Now and then there was a blustery day, but good weather remained till late in November. But the ground tightened with the cold, and a snow-whirlwind came from the Northwest. Nowhere had the autumn been fuller of color, but a hiss and a snarl had buried it all beneath the crackly white of winter. Windmills creaked in the fierce blast, sucking smoky water from the ground, to gush, to drip, and then to hang from the spout a frozen beard. Black-capped milkmen, with flaps drawn down over ears, sat upon their wagons, appearing in their garb as if the hangman had rigged them up for a final journey. To look upon the frozen fields and to stand in the groaning woods it did not seem possible that there had ever been a day of lazy heat and nodding bloom. At tightening midnight the flinty lake cracked with a running shriek. The dawn was a gray shudder, the sunrise a shiver of pale red, and then a black cloud blot-out and more snow. A day that promised to be good-tempered often ended in a fury; and sometimes, when it seemed that nature could not be more harsh, the wind would soften, a thaw come with rain, and then another freeze with a snow-storm fiercer than before. Sometimes thunder growled, a lost mood of summer in the upper air; sometimes a lagging autumn bird was whirled through the freezing wind. And with it all the Yankee man was full of spirit, almost happy, happy as the Yankee well can be. His cool nature demanded a fight with the cold. The ears of all his ancestors had been frozen in bleak New England. His religion had been nurtured in a snow-drift, and unlike the breath of a freezing rabbit, did not melt an inch of it. In the howl of a cutting wind he heard a psalm to his vengeful Deity. And to-day the winter reminds him that his army was victorious in the summer South. It was a fight of Winter against Summer.

Milford had no idle time upon his hands. When not at work in the barn he was trading among the farmers. They called him sharp, and this was a compliment. He had beaten Steve Hardy in a trade, and this was praise. An honest sort of a fellow is an eyesore to the genuine Yankee. He must have other virtues—thrift. There was but one drawback in the Rollins community: The land was too productive. It yielded a good living without the full exercise of the Yankee quality. The Yankee is happiest when strongly opposed. His religion was sweetest when he had to pray with one eye open, sighting at the enemy, the dragoon sent by the king to break up the Conventicle, or the American Indian come to burn the meeting-house.

The winter had brought out Milford's strong points. He doubled his money on a flock of sheep. Fathers spoke of it to their daughters. Mothers asked their sons if they were acquainted with Mr. Milford. Mrs. Stuvic was proud of him.

"Oh, I knowed what I was doin'," she said one night, sitting near the hot stove in Milford's dining-room. "You can't fool me. I know lots, I tell you. Do you know the Bunker girl? Well, she was at my house yesterday, and she talked like she knowed you but wanted to know you better. Now put down that newspaper and talk to me. Do you know her?"

"I think I've met her," said Milford.

"You think you have. Well, a woman has taken mighty little hold of a man when he thinks he's met her. She'd make you a good wife; yes, you bet!"

"I don't want a wife, good or bad."

"Oh, you keep still. What the deuce are you workin' for? You know there's a woman somewhere waitin' for you."

"And if there is, why should I want to marry the Bunker girl?"

"Now listen at him! Why, I didn't know but you'd got tired of foolin' with the other one. Who is she? That tall critter that was out here? Well, I don't know about her, with her art. Art the cat's foot! You'd better marry a woman that knows how to do housework. She may be all right for summer, but you'd better marry a woman for winter. Don't you think so, Bob?"

"For winter and summer, I should think," said the hired man. "But I married one for winter, and she went away along in July. But I guess I could get her again."

"And he's just about fool enough to take her," Milford spoke up. "Why, she'd run away again."

"I don't think that, Bill. I guess she's got more sense now."

"At any rate, she's got more sense than you," said the old woman. "She had sense enough to run away and you didn't. But I hear that somebody else run away, Bill. I heard that you left a wife out West."

"You heard a lie, madam," Milford replied. "But that's not hard to hear. A man may be ever so deaf, and sometimes might hear a lie."

"That's gospel, Mrs. Stuvic," said the hired man. "I was out at the deaf and dumb asylum one time, and they had a boy shut up for lyin' with his fingers."

"Well, what do you come tellin' me about it for? Do you s'pose I care? I wasn't talkin' about lyin'. I was talkin' about some folks not havin' much sense, and you was right at the top of the pot, I'll tell you that. You haven't got sense enough to catch a good woman."

"I might not have from your standpoint, but I have from mine. I don't believe I'd want the woman you'd call good. She'd think it was her duty to keep a man stirred up all the time; she'd make him work himself to death."

"Well," she snapped, "a woman's better off every time she makes a man work himself to death, I'll tell you that."

"Yes, from your standpoint," drawled the hired man, opening the stove door to get a light for his pipe. "But I wouldn't kill myself for no woman, would you, Bill?"

"I don't know that I'm called on to do it," Milford replied. "Give me that," he added, reaching for the bit of blazing paper which the hired man was about to put out. He lighted his pipe, threw the burning paper on the stove, and idly looked at the cinder waving in the draft. "As unsteadfast as Mitchell's love," he said.

"What is?" the hired man inquired. "That thing, there? No, that's a woman's love. See, it's blowed away."

"Such nonsense!" said the old woman. "How can you keep it up so long? I'd get sick to death of it. Woman's love, woman's love—I never was as tired of hearing of a thing. I hear it all summer, and now you're talkin' it. Conscience alive, how the wind blows! It makes me think of old Lewson, the cold made him shiver so. I've knowed him to sit up at night with his fire out and his teeth chatterin', waitin' for the spirits to come. One night I asked him who he expected, and he said his wife, and I told him she was a fool to come out such a night, and he flung his spirit book at me, and the Dutch girl kindled the fire with it the next mornin'. Poor old feller! I passed his grave the other day, all heaped up with snow; and it made me shake so to think I'd be lyin' there sometime, with the snow fallin' an' the cows mooin' down the road. But I'm not gone yet, Bill. Do you understand that? I say I'm not gone yet, and many a one of 'em 'll be hauled off before I do go. Yes, you bet! I'll outlive all of you; the last one of you."

"I hope so, Mrs. Stuvic," said Milford.

"You do? Thank you for the compliment."

"But you've got to go sometime," Mitchell spoke up; and she frowned upon him.

"You shut your mouth, now," she snapped. "I wan't talkin' to you. I'll go when I get ready, and it's none of your business. But ain't it awful," she added, speaking to Milford, "that we've got to go? And we don't know where and don't know what'll happen to us afterwards. Lord, Lord, such a world! If we could only be dead for a while to see what it's like; but to think forever and ever, all the summers and all the winters to come! Dead, all the time dead. I wake up in the night, and think about it and wish I'd never been born. Sometimes I look at my hand and say, 'Yes, the flesh has got to drop off.' Not long ago a doctor stopped at my house one night with a skeleton. He was a young fool, and had bought it somewhere. He jerked the thing around like it was a jumpin'-jack; and I said to myself, 'You'd do me the same way, you scoundrel.' And I told him to drive away from there as fast as he could. And old Lewson's failin' to come back has made it worse. I wonder if he did lie to me. I wonder if he could come back. And if he could, why didn't he? I'd always been kind to him; took him when his own flesh and blood turned him out. Then what made him lie to me? I don't care so much about his not comin' back; all I want is to know that he could have come. That would satisfy me. And why couldn't he let me know that much? Bill, you lump of mud, don't you think about dyin'?"

"You're coming pretty close to my name, old lady. Yes, I think about it, but death will have to take care of itself. I haven't the time to worry with it just at present."

"Yes, and the first thing you know you can't worry about it."

"Then I'll be all right; won't need to worry."

She reached over and gripped his wrist. "Ah, that's it; that's just it. How do you know that you won't need to worry? What proof have you got? Tell me, if you've got any." She jerked him. "Tell me. Don't you see how I'm sufferin'? If you know anythin', tell me. I want the truth. That's all I want, the truth."

"I don't know anything, Mrs. Stuvic. I can only hope."

She turned loose his wrist and shoved herself back further from him. "You can only hope. You mean that you're only a fool. That's what you mean. What do you want to hope for? Why don't you find out? What's all the smart men doin' that they don't find out? Talk to me about the world gettin' wiser! Oh, they can invent their machines and all that, but why don't they find out the truth?"

"Some of the wisest of them think they have found out long ago," Milford replied. "Don't you see the churches? Somebody must believe that the truth is known or there wouldn't be so many churches."

"Churches," she sneered, "yes, churches. But I don't believe in 'em, and you don't neither. Same old thing all the time; believe, believe, nothin' but believe. Well, I'm goin' home. I see you don't know any more than I do. We're all a pack of fools."

Mitchell said that he was going her way, and she told him to come on. At the door going out they met the Professor coming in. The old woman fell back as if she had seen a ghost. She declared that for a moment he was Old Lewson, just as he looked on the day when last he urged her to accept his faith. She sat down to recover breath. The Professor assured her that he meant no harm. Any resemblance that he might bear to the living or the dead was wholly unintentional on his part. She told him to shut up, that he was a fool. He acknowledged it with a bow, and said that this fact also was wholly unintentional.

"You pretend to be so smart," she said. "Yes, but why don't you know the truth?"

"I should know it, madam, were I to hear it."

"Oh, you get out! You don't know half the time what you're talkin' about. What's to become of us all? That's what I want to know."

The Professor sat down. The hired man stood at the door. Milford leaned back in his chair. The old woman looked at the learned man and repeated her question. He began to say something about philosophy, and she broke in with a contemptuous snort and the cat's foot. She did not want philosophy; she wanted the truth. The Professor attempted to persuade her that philosophy was the truth, and she fluttered like a hen. It was nothing of the sort; it was ignorance put in big words. What she wanted was the truth.

"But if you won't listen I can't give it to you," said the Professor. "You cut me off at the beginning. Now, you say that what you want is the truth. You demand an answer to your question of what is to become of us all, after this life. You want me to answer it in a word, when the books that have been written on the subject would sink the biggest ship afloat."

"Yes, and you don't know anythin' about it. What I want to know is, can we come back? Answer me that."

"Madam, in my opinion——"

"I don't give a snap for your opinion. Come on, Bob Mitchell, if you're goin' with me." She bustled out of the room, leaving the Professor with his finger-tips pressed together and his head erect. "As odd a fish as was ever hooked," said he. "She must be afraid that she is going to die."

"It's on her mind all the time," said Milford. "She wants to believe something, she doesn't know exactly what."

"The pitiable case of one beyond the reach of philosophy. But in her struggling to land herself somewhere she keeps her interest in herself keenly alive. There is always some sort of hope as long as we are interested in ourselves. Trite, I admit that it is trite, but it is a fact that we should always bear in mind, endeavoring constantly to keep alive an interest in self so that we may not fail in the obligations which we owe to others. But well may the old woman ask what is to become of us all. I wash my hands of the spiritual part," he said, going through the motion of washing; "I can shift the responsibilities here, or at least feel that I can, but—bodily, bodily, what's to become of us bodily?"

"When such riddles are asked of me, I'm always ready to give them up," said Milford. "I'm not asking myself any questions."

"Ha! you don't need to," the Professor declared. "You bristle yourself against the world, and in the fight that ensues you are not always beaten. I am. Your nerve is sound. Mine has been broken many a time, tied together again, and is therefore weak. Leaving age out of the question, there is scarcely any comparison between our equipments for the fight. You have a habit of silence that enforces respect for your talk. I am talkative, and a talkative man utters many an unheeded truth. At times you are almost grim, and this makes your good humor the brighter. I am always pleasant, and as a consequence fail to hold the interest of the company. In overalls you can assert a sort of dignity, or rather what the thoughtless would take for dignity, but which I know to be a gruffism—permit the expression—a gruffism toned down. But I—even in a dress-suit I could not keep my dignity from cutting a prejudicial caper. The trouble is that my acquaintances will not take me seriously. I once heard a man say, 'Yes, as light as one of Dolihide's worries.' It angers me to feel that outwardly I am a caricature of my inner self. Not even my wife knows how serious I am, or what a tragedy life is to me. But, my dear fellow, my oddities are crystal, and I will not thread them off in spun glass. I came over for a different purpose. The money with which you so generously deceived me—I have raised it; it was a fearful scuffle, but I seized the obstacles that danced about me and threw them down, one by one. Here is the money."

He took out a number of bank notes with a scattering of silver, and slowly spread them on the table, carefully placing one upon the other. "I said that I would pay you, and here's the money,—down to the forty cents."

"I am much abliged to you, Professor. No hurry, though, you understand."

"There has been no hurry, my dear friend. No one can ever know what a struggle it was to—to raise it at this time, this needful time." He leaned back, and with lips tightly sealed together, and with head slowly nodding, gazed at the pile of dirty paper. "This needful time, thou filth," he said.

"Now, if you need it," Milford spoke up quickly, "take it. I'm not pressed. You can pay it some other time."

"My life insurance will be due again within three days."

"Then go ahead and pay it."

The Professor continued to gaze at the bank notes. "Must I again crease you into uncleanly folds—I am a thousand times your debtor, my dear boy. I could spin fine, but I won't. I could pronounce a curse upon these pieces of motley paper, but I won't. I cannot afford to. In their mire they lie between me and my family's future misery. I don't know what your ultimate aim is in this life, but I know that you are a Christian. I don't know what you have done, but it is what a man does now that makes him a Christian. Well, solemn under the weight of a renewed obligation, I will return to my own fireside. Before touching this money again, let me shake your hand."