But when he saw Frances going about with something of her old cheerful air he ceased to avoid her. It was not necessary, he told himself, with bitter self-disdain. And when he glimpsed her one day walking in from town through the gates and along the way they had come in the autumn days, he walked straight on, bowed, and passed her. He saw her startled eyes, for she had been looking down and walking slowly, and despite his pride he turned and watched, half longing he might walk by her side along the ribbony path under the arching trees. He knew, with sudden swift memory, that so the skies had looked, primrose on the horizon and in the west clear green and far above the blue, and so the bare branches had rocked against the sky as they walked home together. But Frances' footsteps were quickened. So! he would go his way. And Frances, hurrying faster and faster, fleeing the very memories he was recalling, and yet carrying them with her, felt her hard-won control gone at a breath. As one who strives and strives, and believes he has at last attained, faces, at some unthought-of trifle, failure,--it is not always failure; it is often fear which shakes him, and which, when it is conquered, leaves the bulwark higher and firmer. But Frances ran past Susan at the door and up the stair. Her heavy furs were stifling her; she flung them off. What should she do? she was asking herself wildly. Own herself defeated, say to herself there was a voice in her heart stronger than all else? She threw herself face downwards on her bed, and shook with her sobbing; and though her cries were stifled, Susan, in the hall where she had stolen, startled, scared at what she had seen in Frances' face, Susan heard. Susan went softly back down the stairway. "Lord," she moaned as she wrung her skinny hands, "Lord, what we gwine do now? Dyar's Marse Robert away, an' a good thing too; dyar's no mother, nuthin' but me, Lord, what _is_ I gwine do?" She picked up an armful of wood and went upstairs. "Honey," she declared briskly as she opened the door, "Ise gwine mek yo' fiah, it's gittin' col', fer shuah!" She fussed about the hearth, clattering tongs and shovel, and though there were no sobs from the bed, there was no word. Susan was fairly beside herself. She swept the hearth, the fire was aglow. She walked slowly to the footboard and folded her thin arms on it and looked down at the face beneath her. The eyes were closed, the lids red with weeping, the lashes wet, and the mouth trembling pitifully. Susan looked long and searchingly. There was suffering she saw there, suffering that she knew the hall-mark of, but there was not the dumb white look of heartbreak. Frances had been nearer that a month ago. The old woman drew a long breath of relief. She pulled Frances' own low chair to the bedside and sat down in it.