"I'm going to make you some tea," he said.
Going to the bedroom door, he closed it, took his lantern out to the little "lean-to" woodshed, and split up some bits of lightwood; with these he roused the dying fire to life. With much precision, he put on the kettle, and when it boiled asked in a matter-of-fact way for the tea.
Myron rose, with My half awake in her arms, and went to the pantry-shelf to get it. It was chill there; she wrapped her apron about My's bare toes. He soon went to sleep again, and Myron Holder and Homer Wilson sat down together to drink the tea. Her eyes rested upon him, as if well content, and he noted this with delight. The truth was they dared not yet stray elsewhere, lest the spectres he had banished might jibber at her from the dusky corners of the room.
Love is served on strange altars, and the sacrifice of a heart was again proffered in that lonely cottage, whose atmosphere was chill with the dreadful influence of death, whose silence was broken by the soft breathing of a child of shame. Homer looked upon the woman of his heart and loved her. When the first breaking of the skies ushered in the dawn, he left.
The women returned early, for it was considered an honorable thing to have the ordering of a funeral—to be able to speak ex cathedra of the mode of procedure.
Mr. Muir came. The last ghastly toilet for the grave was made. Nothing remained but to wait for the morrow, when the funeral was to be.
The women looked at her curiously when they came that morning, and Mrs. Warner expressed the sentiment of the rest when she said: "That Myron Holder is bad clean through. Any other woman would have been drove crazy last night; but look at her! She's a hardened one!" Mrs. Warner did not consider that this speech cast any reflection upon herself and her friends who had subjected a woman to an ordeal calculated to drive her crazy.
Night sank slowly down; and once more the women, departing, cast wondering glances at Myron's pale face, steadfast in the knowledge that she would have some one near her to chase those horrid visions away.
When Homer arrived, she was sitting beside her sleeping child, sewing upon an old black skirt of her grandmother's that some of the women, with an eye to funeral effects, had pinned up to suit her shorter stature, and bade her sew, that she might be properly clothed on the morrow. The work was nearly done, and the needle hung loosely between her listless fingers. Her eyes ached for lack of sleep; every joint trembled from fatigue; every nerve tingled from overstrain.
She greeted Homer more by a gesture than by speech, and perceiving her exhaustion, he insisted upon her resting. She made some demur, but he overruled it with a word. She rose a little unsteadily, and bent over My.