Va Di’s mother had borne sixteen and brought up ten. He heard her now, moaning gently through her apron: “Well, well, I don’t know--I don’t know.... I go ’long with you, Baldy Minn. Poor thing! Poor thing! I put my shawl, go ’long with you, Baldy Minn.” “Naw; ain’t no need, Annie. I got Angie Bragg up there now, an’ Rosie Courier’s there, anyhow. Gimme the kittle. She ought to be comin’ ’long now. Rosie come down two hour ago.” She stood for a moment ringing the huge kettle with a thumb-nail. “Won’er what started her up. She ain’t fell or nothin’ I hear of. Well....” She flapped away along the dark hall, not a yard from the silent man, humming and bubbling between her gums. There was a long hush, broken only by the snores of the sleepers and the continuous, subdued moaning from the kitchen, like the chant of a vigil. Va Di went out as softly as he had come in, and stood by the gate, fanning his face with the big hat. “Damn!” he mumbled. And after a moment, “’Tain’t none o’ _my_ fun’ral, though.” Putting the hat on his head, he opened the gate, turned aimlessly toward the back country, and mounted the clear, blue slope of the dune, picking his way mechanically among the scattered tomato-cans and disemboweled bedticks and skeletons of barrels. Sitting down on the crest, he became part of it, moon-colored and still. The night was so intolerably quiet that the ground-swell eating the beaches far off on the outside crept in to him, and he ruffled the sand with his feet because it made him think of his mother’s moaning and her words: “Poor thing! Poor thing!” “God! how that girl looked at me!” he remembered out loud. “She l-l--” He jumped up and shuffled around; rolled a cigarette, wetting it too much with his tongue so that it fell apart; threw it away. “She _l-l-loves_ me,” he came out, more racked by the word than ever a child by his virgin oath. He found himself at the foot of the dune on the other side, his canvas shoes sucking up moisture from a bog. He climbed another hill, drawn back toward the town, and waded across it knee-deep in scrub and wild roses that tore triangular rents in his flannel trousers. Descending into the shadow of familiar trees, he hunched himself up to sit on the shingles of a pigsty, and heard the sluggish animals, whose distant forebears he had beaten with furtive barrel-staves, grunt and roll over in the interior muck.