As the girl went up the stairs, Dorinda opened the door of her room and stepped over the threshold. The fire had been freshly made up and a pleasant ruddiness suffused the large quaintly furnished chamber where her parents had lived and died. Nathan had tried to keep the room warm and to sit up for her; but overcome at last by the loneliness and the firelight, he had fallen asleep on the big couch by the hearth. Having removed only his coat, he lay stretched out on his back, snoring slightly, with his jaw drooping above his magenta tie and his glazed collar. His features wore the defenseless look which sleep brings to men and women alike, and she felt, with a pang of sympathy, that he was at her mercy because he cared while she was indifferent. She would be always, she realized, the stronger of the two; for it seemed to her one of the inconsistencies of human nature that strength should be measured by indifference rather than by love. Picking up the old grey blanket from the foot of the bed, she spread it over him so gently that he did not stir in his sleep. The honesty she had felt in him from the beginning was the single attribute that survived in unconsciousness. If only she could remember his goodness and forget his absurdity, life would be so much easier. Too tired to do more than let down her hair and slip into a wrapper, she dropped on the bed and drew the patchwork quilt up to her chin. As the firelight flickered over her face, she remembered the night when Rufus was arrested. Now, as then, she felt that the end of endurance was reached. "Even if I am married to Nathan and Geneva has drowned herself, I can't keep awake any longer." XVIII Up by the barn John Appleseed's threshing machine was droning like a gigantic swarm of June beetles. After a rainy spring the sky had cleared with the beginning of summer, and as the weeks went on, the weather remained warm and dry for the wheat harvest. Standing on the porch, with her curved palm screening her eyes, Dorinda watched for Nathan to leave the threshing and come home to dinner. All the morning Fluvanna had been baking wheaten bread for the white men and corn pone for the coloured hands, who had their midday meal out under the locust trees at the back of the house. It was five years since the night of her wedding day, when Nathan had fallen asleep by the fire, and never in those five years had she known a season of such bountiful crops.