He opened his mouth, and for the first time addressed her. "Put those crutches down."
She paid less attention to him than she did to the crackling of the fire. Walking behind his chair, and making a wide circle to avoid his outstretched arms, she went to the other side of the stove and—
He lifted up his voice and roared at her. She was sticking the legs of his crutches down in that fiery furnace.
He roared again, but she did not even raise her head. She was holding the crutches down, stuffing them in, burning them off inch by inch—very quietly, very deliberately, but very surely. She was not thinking of him, she was thinking of the dead dog out on the snow.
He kept quiet for a few seconds, then he began to bellow for mercy. She was burning up to the cross-bar handles, she would soon reach that gold-plate inscription, and now for the first time he knew what those eulogistic words were to him—he, a man who had had the temper of a maniac that had cut him off from the sympathy of every human being he knew.
Tears ran down his cheeks—in incoherent words he stammered an apology for killing her dog, and then she relented.
Throwing the charred and smoking tops to him, she shut up the stove, took her hat and tippet from a peg in the wall, and clasping Gippie to her, left the house without one glance at the old man as he sat in the smoky atmosphere mumbling to himself, and fumbling over the burnt pieces of wood as tenderly as if they had been babies.
She had conquered him, but without caring for her conquest she left him.