“No use, just for me, me not very partial to milk in my diet. I eat mostly the same all the time, but you say the doctor said milk for you and I got Bland to fetch up some.” “That was very kind of you, Aunt Doe.” As she lay again in the bed the avenue ran down to the stone wall and turned sweetly to the gate, which was perpetually white. Slowly in mind she walked down the avenue, step by step, stopping to look at each minute occurrence, as the wild fern by the side of the drive, the small gray imagined birds that flocked over the stems of the low pasture weeds and took imagined flight at her step. Her foot twitched lightly under the quilts. When the birds had flown she passed on, going slowly, undetermined whether the way should slope downward or extend outward, shaping it to her will. She would step slowly to make the walk last the longer. The clover at the side of the path was white and rank, and the grass and weeds of the pasture ready for cutting. The path she went ran along the side of the drive although from the window she could see that there was no path there now, for none ever walked that way. There were wagon prints on the drive, however, marks of tires, and she shuffled her toe in the faintly marked rut and wondered what habitual coming had made it. Each day she prepared the walk, clinging to it with fervor, returning to it as to a consolation. After five days no wheels had sounded on the stone and gravel of the way. The great hounds would come to her room each day, now one and again another, and they would sniff at the bed or turn about lazily on the carpet. She would call the names until some flicker of recognition would denote that the beast had been rightly called—Roscoe, Nomie, Tim, Speed, Old Mam, Tilly, True. There were some younger dogs, unnamed and unbroken, but these came little to the house. She would hear them running on the hills and hunting their prey. She clung to the daily walk to the gate and back and built the path minutely for comfort, gathering herself out of a running slant of historic actuality to the more comforting actuality of the path beside the drive where the ruts of some never-heard wagon wheels threaded constantly down to the highway. One day it was the shade of the elms that was intensely realized, or another the sounds of the beetles and crickets, until, being minutely sensed, the path brought her to the white flowers, queen-anne’s-lace-handkerchief, clustered in tall masses before the stone wall. The old dogs walked up and down the stairs, sniffing at her bed. True brought her stiff old limbs laboriously up the hall and turned about on the carpet to lie down at the foot of her bed. Below on the hearth in Doe Singleton’s room some great pones of cornbread were perpetually cooking on rough old iron pans, bread for the old dogs. * * * * *