Annie found the living room of the Fairchild homestead unoccupied. She could hear Alvira talking with the Lawton girl out in the kitchen, and from the parlor on the other side there came a murmuring sound which she did not comprehend at once. As she laid her hand upon the stair door, with the purpose of ascending to Sabrina’s room, this sound rose to a distinguishable pitch. It was a woman’s weeping. Annie hesitated, listening for a moment; then she turned, rolled one of the parlor doors back, and entered.

Isabel lay buried in the blue easy-chair, her face, encircled by one arm, hidden against its back. The great braids of her yellow hair were dishevelled and loosened, without being in graceful disorder. Her whole form trembled with the force of her hysterical sobbing.

At Annie’s touch upon her shoulder she raised her face quickly. It was tear-stained, haggard, and looked soft with that flabbiness of outline which trouble may give to the fairest woman’s beauty when it is not built upon youth; over this face passed a quick look of disappointment at recognition of Annie.

“Oh, it is you!”

The almost petulant words escaped before Isabel could collect herself. She sat up now, wiping her eyes, and striving with all her might for control of her thoughts and tongue.

“Yes, Isabel. I was going up to Sabrina’s room, but I heard you sobbing here, and I felt that I must come to you. It is all so terrible—and I do so feel for you!”

“Terrible—yes, it is terrible! It was kind of you to come—very kind. I—I scarcely realize it all, yet. It was such a shock!”

“I know, poor dear.” Annie laid her hand caressingly on the other’s brow. She had not come with over-tenderness in her heart, but this unexpected depth of suffering, so palpably real, touched her keenly. “I know. Don’t try to talk to me—don’t feel that it is necessary. Only let me be of use to you. It will be a dreadful time for you all—and perhaps I can spare you some. I shan’t go to the school to-day. Oughtn’t you to go up to your room now, Isabel, and lie down, and leave me here to—to arrange things?”

“No, not yet! Perhaps soon I will. My impulse is to stay down, to spare myself nothing, to force myself to suffer everything that there is to be suffered. I’ll see; perhaps that may not be best. But not now! not now! No—don’t go! Stay with me. I dread to be left alone; my own thoughts murder me!” She rose to her feet, and began pacing to and from the piano. “Let me walk—and you talk to me—anything, it doesn’t matter what—it will help occupy my mind. Oh, yes—were you at Crump’s last night? I heard them come by, late, singing.”

“Oh, Isabel, how can we talk of such trivial things? Yes, I was there; I was in the singing party, too. It makes me shudder to think that at that very minute, perhaps——” The girl paused for a moment, with parted lips and troubled face, as if pondering some sudden thought; then exclaimed, “Oh-h! the horse! Could it have been!”

“Could what have been!” Isabel stopped in her caged-panther-like pacing, and looked deep inquiry.

“But no, of course not! What connection could there have been! You see, after I left the wagon, to cut across by the path at the end of the poplars, a horse came galloping like the wind up the road, with some figure lying low on its back. We were too far away to see distinctly, though the night was so light”—she had insensibly drifted into the use of the plural pronoun—“but the thing went by so like a flash that it seemed an apparition. And come to think of it, there was an effort to avoid noise. I know I wondered at there being such a muffled sound, and Seth explained——”

She stopped short, conscious of having said more than she intended.

“Seth was with you, then?”

“Yes—he met me, quite unexpectedly, by the thorns. He had been out walking, he said; the night was too fine to sleep.”

“Yes, I heard him go out, an hour and a half at least before the singers came by. Did he say anything to you about what had happened, here in the house, during the evening?” Isabel’s azure eyes took on their darkest hue now, in the intentness of her gaze into her companion’s face.

“Only that he had had words with Albert—poor boy! how like a knife the memory of them must be to him now!”

“Did he tell you what the words were about?”

“No.”

“Did he say anything else to you?”

Annie grew restive under this persistent interrogation. The habit of deference to the older, wiser, more beautiful woman was very strong with her, but this did seem like an undue strain upon it.

“Why yes, no doubt he did. We talked of a number of things.”

“What were they? What did he say?”

“Well, really, Isabel, I——”

The elder woman gave a little click with her teeth and, after a searching glance into the other’s face, resumed her walk up and down, her hands clenched rather than clasped before her, and her movement more feline than ever. “Well, really you—what?” she said with the faintest suggestion of a mocking snarl in the intonation.

The girl drew herself up. It was not in human nature to keep her tone from chilling. “Really, I think I would better go up to Sabrina. I fancied I might be of some service to you.”

“Annie! Are you going to speak like that to me?—now of all times!” The tone was outwardly appealing. Annie’s sense was not skilled enough to detect the vibration of menace in it.

“No, Isabel, not at all. But you make it hard for me. Can you wonder? I think to comfort a desolate, stricken woman in her hour of sorrow, and she responds by peremptory cross-examination as to what a young man may have said to me, in the moonlight. Is it strange that I am puzzled?”

“Strange! Is not everything strange around and about me! That I should have married as I did; that I, loathing farm life, should have come here to live; that I should be waiting here now for them to bring my husband’s corpse home to me—is it not all strange, unreal? The conversation ought to be to match, oughtn’t it?”—she spoke with an unnatural, tremulous vivacity which pained and frightened the girl—“and so, while we wait, I talk to you about young men, and the moonlight, and all that. Can’t you see that my mind is tearing itself to pieces, like a machine in motion with some big rod or other loose, pounding, crushing, right and left like a flail! We must talk! Tell me what he said, anything&mda............