By noon the next day she was back in her home. Everything had been done that was necessary. Ellen’s mother and Jason could care for her. There was no reason why Mahala might not go back to her little house and again take up her life with her dead. Because that was what Mahala was doing in those days. She was living hourly with her father. At first it had been difficult to vision him in the country house, but now she could see him before the bookcase, at the hearth, in the dining room. Sometimes she dreamed of him, and with the awful reality of dreams, she again heard his voice, her nostrils were filled with the personal odours of his body, every familiar gesture was before her eyes. Her mother came there, too. Hourly now she stepped down from the frame above the mantel and walked through the rooms, twitching a curtain into place, setting a picture at a different angle, drawing a finger across a polished surface to make sure that no particle of dust had settled there. In those days when winter was the coldest and the storms raged outside, and the amount of physical exercise required to keep her in good health was difficult to obtain, Mahala paced the rooms of the little house, and beside her walked another of her dead. Jason was there—thoughtful, kind, always taking care of her, always watching that she should be sheltered, that she should be comfortable—but he was a dead Jason. There was no life in him. The living part of him belonged to Ellen. The mouthing little pink bundle lying on Ellen’s breast very shortly would be on his feet, holding Jason’s hands, making demands of him. The one thing for which Mahala tried to be thankful in those days was the steady round of duties entailed by living. After Mrs. Ford had gone home, there were days when Ellen was feeling badly and the baby cried, that Mahala went down to Jason’s home, and with light step and skilful fingers, straightened out problems that were too much for Ellen, taught her patience and forbearance and the love that ministers, that expends itself and demands little. Then she went back to her house and during the long nights she deliberately turned her pillow where she could look through the window at the storm-whipped arms of the old orchard and watch the elements having their way with the world, rolling on its age-old route around its orbit. In these days Mahala found that, in her own home, life had simmered to the asking of one question. She did not ask it of God. She had stopped praying when she had been overwhelmed. She asked it of her mental vision of her father: “Why?” She faced the skilfully painted portrait of her mother, and with stiff lips cried to her: “Why?” She asked the walls of each room in the house. She asked the authors of the books she tried to read. She looked from the windows and asked the winds raging past. She asked the moon of night and the first red rays of morning. “Why?” Eternally, “Why?”