“Oh, I know, David, I know! You would save me if you could. But maybe--maybe it ain't what we think it is. Maybe he was outlawed by staying away so long?” Neither of them named Dylks, but each knew whom the other meant, throughout their talk. “A lawyer might let you think so till he got all your money.” “Matthew Braile wouldn't.” “That infidel?” She drooped again. “Oh, well, I must do it. I must do it. I'll go and get ready and I'll come to you. What will Jane think?” “I'll take care of what Jane thinks. When do you expect Laban back?” “Not before sundown. I'll not come till I see him.” “We'll be ready for you.” He moved now to open the spring-house door; she turned and was lost to him in the lights and shadows of the woods-pasture. On its further border her cabin stood, and from it came the sound of a pitiful wail; at the back door a little child stood, staying itself by the slats let into grooves in the jambs. She had left it in its low cradle asleep, and it must have waked and clambered out and crept to the barrier and been crying for her there; its small face was soaked with tears. She ran forward with long leaps out of the cornfield and caught it to her neck and mumbled its wet cheeks with hungry kisses. “Oh, my honey, my honey! Did it think its mother had left--” She stopped at the word with a pang, and began to go about the rude place that was the simple home where after years of hell she had found an earthly heaven. Often she stopped, and wondered at herself. It seemed impossible she could be thinking it, be doing it, but she was thinking and doing it, and at sundown, when she knew by the eager shadow of a man in the doorway, pausing to listen if the baby were awake, all had been thought and done. V The emotional frenzies, recurring through the day, were past, and she could speak steadily to the man, in the absence of greeting which often emphasizes the self-forgetfulness of love as well as marks the formlessness of common life: “Your supper's waitin' for you, Laban; I've had mine; you must be hungry. It's out in the shed; it's cooler there. Go round; baby's asleep.” The man obeyed, and she heard him drop the bucket into the well, and lift it by the groaning sweep, and pour the water into the basin, and then splash himself, with murmurs of comfort, presently muffled in the towel. Her hearing followed him through his supper, and she knew he was obediently eating it, and patiently waiting for her to account for whatever was unwonted in her greeting. She loved him most of all for his boylike submission to her will and every caprice of it, but now she hardly knew how to deny his tacit question as he ventured in from the shed. “Don't come near me, Laban,” she said with a stony quiet. “Don't touch me. I ain't your wife, any more.” He could not speak at first; then it was like him to ask, “Why--why--What have I done, Nancy?” “_You_, you poor soul?” she answered. “Nothing but good, all your days! He's come back.”