They all went stolidly, carefully into the barn. She slipped like a wraith in after them.
Jethro turned and saw her.
“Go back!” he said wrathfully. “Go back!” repeating it, with no wrath at all, but with exquisite pleading and gentleness. “Go back! Dear love, go back to the fire.”
She looked up at him meaningly, knowingly. She began to feel what it was that stretched under those wet sacks. Dear love! It was the first time since her return that he had used those words—his favorite pet expression during the brief, agitated period of their engagement.
There were frozen flakes of snow scattered over the orange silk rug which wrapped her from her chin to the toe-caps of her slippers. Her white face, framed in disheveled, dust-colored hair, was shadowy. They stood together at the door of the barn. At the back of them, the men, each with his lantern, made a patch of light. An evil spirit seemed to stare out of each corner of the vast raftered place—to stare down at the thing under the sacks.
“I will not go back,” she said firmly. “I want to see. What is there?”
She pointed with a steady finger. They had improvised a bench. They were laying it out—straightening it, with rough, pitiful reverence, as she could very well see.
“What is there?”
Her voice rang out in the lofty barn amid the perfect, unnatural silence which suddenly fell over the rest. Jethro only repeated, touching her coaxingly on the wrist:
“Go back. I’ll come in and tell you presently.”