As she was leaving the barn she turned and the breeze lifted those little rings of her hair and Tenney, looking full at her now, groaned. It was not, he felt, any of the other things that had happened to them: only there was always breeze enough, even on the stillest day, to stir her hair. Now it seemed to be the only thing in the world with life in it.
"I shall tell 'em," she said clearly, as if she wanted him to understand and remember—and she did not look at him, but across the road and up the slope where the hut stood waiting for her—"the doctor an' all the rest I've got to see, you was so sick over it, you couldn't come."
Then she stepped out of the picture she had made against the smiling day, the dark interior of the barn framing her, and walked, with her free-swinging step, to the house. And Tenney ate his breakfast, took his luncheon box and axe, and started for the woods. But he had not got out of the yard when she called to him. He stopped and she came running; she was no longer pale, and her eyes were rimmed with red. She came up with him.
"Isr'el," she said, "you think o' this. You think of it all day long. 'I'm goin' through it alone,' you says to yourself mebbe, after you've got off there into the woods. 'But I ain't alone. He'll be with me, the Lord Jesus Christ.' An' you remember there's that to think on. An' there's forgiveness. Isr'el, you lay down your axe. You let me take holt o' your hand."
He could only stare at her, and she took the axe from his hand and laid it at their feet. She took his hand and put it to her cheek. Then she took his other hand and laid that also on her cheek, and murmured a little formlessly, but in a way he sharply remembered as a means of stilling the baby. She lifted her head then, smiling a little, and still holding the hands. But before releasing them she stroked them softly and said, "There! there! Poor souls," she added, "poor souls!" Did she mean the unhappy hands, or all souls of men caught in the network of mysterious life? She picked up his axe and gave it to him as a mother might dismiss a child who was going to a distasteful task. "There!" she said again. "Now, you remember." She turned from him, and Tenney went, head down, to his work.
That afternoon, about three o'clock, Nan was in her garden, busy with the peony bed. She was dressed in cotton crêpe the color of the soil, and her cheeks were red, like wild roses, and her ungloved hands also the color of mould. She was delightfully happy getting into the earth and the earth into her, and she looked it. Charlotte, coming on her across the grass, thought her face was like a bloom the rest of her had somehow made, as the earth was going to make red peonies. That is, I think Charlotte thought something of this sort, though she would not have put it in that way. Only she did have a great sense of Nan's entire harmony with the garden bed and the garden bed with her. Charlotte had other things on her mind, and she spoke without preamble:
"D'you know what's happened over to Tenney's?"
Nan got up from her knees, and her face was no longer the April-May face she had bent above the peonies.
"No," she said. "What is it?"
"I see doctor go by this mornin' in his car," said Charlotte, "carryin' Tira. In a couple of hours they come back. An' then he went by ag'in, goin' down home. I was on the lookout an' stopped him. I was kind of uneasy. An' he says: 'Yes, Mis' Tenney's baby's dead. She overlaid it,' he says. 'They feel terribly about it,' he says. 'Tenney run away from the services.'"