She was climbing the rise again, walking along the path, facing the wind now, moaning softly as she went. The cold cut her garments apart and entered her flesh, past her chilled blood. She labored with the low hill and came at last to the stile. She was drowsed by fatigue and dulled by the cold. She went to the evening bit of food, her life stilled, scarcely knowing when she had eaten the last of the leather cake. When this was done she built a fire on the parlor hearth with wood she had brought there some days earlier and made the wood stand high over the blaze. There would be a great glow, a holiday burning of the demon sticks she had carried, two and two, from the wood-lot. A dozen now went on the flame. She put on a soft gray dress she had saved from her former wardrobe and twined a warm rose-and-yellow scarf about her shoulders. She sat in the parlor before the high fire and felt the color gather richly above her scarfed breast. The sofa on which she sat ran before the fire in a retreating curve of black, and her mind caught in the irony of warmth and the color that wrapped her throat. Frank came, opening the door for himself, knocking softly and entering, rubbing his hands for their cold, eager for the fire, for the color, eager for herself. He sat beside her and presently he began to kiss her face and her throat and to whisper strange words, but she stared into the blaze and turned his caresses aside with her ironic mind where yes and no functioned identically. His hands were on her body beneath the glowing scarf, were feeding her body, and the fire was food again, these foods rich in their insufficiency. Frank was a kindness at her side, at her ear, at her mouth, and it appeared to her that she would ask him for help. She turned toward him crying with her broken breath close to his ear, “Frank, I’m so hungry. I’m hungry. I never have enough. I’m hungry. Aunt Doe ... I never have real food. I’ll starve.” He warmed her with his caresses, murmuring some pleasure in his bestowal, and she floated out of life, warmed, and presently was appeased and comforted. She had fallen into a deep inner reverie from which nothing could arouse her. She heard as a long way off the monotony of Frank as he talked. He sat apart from her now, or he had gone, had kissed her in the moment of his departure. He would come back, she could be sure of that, some voice had said. The night would be cold, was cold. Daylight came late. It was winter now, snow on the ground, on the wood in the pile at the back of the wood-lot. The noise of the woodpeckers was strange against the snow, was flattened by the snow. A day was but little different from a night, she observed under the fog of her reverie, one being light, the other dark, a mere difference. Sleep, wake, sleep. The journey to the woodpile was the one link that bound her to that strange and foregone experience, the ways people go and the things people do. * * * * *