RoBards’ eyes wandered and fell upon the hearthstone at his feet with the firelight shuttling about it in ripples. Jud Lasher was under there. He must not hide the child in these same walls. There would be something burlesque about that. Strange, hideous, loathsome truth that the most sorrowful things have only to be repeated to become comic! He walked away from the hearthstone. It was too much like a headstone. He went to the window. The night had not changed. The earth was stowed away under a great tight tarpaulin of snow. The sky was a vast steel-blue windowpane frosted with stars and the long ice-trail of the Milky Way. Through the snow a few trees stood upthrust. Among them the little tulip trees huddled together slim and still. There beneath were the bodies of his children and Patty’s. He had seen Patty cry over them as Immy had done, and sway with their still frames, according to that inveterate habit women have of rocking their children, awake or asleep, alive, or—— Immy’s baby belonged out there with the family—with its tiny uncle and its tiny aunt. They would not flinch from it or snub it because of the absence of a marriage ceremony. It had not been to blame. There was nothing it could have done to insist upon such a provision; nothing to prevent its own arrival. It brought with it a certain sanctifying grace. It brought with it a certain penitential suffering. RoBards nodded to himself, went to Patty and told her his plan, and then hastened to find in the cellar an axe and a shovel, and a discarded empty box of the nearest size for its purpose. He put on his heaviest coat, his boots and his gloves, and a heavy scarf. In the meantime Patty had fetched the child. She whispered: “When I took it from her, her hands resisted. Her lips made a kissing sound and she mumbled something that sounded like, ‘Baby go by-by!’” Patty had wrapped the little form in a silken shawl she had always prized since it came out of China in one of her father’s ships—in the wonderful days when she had had a father and he had had ships. A girlish jealousy had persisted in her heart and she would never let Immy wear that shawl. Now she gave it up because it was the only thing she could find in the house precious enough to honor the going guest and be a sacrifice. RoBards pushed out into the snow with his weapons and his casket, and made his way to the young tulip trees, which were no longer so young as he imagined them. The snow was ice and turned the shovel aside. He must crack its surface with the ax, and it was hard for his frozen fingers to grip the handle. Only the sheer necessity of finishing the work made it possible for him to stand the pain. By the time he reached the soil deep below, he was so tired and so hot that he flung off his overcoat and his muffler and gloves.