Martha had been wont to run lightly about her father's house. Her movements had become suddenly freighted with a seriousness that was not natural to her. Her laughter quieted to a restrained smile which in turn gave way to a uniform seriousness. The whole village noted and remarked the change. "He is older than she," they said, "and is making her see things as he does."
When they reached the house, Martha, without a word, left Deems and hurried in. Deems turned away, looking back and shaking his head, the while he mumbled to himself, "There's no good in this. There's no good for Martha."
He was struck motionless when suddenly he beheld Martha by the window. He had thought her slightly composed when she had left him, for her manner was more quiet than it had been. Now he was startled. Out of the window she leaned, her eyes fastened on the distant gravestone—white, large, and dominating—a shaft that rose upright like a gigantic spear on the crest of the hill. He watched her face and head and saw that her movements were frightened. As she moved her head—it seemed she was following something with her eyes which, look as closely as he could, he failed to make out—there was a jerkiness of movement that showed her alert and startled.
From the musty, dark parlor Martha looked out on the cemetery. There, clear in the evening light, stood the large white stone—a terrible symbol that held her. To her nervous mind, alive with the creations of her fear, it seemed she could read the lines,
JAMES SLOAN
BORN SEPT. 14, 1857
DIED NOV. 12, 1915
and below it, stamped clearly and illumined by her fright,
HIS FAITHFUL WIFE
MARTHA SLOAN
BORN AUG. 9, 1871. DIED——
At the thought of the word "Died," followed by the dash, she recoiled. The dash reaching out to her—reaching to her—swept into her mind all the graspingness of James which had squeezed the sweetness out of life—all the hardness which had marked his possession of her. Was it her mind, prodded by terror, that visualized it? There, seeming to advance from the hill, from the cemetery, from the very gravestone which was beginning to blot and blurr in her vision, she saw a hand—his hand! It was coming—coming to her, to crush what of life was left in her.
Even in her own mind, it was a miracle that she had survived Jim's tenacity. When Jim had died, she began suddenly to recover her former manner of life. She began to win back to herself. It was as if, the siege of Winter having lifted, the breath and warmth of Spring might now again prevail.
Then had come the horrors of uncontrollable dreams followed by the death by fire of Dorothy. That had shaken her completely.