There, upstairs, he slept--isolated still. And Sarah, her elbows on the table, gazed wonderingly across to the brooding figure of her husband. The lamp-light reached out despairingly against the shadowed gloom. Its yellow fingers touched scantly on Josiah’s face. Sarah followed it. The folds of flesh were heavy and moist. The eyes were lost in their lids. It was a sorrowful face. The lamp-light was of no avail save to display it. And then,--the strangeness of her thought shocked Sarah: how should lamp-light affect a heart? what was light? what was anything? why was the dark uncomfortable, after all? Her mind groped upward toward her baby. But she could not find him. When her mind went groping, always it stumbled down upon Sylvia and Josiah junior. She would think of the living; there came the dead. Why was this? Why did thinking of the two who were buried seem like the warm glow of the lamp, and thought of her last born appear like a vague depth lost in a shadow? It should have been reversed--this figure. Yet so it was. And Sarah did not care for shadows. A half knitted garment was in Sarah’s hands. Listlessly she let it fall in her lap. In the table drawer were letters from Sylvia and “Jo”--scrawls to her from the mountains, where last summer her husband had taken them, while she remained in Harriet with the other children--and Quincy under her heart. She took the letters, held them long and read them swiftly, again and again, as if each time, in her too cursory way (the product of inner conflict), she had lost a phrase.... The sweater for upstairs must be done, however. III In the room of Sarah and Josiah stood two beds, in place of the one. It was to that one they had come, when they were married. Sarah was eighteen then, ten years the younger of the two. Josiah had begun by thriving in his affairs. He had taken on flesh in token of his natural love of living; he had taken on bitterness in token of Sarah’s rôle. So at least, it seemed to Sarah. She was thirty-three, and already she had outlived her husband. At times, with this thought, a flood of anger came as she looked at the two prim, sneering beds that marked her punishment. For punishment it was--humiliating, permanent. But more often than anger and more lasting, came the sense of failure, the taste of ashes in her mouth, the waste of desert before her eyes. But Sarah had taken on no flesh. And she was not clever enough to take on bitterness. With March had come a revival of winter, and of misfortune. The country had been frozen ruggedly. Marsden, the eldest now of the Burt children, had been playing Indian. He had scuffled to the low roof of the porch, where lay a thin, insidious scale of ice. He had slipped and fallen. Once more, the Mother was flung helpless, mindless, into the shadows. Marsden had been brought back from the Hospital in Brooklyn. His life was saved. It was to be the life of a cripple.