"Good-by," she said; and, turning, passed down the desolate garden, feeling remorseful that she had left him unthanked.
Homer, now that the tenderness evoked by her presence was left unsustained, felt a spiteful defiance waken in his heart. He walked slowly to his horses' heads, pretending to adjust the harness; then, after inspecting them with critical deliberateness, drove slowly past the curious eyes at the window.
"Might as well give them the full benefit of the sight," he said to himself; "it seems to strike them as interesting."
All day long, as he swung his axe in the woodland, he mused upon Myron as he had seen her last, with pure, uplifted brow and chin, as she said good-by.
He returned at night, calm, and braced, as he thought, to receive a storm of reproaches. He found a table "coldly furnished forth" for his supper; the kitchen was deserted, and from his mother's room came the hum of voices.
Mrs. Wilson expected to crush her son utterly by this isolation, but it was a treatment he could endure much longer than she could suffer to inflict it, for to women of her type the expression of anger in words is essential; any repression of speech is a physical pang. It was well, though, for this one night that it should be so, for Homer's calm was but as the brittle crust that forms on seething lava, that neither controls nor cools it; that melts at a touch, and offers no restraint to the force beneath. Too hot an anger yet filled his heart to admit of peaceful argument; his hand was too ready to clinch yet when he thought of Warner's tentative question. He ate his supper, smoked a peaceful pipe, and soon slept, dreaming, even as he had done all day, of the calm sweetness of those patient eyes.
Myron was having her first of solitude, passing it in brief watches of wakefulness and shorter spaces of sleep.
And in the lonely little graveyard a new-made mound was slowly whitening under the falling snow.