Isom was a man of bone and dry skin, whose greed and penury had starved his own soul. He had brought her there and put burdens upon her, with the assurance that it would be only for a little while, until somebody could be hired to take the work off her hands. Then he had advanced the plea of hard times, when the first excuse had worn out; now he had dropped all pretenses. She was serving, as he had married her to serve, as he had brought her there in unrecompensed bondage to serve, and hope was gone from her horizon, and her tears were undried upon her cheeks. Isom had profited by a good day's work from Joe, and he had not been obliged to drive him to obtain it. So he was in great spirits when he came back from the barn, where he had found the calf coming on sturdily and with great promise. He put out the lantern and turned the lamp down a shade seeing that it was consuming a twentieth more oil than necessary to light Ollie about her work. Then he sat down beside the table, stretching his long legs with a sigh. Ollie was washing the few dishes which had served for supper, moving between table and sink with quick competence, making a neat figure in the somber room. It was a time when a natural man would have filled his pipe and brought out the weekly paper, or sat and gossiped a comfortable hour with his wife. But Isom never had cheered his atrophied nerves with a whiff of tobacco, and as for the county paper, or any paper whatever except mortgages and deeds, Isom held all of them to be frauds and extravagances which a man was better off without. "Well, what do you think of the new hand?" asked Isom, following her with his eyes. "I didn't pay any particular notice to him," said she, her back toward him as she stood scraping a pan at the sink. "Did you hear what he said to me this morning when he was standin' there by the steps?" "No, I didn't hear," listlessly, indifferently. "H'm--I thought you was listening." "I just looked out to see who it was." "No difference if you did hear, Ollie," he allowed generously--for Isom. "A man's wife ought to share his business secrets, according to my way of lookin' at it; she's got a right to know what's going on. Well, I tell you that chap talked up to me like a man!" Isom smacked his lips over the recollection. The promise of it was sweet to his taste. Ollie's heart stirred a little. She wondered if someone had entered that house at last who would be able to set at defiance its stern decrees. She hoped that, if so, this breach in the grim wall might let some sunlight in time into her own bleak heart. But she said nothing to Isom, and he talked on.