Dorothy washed the milk-things now, and the mother spent her days in the
sunny east room, between her bed and the easy-chair, where she sat and
mused for hours over the five letters that she had received from her
husband in as many months. The boys had, in a measure, justified their
father's faith in them, since Rachel's illness, and Dorothy was released
from much of her out-door work; but the silence of the kitchen, when she
was there alone with her ironing and dish washing, was a heavier burden
than she had yet known.

Nature sometimes strikes in upon the hopeless monotony of life in remote
farmhouses with one of her phenomenal moods. They come like besoms of
destruction, but they scatter the web of stifling routine; they fling into
the stiffening pool the stone which jars the atoms into crystal.

The storms, that had ambushed in the lurid August skies and circled
ominously round the horizon during the first weeks of September, broke at
last in an equinoctial which was long remembered in the mill-house. It took
its place in the family calendar of momentous dates with the hard winter of
1800, with the late frost that had coated the incipient apples with ice and
frozen the new potatoes in the ground in the spring of '97, and with the
year the typhus had visited the valley.

The rain had been falling a night and a day; it had been welcomed with
thanksgiving, but it had worn out its welcome some hours since, and now the
early darkness was coming on without a lull in the storm. Dorothy and the
two older boys had made the rounds of the farm-buildings, seeing all safe
for the second night. The barns and mill stood on high ground, while the
house occupied the sheltered hollow between. Little streams from the hills
were washing in turbid currents across the lower levels; the waste-weir