tried in gold, the glowing tapestry of swarms of outspread
yellow butterflies sweeping in gilded tides from the rough floors to
the black rafters overhead.

Olga Brenner herself was no less tragic than her family. On her face,
written in the acid of pain, was the history of the blows and
cruelty that had warped her active body. Because of her crippled foot,
her entire left side sagged hopelessly and her arm swung away, above
it, like a branch from a decayed tree. But more saddening than her
distorted body was the lonely soul that looked out of her tired,
faded eyes.

She was essentially a village woman with a profound love of its
intimacies and gossip, its fence-corner neighbourliness. The horror
with which the village regarded her, as the wife of Mart Brenner,
was an eating sore. It was greater than the tragedy of her poor,
witless son, the hatred of old Mrs. Brenner, and her ever-present
fear of Mart. She had never quite given up her unreasoning hope that
some day some one might come to the house in one of Mart's long,
unexplained absences and sit down and talk with her over a cup of tea.
She put away the feeble hope again as she turned back into the dim
room and closed the door behind her.

"Must have been that bit of wind," she meditated. "It plays queer
tricks sometimes"

She went to the mantel and lighted the dull lamp. By the flicker she
read the face of the clock.

"Tobey's late!" she exclaimed uneasily. Her mind never rested from
its fear for Tobey. His childlike mentality made him always the same
burden as when she had rocked him hour after hour, a scrawny mite of
a baby on her breast.

"It's a fearful night for him to be out!" she muttered.

"Blood! Blood!" said a tragic voice from a dark corner by the stove.
Barely visible in the ruddy half-dark of the room a pair of demoniac
eyes met hers.

Mrs. Brenner threw her shrivelled and wizened mother-in-law an angry
and contemptuous glance.

"Be still!" she commanded. "'Pears to me that's all you ever
say--blood!"

The glittering eyes fell away from hers in a sullen obedience. But
the tragic voice went on intoning stubbornly, "Blood on his hands!
Red! Dripping! I see blood!"

Mrs. Brenner shuddered. "Seems like you could shut up a spell!" she
complained.

The old woman's voice trailed into a broken and fitful whispering.
Olga's commands were the only laws she knew, and she obeyed them.
Mrs. Brenner went back to the stove. But her eyes kept returni