Her look of contempt would have cut short another man. "Ye--wantta--go?" he finished. She nodded mutely. And at that he flared at her terribly. "It's like ye," he shouted, "like yere mother, like all the Perkinses. Word-breakers! cowards! _shirkers!_" The words seared. The careful articulation of the afternoon was gone. "Promised--if I sent ye to school, ye'd stay here winters to look after ye're pore ol' Father--didn't ye?" He looked at her through narrow, reddish lids, where she had backed against the door. "Didn't ye?" he repeated. "But soon's he's done fur--soon's his _money's gone_--" "Stop!" she cried. "_Stop i_--" Her breath caught. He stared at her, the words shaken from him by the sheer force of her. She had not moved, but, somehow, as she stood there against the unvarnished door facing him, fists at her side, eyes brilliant, she appeared to tower over him. "I'll stay," she was saying in a queer, fierce monotone, "I'll stay here this winter anyhow if I freeze for it! I'll scrub and cook and haul wood for ye till I've paid ye back--_paid ye_," she repeated more softly, "till no one can say the Perkinses don't keep their word! And then--in the spring--I'm going--it'll be for good--. _For always_," she added, and turned limply towards the door. To my surprise he sank heavily into the rickety chair by the stove. "Go then," he muttered. "It's all I c'ld expect." The door closed on her and still he sat there before the fire, head bent forward, as though he had an audience. I shrank back closer into the shadows, drawing my coat collar more snugly about my throat. It was incredible that he should play a part before her--and now alone! His very posture suggested a martyred, deserted old man. I felt myself in the presence of something inexplicable.--Then, in a frenzy of suppressed rancor, such as I had never felt before, I climbed the hill, the lumps of mud and ice seeming to cling against my footsteps as I went. * * * * * The winter was a bitter one that year, such as only the winters in that Northern, prostrate land can be. The countryside appeared to crouch under a passive, laden-colored sky. Then the snow came settling in deeper and deeper layers, and, as it packed down, a coating of thin ice formed on its surface. One could walk on it at times, this crust that had grown over the land like a new skin. We smuggled sweaters and coats to Lisbeth, making them old lest Con suspect us. But, even with all we could do for her, her suffering must have been without comparison. There was no fire in the shack except that in the old rusty cook stove which she tended, and the cold made an easy entrance through the loose carpentry of the walls. With it all there were the loneliness and the mental agony. At first, when she did not know how deep was Jim's devotion, there must have been times when life held out no promise to her except that of escape.