With a shudder he passed on. The trees grew less dense, and then on a rise ahead of him he saw his humble cottage, like a cheerless blot on the green lush-sward about it. He wanted now to search the face of his wife. For ten days, the letter said, she had suffered. She had suffered so much that the neighbors had taken up her cause--they had taken it up when he--great God!--when he loved her and the children with every tortured cord of his being! They had come to his wife's aid against him, her prime enemy. Yes, they should whip him, and he would tell them while they were at it to lay it on--to lay it on! and God sanction the cause. He entered the gate. His wife was sitting in the little hall, a wooden bowl in her lap, shelling pease; on a blanket at her feet lay the baby. He went up the steps and stood in the doorway. She raised her eyes and saw him, and then lowered her head, saying nothing, though she was deathly pale. He stared helplessly for a moment, and then went out behind the house and sat down in a chair under a tree, near his beehives and his bent-toothed, stone-weighted harrow. A deeper feeling of despair had come over him, for it was the first time his wife had ever refused to greet him in some way or other on his return home. On the banks of a spring branch below the barn, he saw his older children playing, but he could not bear the sight of them, and, with his elbows on his knees, he covered his face with his hands. The memory came to him of men who had killed themselves when in deep trouble, but he brushed the thought away. They were shirking cowards. For half an hour he sat thus. He heard the children laughing as they continued their romp up and down the stream. Then his wife slowly came out to him. She was still pale, and it seemed to him that she was thinner than she had ever been before. “Pole, darlin',” she began, with a catch in her voice, “some o' the neighbors has been tellin' me that I ort not to be kind an' good to you when you come home after you've done us this away, an' I acknowledge I did try just now to act sorter cold, but I can't. Oh, Pole, I ain't mad at you, darlin'! My heart is so full o' joy at seein' you back home, safe an' sound, that I don't know what to do. I know you are sorry, darlin', fer you always are, an' you look more downcast than I ever seed you in all my life. Oh, Pole, I've suffered, I'll admit, but that can't equal my joy right now at seein' you home with that sweet, sorry look in yore eyes. Pole, darlin', won't you kiss me? You would ef I hadn't turned from you as I did in the house jest now. Don't--don't blame me! I hardly knowed what I was doin'.” A sob rose in him and burst. She saw his emotion, and put her arms around his neck.