Doe Singleton was tall and straight, a fantasy of old age, her movements hurried and uncertain. Her hair, white now, had turned coarse and frizzled with its graying. When the report of the roof came to her, her mouth became straighter and more thin. She dipped her bread into her coffee and ate slowly, saying nothing. “Want more bread?” she said after a little, a curious cheerfulness, reiterated each mealtime over the food. Theodosia moved to the east room, across the hall, for there were fewer leaks there and the bed could be kept dry. She set three basins under the drips in her new quarters and closed the door of the west room upon its wet misery. When she had lain ten days without fever at any time during the day she might arise and walk a few steps into the yard. This was the doctor’s suggestion when he came in the autumn, his last visit, and found her lung healed. It was difficult to achieve the ten in consecutive occurrence, and with each failure she must begin the count anew. * * * * * Her grandfather’s books were in their boxes in the hall, half-unpacked, tumbled together as she had searched among them. In the east room she looked at the walls her grandfather had seen when he lay in Doe Singleton’s house, herself across the hall then in the room with Annie. The likenesses of the Bells and the Trotters stood in stiff frames, awkwardly placed along the walls, and once, indifferent to what she did, she arose and rearranged the small frames to a happier proportion, driving the small tacks with the poker from the fireplace. She was often insulated from her own thought by pain in her head, in her abdomen and loins. The autumn was bright and long, lingering warmly after the leaves had fallen. She would fasten her eyes upon the ship, a chromo picture framed in old gilt, a dull brown mounting. A great still ship, caught on the upward wash of a wave and tilted with the wind, frozen forever with one stayed moment. Its great sail lay out on the current of the air and its round keel swelled high out of the plume of water from which it had arisen and on which it now hung. Frank was turned away from the door by the same reiterated cheerfulness that responded to the food. “You better come again when she’s up and down-stairs. Come again, young man.”