The next day with an axe she killed every cat in the house. This brutal slaughter of innocent and pretty pets dismayed Doll almost beyond endurance. She had loved and fed every one, and they often slept upon her bed at night. Filled with abomination towards the woman, she thought at least to give her a headache, or in some way work her a small harm. She looked about for nail paring or wisp of hair with which she might fortify a poppet and work magic against the woman. She found to her astonishment that Hannah evidently suspected her, for any combing from her hair was instantly burned, and she never pared her nails except over a dark cloth which she shook out into the fire. While she did these things, she would look slyly at Doll, as if to say she understood her game, and would take every precaution against her. So she had done ever since her husband died, but Doll did not notice this precaution until February. Much of the time Doll lay in her own room upon her own narrow bed, and prayed to the Prince of Hell that he send some instructor or messenger to her ... but thus far only Mr. Zelley came to instruct her. She looked forward to the spring with longing, and because of a dream she had three times concerning a young man asleep in a bed of violets (yet the man she knew, even as she gazed at him, was infernal), she came to believe that in spring, when the violets blossom, a messenger would come. By February, the roads being broken, Widow Bilby was again about, but Doll in her discontent walked solitary. She saw no one except perhaps once in a long time Goody Greene, and once a week Mr. Zelley (whom she filled full of the phantasies of her childhood). She did not go to Church, and this shocked and angered the whole community, although Mr. Zelley himself insisted that she was too weak and sick to take the hard trip on horseback. Of her neighbours, the Thumbs, she saw nothing. Titus (because of the stories which Widow Bilby told his mother, and she, in turn, told him) went in daily terror of his life. He believed Doll had a poppet of him. If his head ached, it was because she pinched or pricked the head of the poppet. Were it his stomach, lights, bowels, that hurt him, he thought she was rubbing poison on the belly and body of this same poppet. When a black sow he had raised up by hand suddenly jumped into the air and fell dead, he thought she had in passing glanced at it. Of all things, however, Titus most feared Ahab, the black bull, who had, from the day Doll found him in the forest, changed his gentle nature to one most ferocious and perverse. He urged his father to butcher the animal before it took human life. The deacon said it would be gluttonous to put into the stomach such costly steaks, roasts, etc., and any man who did so deserved to have his bowels rot. 2 _Showing that the Sun will always shine again, no matter how black the Winter._