What would he be
informed? How could he face the thing that he had told Cavanaugh
actually was to happen--that Tilly and he were to be parted forever?

At noon he crept down the hill, keeping himself hidden till the way was
clear, then he hastened across the open to the cottage. The child, still
there, had given it a semblance of order, and his lunch was on the
table. She refused to sit with him, though he asked her in a tone that
was full of consideration and that odd, abashed tenderness for her which
seemed to be rooting in the loam of pained humility which filled him.

"I want to know, brother John," she said, her deep-sunken eyes staring
earnestly--"I want to know if you think she is coming back?"

He gulped down his hot coffee, and as he replaced his cup in his saucer
he said, with a touch of his old fatalistic recklessness: "I don't know.
I think not. Sam is up there to-day to--to see about it. He will be back
to-night. I don't know. I'm leaving it all to him, and--and to--her."

Later, as he sat and smoked in the parlor he tried to read the daily
newspaper that had been left at his door, but even the boldest
head-lines foiled to catch and rivet his attention. Taking a hammer and
nails, he went into the back yard to repair a fence; but he had scarcely
started to lift the first plank into place when the incongruity of the
thing clutched him as in a vise. What was he doing? Why was he thinking
of a thing so inconsequential as that? And for whom was he putting the
fence to rights? With an oath born of sheer bleak agony, he threw the
hammer from him and dropped the nails and plank to the ground. He had
loved the place; he and Tilly had called it their "Cottage of Delight";
he had thought he would keep it in order, and even improve it, but all
that was gone. He went back to the hillside. He watched the afternoon
melt away, saw the sun go down into a bed of crimson and pink and the
filmy cloud-curtains being drawn about the molten sleeper.

It was growing dark when he went back to the cottage. Dora was in the
kitchen, preparing his supper. He was vaguely angered by her attention
to him. He appreciated her doglike fidelity, but it made him impatient,
for she was too small, young, and weak to do all that she was doing.

"You must go home," he blurted out, standing in the doorway and
surveying her. "I'm able to look out for myself. I'm not hungry, anyway,
now, for you have filled me up to the neck."

She smiled wist