"If you think I don't care, you're mistaken. I'm just about sick. I been a Christian and a good believer all my life, and now I ain't. Maybe I don't care about that? They just pester me t' death, and Mis' Markham, she can't stop 'em. They'll send me back to Sarah's, that's my niece, and they can't keep me there. They ain't good to me there, and I get fever 'n ague every day o' my life there. But I can't help it--I can't help it! I got ter go!" Some good angel held Mr. Freeland silent, and after a moment she went on. "I'm sixty-two years old, and I never was anything but a churchgoer an' a believer. Two weeks ago to-day I set in this chair an' looked out the winder, an' I see the birds pickin' in the front yard." He followed her eyes and watched for a moment the poor house pigeons preening and posing in the noon sun. They whitened the summer grass, and their clucking and cooing formed the undertone of the old woman's confession. "I see 'em there, and I got thinkin' about the dove in my Bible an' the Holy Ghost. And it just come into my mind like a shot--what's the good of it? What'd it ever done for me? What's the sense of a bird, anyhow? An' I worked over it, and I worried over it, an' I got to talkin' with Mis' Sheldon about it while we was workin' together, and she just made me hate it more. She said I'd go to hell--me, a believer for sixty-two years! An' I've cried till I can't cry any more, an' I've prayed till I'm tired of prayin', and nothin' happens to me exceptin' I hate it more. An' if they send me back to Sarah's I'll die, that's the truth. But I'll have t' go--I'll have t' go!" She rocked back and forth, dry-eyed, but in an agony of grief. The pastor remembered the time when he had wrestled with certain damnation in the form of terrible religious doubt, and experienced again that peculiar helplessness, that isolation, that terror of hope gone from him that had dignified even his commonplace life. His vocabulary forsook him, his periods and phrases receded from his mind like the tide from the beach, and left it bare of suggestion. He looked at her for a moment, and as she bent her tired old head over her arm and sobbed the dry, creaking sob of the ageing spirit that looks forward to no long and gayer future, he felt that the time was short and kindness not too lenient for the sinner. "I will send my wife over," he said, suddenly. "Would--would you want to see her?" Harriet had stiffened again and got herself in hand. "I don't want that any one should put 'emselves out for me," she said dryly. "I guess I'll get along. I'd just as lief see Mis' Freeland if it ain't any trouble to any one. But I don't know as anybody c'n do anything. I ain't very pleasant comp'ny. An' I dunno as the room's cleared up enough. I ain't swept it sence day before yesterday."