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to feed them at noon and toss in corn, kind and yet viciously, damning their eagerness. The stalls got muck-deep and moldy when she was gone, and Father left them because there was little time. But this year when school closed, she seemed to forget all the things she used to do, and it was only by nagging that we made her work.
    I wished that all the strength which she spent in hate and in searching for something she did not even name to herself had been ours to use. But I knew thatstrength alone would never have helped us much, and even if we had raised nine farms we would have had less than an acre’s return in money. Kerrin herself never cared whether or not this slough of debt was filled, and to her the land was only a place to stay in, and as lonely as peaks or islands are.
    She spent most of her time now, as she used to do when we were children, reading—it seemed, almost everything that was piled up there on the shelves. She would lie with her hard brown face casting a shadow on the page, and go through the books that the grandfathers used to own—old books that had page after page without a new paragraph or picture, and filled with philosophies obscure and gloomy as were the bindings, but even more durable perhaps. She spent hours in reading them over and did not stop, as Merle and I did, at a certain page or time, or stop to do dishes and scrabble in earth to make a garden. She was never law or time bound, or thinking of how her eyes might hurt; and she had a faith that was almost religious in believing a thing must be so if a man would bother to write it out seriously and bind it in a book.
    Even if we had had more money, I doubt that Kerrin would have been satisfied.She carried the root ofher unrest with her, a root not the kind that pushed the self on and up to accomplishment and fed it with a desire, but a poisoned thing that wasted its strength in pushing down here and there, and found only a shallow soil or one full of rocks wherever planted. I knewthat she wanted love,—not anything we could give her, frugal and spinsterly, nor Father’s (having long ago stopped even hoping for it), but some man’s love in which she could see this image she had of herself reflected and thus becoming half-true. I knew it was this fierce restlessness, this desire and hunger that had led her—even after teaching school all day, and carrying up milk at night, and finishing all those things accumulated and undone as though tipped there from the day like a rubbish heap of the hours’ leavings—to go out fox-hunting at night with the farmers, or walk alone, tramping the marsh grass and weeds or along the dim rutted roads until morning. I would crouch cold on these nights in bed or at the window, driven by some obsession to see her come and go, and could not sleep until the empty moon-patch on her bed was broken and I could see the light on her bony and polished arms.
    I felt empty and thirsty, too, sometimes, dreamingwild and impossible dreams, but was driven easily from them by the pattern of a shadow or a pot on the stove, and driven from them too by a wry sense of humor that made my mind leap always to see the vision’s end. Not even on April nights heavy with grape smell, or in the moving of shadow-leaves could my mind forget the inevitable noon.

8
    ON FATHER’S birthday this year, I walked up near to the old stone fence where we’d buried Cale. Merle and I had piled some of its rocks in a sort of cairn on top of his grave, and planted wild ginger there. We used to see Kerrin going up this hill-path sometimes, and once, years ago, we found her crying on top of the cairn and sneaked away, pretending not to see. It seemed queer to us who had never cried afterward but had loved him so much when alive—much more than she had, we thought. But now I’m not sure of it.—Kerrin had a strange way of not seeming to notice things or care about them, but years later we’d find