His hand, broad in the palm, flexible, sensitive to the boards of the floor, was stretched, palm downward, beyond his foot, or it crept over the floor; it turned upward and moved back and forth before her. The long reach of the thumb and the span of the thumb and the fingers assailed her, and the hand fiddled a moment on the air. Then it crumpled together, bones and muscles flexed, and withdrew to the shadow under his knee. “The fiddle hand,” she said, standing straight beside the door now. “You got the fiddle hand, Stig,” she whispered. “You got it.” “I got a hungry belly insides me, that’s what I got. I already told you-all now. I got a hungry gut.” She ran out the door, making a clatter on the steps, flinging the gate back after her. The lights were lit along the streets and lanes now and people were stirring about. The town seemed of one essence, every detail flattened to the mass, and she walked as if she walked alone, arrogant, stepping upon the closely conglomerated matter of voices, stones, shadows, faces, acquaintance, history. Singularly marked, standing above the stones on which she stepped, above the earth on which she walked, she came down the street and entered her gate, detached from her own entrance, standing above the click of the latch, above the segments of light that lay as broken rectangles on the gallery floor. * * * * * Anthony had passed into a delusion, imagining he was in some other place; he talked of a sea which he thought could be seen from the window and he would ask the state of the tide. He called Theodosia by a strange name, Amelia, one she had never heard in the family before. Theodosia set herself to gather a class of students for stringed instruments and presently she had as large a number as her time allowed, for a passing fancy for this kind of playing was spreading over the town. The house was desolate and poorly warmed. There was little fuel, and Aunt Bet sulked of insufficient supplies for the kitchen. Theodosia brought the children to the parlor and taught them there, wondering at Anthony’s myth of Amelia and a sea. Or passing away from his room after he had talked with her in his strange knowledge, she would look with an unyielding scrutiny at herself, at the myth of Anthony, to try to find some last sign of an inevitable substance or kind, perpetually existent, unchanged, beyond delusion. “I join hands with him, and he is gone,” she said. “Tell Sylvester to put harness on the gray,” Anthony would say, or again, “High tide comes the second of the month, Amelia....” If he were from his bed he would sit very quietly, sinking slowly with the fire until he sat crumpled in sleep.