"You know—here's how I can break away from Jim. When he reaches out—reaches out for me, I can just cut off his hand."
Mrs. Lennon stood motionless, startled by the unexpected words. She had thought Martha's mind free of all fears of Jim. She was brought up sharply by this sudden speech and gesture. "Deems," she called, "Deems, come here."
Deems had taken the cleaver hastily from Martha's hands, and that night told his wife that Martha would have to be watched closely. He feared that Martha was becoming deranged.
Martha had discovered that she was watched when one night she left her room. She heard the door open and instantly she felt the hands of Mrs. Lennon on her arm and heard a gentle, persuasive voice asking her to return to bed.
It was the next day, in the dusk of a turn in the hallway, that Martha once more felt the presence of Jim. If her life in the peaceful household of her friends had brought an outward calm, a mantle of repose and quiet, this was instantly torn up by the vision that formed before her eyes in the half dim hallway. Instantly she was the old Martha, held in the grasp of terror. Her face was drawn in tense, white lines, her lips were deformed, and with trembling gaunt hands she thrust back the apparition. Her screams, "Jim, let me be, let me be," brought Mrs. Lennon running and called Deems from his work in the wood-shed.
They found her in a faint on the floor. They carried her to her room and put her to bed, Mrs. Lennon speaking to her, soothing and trying to bring her back to her former calm.
There followed a few days of rain which seemed in some way to make Martha less uneasy and restless. Deems and his wife, seeing her silent and apparently resting, felt that slowly the terror she had been suffering was being washed out. Martha's attitude encouraged this feeling. She rested in silence, attentive to the dropping of the rain and learning once more to wear her old-time composure.
When Deems returned toward nightfall one day, it was with the news that the incessant rains had done serious damage in the cemetery. Dripping from the drenching he had received in his tour of inspection, his boots muddy, and his hands dirty from holding to the precarious bushes, he shook with cold as he reported on what he had found. In his narrative he had quite forgotten the presence of Martha who sat by, silent and waxen-faced.
"And you ought to see," he said, turning to his wife, "how the rain has run down those graves. You know, it's loosened Jim Sloan's stone so, I'm afraid it'll fall against the first heavy blow."
Martha's exclamation "Oh!" recalled to him her presence. He stopped talking for a while, then hoping to blot out the effects of his statement he began a lively story of the number of trees that had fallen across the road, and how he had been told that over at Rampaco the post-office had been struck by lightning.