But neither cousin nor cousin’s wife saw how the secret eyes of the agent went sliding under his lids toward the woman across the way, and how if she were not there upon her threshold, he stayed but a little while, and how if she were there he sat on and on, facing her, and often he cried in loud and false good nature, “No, good fellow, I have no errand other than this. I am but a common man, too, and I like nothing better than to sit in an honest man’s dooryard and feel the autumn sun upon me.” But all the while he stared across the way where the woman sat spinning or sewing.
Now this was the season when the land was sinking into quiescence for the winter. The wheat was planted in the dry earth and waiting for a rain to sprout it, and the mother took a little leisure and sat in her doorway and mended the winter garments and made new shoes, for the girl’s sight was not enough for this, and never would be. She sat there in the full sun for warmth, half listening to the old woman’s talk and what her children had to say to her, and half dreaming, and her lips were tranquil and her skin warm and golden brown with the sun and her hair shiny black with health and newly combed now she had the time to do it every day, and these days she looked younger than she was, although she was yet not thirty and five years old.
Well she knew that man sat there across the few feet of roadway but she would not look up and sometimes when she felt his look press her too hard she rose and went into the house and stayed there until she had seen him go. But she knew why he came and she knew he looked at her for a cause, and she could not forget him.
All through that winter she could not forget him somehow. At last it grew too cold for him to come even for his purpose. When the snow fell and when the winds came down bitter and dry out of the northwest, she might have forgotten him. But she did not.
Once more the new year came and she went into the town as she did every year and sold some grain and changed her silver into paper and she went and sought a different letter writer, and once more she had the letter written as though the man sent it, and once more the hamlet heard the news and knew she had the money from her man.
But this time their fresh envy and all their talk and praise put nothing in the woman’s empty heart. Not even pride could comfort her this time. She listened to the letter read, her face quiet and cold, and she took it home and that night she put it in the oven with the burning grass. Then she went to the table in the room where there was a small drawer and after a while she opened it and brought out the three letters there, for so long had the man been gone now, and she took them also to the fire and laid them on the flames. The lad saw it, and he cried out astounded,
“Do you burn my father’s letters then?”
“Aye,” the mother answered, cold as death, her eyes on the quick flames.
“But how will we know where he is, then?” the lad wailed.
“I know as well as ever. Do you think I can forget?” the woman said.
So she emptied her heart clean.
But how can any heart live empty? On a day soon after this she went into the city to change again her bit of paper, for these days she did not trouble her cousin often, having learned to be alone, and when she had the ten pieces in her hand she turned to go and there a man stood by the door upon the street, and he stood smiling and smoothing his upper lip, and it was the landlord’s agent.
Not since the late autumn had he seen her close as this, and there was none near who knew them and so he stared at her boldly and smiling and he said, “What do you here, goodwife?”
“I did but change a bit of money—” she broke off here, for she had been about to say on, “that my man sent me,” but the words stuck in her throat somehow and she did not utter them.
“And what then?” he asked her, his lids lifted and his eyes pressing her.
She drooped her head and strove to speak as commonly she did, and she said, “I thought to go and buy a silver pin, or one washed with silver, to hold my hair. The one I had grew thin from long use and broke yesterday.”
It was true her pin to hold her hair had so broken, and she said the truth before she knew it, and turned to go away, ashamed even before people who did not know her to be seen speaking to a man upon a town street, and he was a man somewhat notable in his looks, and being taller than most men and his face very square and
