She shut the window, caught a rug from the cozy corner, and went through the warm, well-lighted corridor out of doors.
*****
They were going very slowly, very cautiously, the group of farm men, headed by Jethro, toward the barn. She could see them—the bent shoulders, the rough clothes, the shambling, swinging steps and loose swing of the body. They were all familiar, these men. She knew them by name—knew how many shillings a week each had, and of how many children each was the father. At that moment she didn’t seem to know them at all. They were instinct with mystery—mystery flavored with dread.
What were they carrying? She could see now, as she gained on them silently in her thin slippers, that they guardedly carried a thing—a long, shrouded bundle. It was shapeless; yet, somehow, it cried out of life beneath the roughly piled coverings. It was nothing agricultural that they were carrying toward the barn so carefully.
She heard them speak, heard Daborn say in his cheery voice and deferential way:
“’Course, sir, it aint as I thinks, it’s as you thinks. But I should jus’ lay ’un in the barn.”
Lay what in the barn? A formless fear quickened her feet. She was very close, none of them yet suspected her presence—the heavy snow now extinguished all sound of feet.
They had covered the shrouded thing with sacks—wet sacks that were already stiffening with frost.
She crept behind them in the shadow of the newly-planted shrubs. She followed to the barn—the great barn, full of cobwebs, scored by huge beams. Its new roof of corrugated iron, covering the heavy thatch, gleamed like a strange, new precious metal.
They stopped to throw open the great door. How cold she was! And yet how her heart under the sofa-rug blazed and beat—she couldn’t have told why.