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And after what seemed a long time to us because the dark was so still, we picked up the lantern and crept back to the house.

6
    IN MARCH of this year—ten years since the day we came—there were tin-grey clouds and cold winds, andthe white ash of orchard fires was blown east and scattered. But no rain had come since the first of February. “This year will have to be different,” I thought. “We’ve scrabbled and prayed too long for it to end as the others have.” The debt was still like a bottomless swamp unfilled, where we had gone year after year, throwing in hours of heat and the wrenching on stony land, only to see them swallowed up and then to creep back and begin again. I felt sure somehow that this year would end differently and better, and not be merely a shift of seasons that left us still bound and waiting. We had gone too long in a fog of hope.
    My father’s life had been a sort offierce crawling to rid us of debt before that time when even the effort would be too heavy for him. He wanted some safety for us, freedom from that fear and doubt he had always known himself. And he wanted time to look around and be still. He loved the land in a proud, owned way,—only because it was his, and for what it would mean to us; not in the way that Merle and I did, and still do. To us it was a thing loved for its own sake, giving a sort of ecstasy and healing (high words, but even they are too pale), and we felt a nameless,not wholly understood love. But the land was all Father’s life then. The whole weight of his ambition, the hope and sanity of his mind rested on the same ground he walked. This heavy, complaining labor with doubtful profit was almost the only visible sign of love he had ever showed us. But it was one that I’d never doubted.
    Father was like Kerrin in that he couldn’t see the masterpiece of a maggot or be satisfied with the shadow of a leaf, in which ways we were older than he was, but young in being so blindwe could not see the heaviness of his responsibility or know the probe of that fear which made him want security at the expense of our happiness.—I think sometimes that he would have been a milder, more patient man had there been some sons instead of nothing but girls’ talk all the time and women-voices. Life’s lonely enough and isolated enough without the thick wall of kind to make it go even darker. Later we did not talk so much, but in the first years we were like a bunch of guineas,cackling and squawking at all hours. It irritated him to have us picking and pecking at lives of other people, and telling the things we’d heard. “Shut up!” he’d shout.—“Shut up and keepout of others’ business!” And at times we had hated him for it. He felt too that we blamed him because there was nothing left but this land out of everything he had piled together for years; but the truth was that we never thought about this, and were glad that the place was old and stony and full of uncleared woods. Nor did Mother blame him either in word or mind. The only place she wanted to be was where Father was, whether this place was Eden or Sheol itself, and what form it took didn’t matter much. But he was so raw in mind himself that he suspected us all.
    We never seemed able to make much over. All that we saved above what it cost to live—and live by mouth and mind only, with nothing new but the seasons or thoughts we had—all went into the mortgage-debt. It would have taken so little to make us happy. A little more rest, a little more money—it was the nearness that tormented. The nearness to life the way we wanted it. And things that have cost more than they’re worth leave a bitter taste. A taste of salt and sweat.
    The spring crept up slowly this year; tide-like receded. Green crosiers of the ferns again and the mandrakes humping up like toadstools in the grass. I gottired as a rag sometimes and would not