“What's the matter with your tending to her?” Bella demanded. “I won't be here; not till night. I'm going to put up hay with one of the farmers. I hear they're in a hurry and offering good money.” Bella's expression was strange. She laughed in a forced way. “We got to hand it to you,” Bowman admitted genially; “you're there. I guess I'd starve before ever it would come to me to fork hay.” Lemuel's wife added nothing; her lips twisted into a fixed smile at once defiant and almost tremulous. Well, he was late now; he couldn't linger to inquire into Bella's moods. Yet at the door he hesitated again to impress on her the importance of attending the doctor's every word. It seemed to him an hour later that he was burning up in a dry intolerable haze of sun and hay. He awkwardly balanced heavy ragged forkfuls, heaving them onto the mounting stack of the wagon in a paste of sweat and dust. His eyes were filmed and his throat dry. He struggled on in the soft unaccustomed tyranny of the grass, the glare of sun, with his mind set on the close of day. He thought of cool shadows, of city streets wet at night, and a swift plunge into a river where it swept about the thrust of a wharf. He wondered what Doctor Markley would say about Flavilla; probably the child wasn't seriously sick. The day drew apparently into a tormenting eternity; the physical effort he welcomed; it seemed to exhaust that devil in him which had so nearly betrayed and ruined him forever in the morning; but the shifting slippery hay, the fiery dust, the incandescent blaze created an inferno in the midst of which his mind whirled with monotonous giddy images and half-meaningless phrases spoken and re-spoken. Yet the sun was not, as he had begun to suppose, still in the sky; it sank toward the horizon, the violet shadows slipped out from the western hills, and Lemuel finished his toil in a swimming gold mist. It was two miles to Nantbrook, and disregarding his aching muscles he hurried over the gray undulating road. The people of the village were gathered on their commanding porches, the barkeeper at the hotel bulked in his doorway. The lower part of Lemuel's own house was closed; no one appeared as he mounted the insecure steps. “Bella!” he cried in an overwhelming anxiety before he reached the hall. There was no reply. He paused inside and called again. His voice echoed about the bare walls; he heard a dripping from the kitchen sink; nothing more. “I'd better go up,” he said aloud with a curious tightening of his throat. He progressed evenly up the stairs; suddenly a great weight seemed to bow his shoulders; the illusion was so vivid that he actually staggered; he was incapable of breaking from his measured progress. He turned directly into Flavilla's room. She was there--he saw her at once. But Bella hadn't put a fresh nightgown on her, and the sheets were disordered and unchanged.