She wondered if she could still count ten rightly and she began to mark the days on an old calendar. Insulated by pain, she would turn to the driveway and walk minutely down imagined paths through the first light snow. She brought wood from her aunt’s hearth and built fires on her own. The required ten days fell in the end of November and she walked weakly a little way under the trees among the fallen leaves. Later she brought wood each day from the old wood-lot behind the garden, the journey to the woodpile becoming her daily measure of exercise. An old pile of cut wood was stored there under a small shed, a pile of which her aunt seemed to have no knowledge. The wood the tenant man brought to her aunt’s room was scarcely enough now for the one fire below-stairs. She had heard her aunt give an order, had heard her complain to the tenant of the waste. “No use to waste the wood so. Eight pieces a day is enough, now.” The words had come above mingled with the tumbled wood as it fell, or mingled again with the retreating steps of the man as they fell stiffly on the pavement. * * * * * Doe Singleton sat all day reading her books. She would bring an armful of novels from the front room, the room where she had lived with Tom Singleton, and she would set herself upon them, one after the other. They were books she had read in her youth and had reread many times since. Theodosia would hear her come to the room below, a dull monotony of steps and of books plucked about in the bookcases, and hear her return, the door closed, the journeys irregularly placed as her demands required. In the back room she would read all day, and, going down for food, Theodosia would see her book where it had been laid aside and would mark her swift progress through the pages. The food was kept in the storeroom behind the chamber, and the old pageant of the aunt handing out the supplies from this doorway, Prudie waiting with full hands, would arise. The door was locked as in the former time, the key hidden away. Miss Doe would bend over the fireplace in the chamber, cooking there. One day Theodosia, leaving after a meal, went into the dining-room and thus to the kitchen where Prudie had cooked. The range was gone from its place, but she recognized a part of it in a mass of broken iron behind the door. She stared at the stale cobwebs that hung from the ceiling in a dusty fringe, and she sickened at the odors of mice, her mind contemptuous of the sickness in her throat and her mouth. She looked again and again for some token of Prudie and the ancient bustle and order of the house, her eyes clinging to an old felt hat, some man’s headwear, thrown down in the corner of the pantry and defiled by mice and mould.