"Six thousand dollars," sang the auctioneer. "Going--going--going for six thousand dollars. Only six thousand dollars. Will nobody bid more? Not a quarter of what it is worth. Will nobody bid more for this fine old farm? Going--going--what? Nobody bids more? Going--going--gone for six thousand dollars!" She rose and went over to where Nathan stood surrounded by a few farmers, who were trying in vain to pretend that they did not think him a fool. "Should have thought you had as much land as you knew what to do with," John Appleseed was saying, as she approached. "What are you going to do with Five Oaks, now you've got it? Eat it, I reckon?" "It ain't mine. I bid on it for my wife," Nathan replied stubbornly. "She was so set on it I couldn't hold out against her." Yes, Nathan was a good man, there was no denying it. Feeling nearer to him than she had ever felt in her life, she moved over to his side and slipped her hand through his arm. "Wall, she got it dirt cheap," the auctioneer declared. "Dirt cheap, if I do say so." "I don't see what you want with two farms, ma'am," chuckled Mr. Kettledrum, the veterinarian. "It looks as if you was goin' to live on one an' let Nathan live by himself on the other." Then the faint-hearted bidders mounted their horses or stepped into their buggies, while Ezra Flower invited the new owners into the house. "Come right in an' clinch the sale with Doctor Greylock. He's settin' right there now with the papers to draw up," he added persuasively, as Dorinda hung back. Beckoning Lena to follow them, Dorinda went up the steps with Nathan and entered the hall. Only once before had she been inside the house; but every detail of the interior had bitten into her memory. She knew the bend in the staircase down which the old man had roamed with his whip at night. She had never forgotten the litter of dust in the corners; the guns and fishing-poles crowded behind the door; the collection of hats on the table and sofa; the empty whiskey bottles arranged in a row by the wainscoting. Above all, she remembered the stale odour of degeneration, of mingled whiskey and tobacco, which saturated the walls. Eighteen years ago, and nothing, not even that odour, had changed! In those eighteen years she had spent her youth and had restored dead land to life; but this house in which Jason had lived was still sunk in immovable sloth and decay. Ezra Flower passed, with his sprightly sparrow-like twitter, through the hall, and flung open the door of a room on the right--the room in which she had sat with the drunken old man while the storm broke outside. Jason, she saw, was standing on the very spot in the rug where his father had stood that afternoon in November. As she crossed the threshold, it seemed to her that the room shifted and came forward to meet her. She heard Nathan's voice saying meaningless words. Then Jason took her hand and dropped it so limply that it might have been a dead leaf.