“Strange! Is not everything strange around and about me! That I should have married as I did; that I, loathing farm life, should have come here to live; that I should be waiting here now for them to bring my husband’s corpse home to me--is it not all strange, unreal? The conversation ought to be to match, oughtn’t it?”--she spoke with an unnatural, tremulous vivacity which pained and frightened the girl--“and so, while we wait, I talk to you about young men, and the moonlight, and all that. _Can’t_ you see that my mind is tearing itself to pieces, like a machine in motion with some big rod or other loose, pounding, crushing, right and left like a flail! We _must_ talk! Tell me what he said, anything--everything.” “Why, that isn’t so easy,” Annie replied dubiously, much mistrusting the sanity of all this conversation, but pushed along with it in spite of herself. “He said something about a misunderstanding with his poor brother, and then--then something that I didn’t at all understand about a temptation, a great temptation leading him to the gates of hell he called it--but you know how Seth is given to exaggerate everything--and then----” “He told you all this, did he. How confiding! How sweet! Go on--what _else_ did he say to you--in the moonlight.” Annie felt vaguely that the tone was cruel and hostile. As she paused in bewildered self-inquiry, Isabel glided forward and confronted her, with gleaming eyes and a white, drawn face. “Why do you stop there?” she demanded in a swift, bitter whisper. “There _are_ things which--a girl doesn’t like to--have dragged from her in this----” Even as Annie was forming this halting halfsentence, a change came over the elder woman. She dropped the hand which had been raised as if to clutch Annie’s shoulder. The flashing light passed from her eyes, and something of color, or at least of calm, came back into her face. “I understand!” she said, simply. “You can see, Isabel, that this is not a time I should have chosen to speak of such things to you, if you had not insisted. It seems almost barbarous to bring my joy forward, at such a time, and appear to contrast it with your affliction. You _won’t_ think I wanted to do it, will you?” The widow of a day was looking contemplatively at her companion; she had effaced from both expression and voice every trace of her recent agitation. “Are you sure it is all joy?” she asked calmly.