for Henry
almost a Turner haze hung between him and some of the stark facts of
Emma Jett's death, turping out horror, which is always the first to fade
from memory, and leaving a dear sepia outline of the woman who had been
his.

At seventeen, Ann Elizabeth was the sun, the sky, the west wind, and the
shimmer of spring--all gone into the making of her a rosebud off the
stock of his being.

His way of putting it was, "You're my all, Annie, closer to me than I am
to myself."

She hated the voweling of her name, and because she was so nimble with
youth could dance away from these moods of his rather than plumb them.

"I won't be 'Annie.' Please, daddy, I'm your Ann Elizabeth."

"Ann Elizabeth, then. My Ann Elizabeth," an inner rhythm in him echoing:
Sweet-Beautiful. Sweet-Beautiful.

There was actually something of the lark about her. She awoke with a
song, sometimes kneeling up in bed, with her pretty brown hair tousling
down over her shoulders and chirruping softly to herself into the little
bird's-eye-maple dressing-table mirror, before she flung her feet over
the side of the bed.

And then, innate little housekeeper that she was, it was to the
preparing of breakfast with a song, her early morning full of antics.
Tiptoeing in to awaken her father to the tickle of a broom straw.
Spreading his breakfast piping hot, and then concealing herself behind a
screen, that he might marvel at the magic of it. And once she put salt
in his coffee, a fresh cup concealed behind the toast rack, and knee to
knee they rocked in merriment at his grimace.

She loved thus to tease him, probably because he was so stolid that each
new adventure came to him with something of a shock. He was forever
being taken unawares, as if he could never become entirely accustomed to
the wonder of her, and that delighted her. Even the obviousness of his
slippers stuffed out with carrots could catch him napping. To her dance
of glee behind him, he kept poking and poking to get into them, only
the peck of her kiss upon his neck finally initiating him into the
absurdity.

There was a little apartment of five rooms, twenty minutes removed by
Subway from the fish store; her bedroom, all pink and yellow maple; his;
a kitchen, parlor, and dining room worked out happily in white-muslin
curtains, spindle-legged parlor chairs, Henry's newfangled chifferobe
and bed with a fine depth of mattress, and a kitchen with eight shining
pots above the sink and a bo