The smell of kerosene in the pantry sickened the woman who was pouring it into lamps. Through the window and side-door the quintessence of the July noonday palpitated in. Twinkling black flies buzzed on the ceiling.

The woman pulled out the spice-drawer and sat down on it. It slanted uncomfortably forward, and she smelled with loathing the warm fragrance of spilled cinnamon. The kitchen clock whirred and struck eleven.

She went to the side-door and called to a man forking hay somewhere in the blinding distance.

“Abel! Abel! when do you want”——

“Can’t hear a word you say,” he called back impatiently. He leaned on his pitchfork, a blur of blue clothes back of dazzling hay and steel.

“What time do you want—I should have—dinner?”

Her voice rose high on the last word.

“Well!” the man kicked at something in the confused grass. “Well, quarter past twelve, I guess. Got to go over to Sydney’s, you know, well, say half past twelve, that’ll give me plenty a’ time; half past twelve.” He lifted a fork full of wizened hay and began to whistle.

The woman shut the door. She turned to the window, leaned out in the hot light, and pulled to the blinds. Standing up in the sudden darkness she felt a hammering in the back of her head. Pink and green lizard-like coils of nothing swam over the china-shelf.

“It’s them pink plates,” she said aloud. “No sir! it’s in my eyes!”

She rested her head against the warm plaster for a minute. Her eyes blinked at the incessant colored coilings in the air. Her hanging hands seemed to pull at her shoulders. Something fused into a troublous unreality the shelves, the odors, and the drone of flies.

Suddenly she became aware of waking up from a swift uncomfortable dream. A shiver of air stirred through the shutters. She shrank away from it, cold. As she stepped into the dark front hall, a hot rush of blood flushed her face like air from an oven. She sat down by the back window, let her hands drop, and woke up again from rapid dreaming.

The start of this shiver shook her permanently awake. Her wide eyes looked out through the shutter-slits, on a blue-green shady spot in the door-yard. “I should like,” she said slowly, “to lay down under them trees—on a shawl—and go to sleep. But I s’pose there’s bugs dropping off the trees—oh, but it looks nice!—There’s Abel’s dinner, let me see, new potatoes, dock-greens, bacon. I wonder if folks could see me from the road? oh, it would look awful silly! I got a good mind to do it, though. I’m just beat out! I don’t see how women keep up and do their work—Abel’s got to have his dinner—I got a good mind”——

She began to be agitated. She was pressed upon by tradition, by generations of women that never had slighted their work. Their transmitted canonized habits stifled her, wrapping innumerable folds about her small wrestling will. The sleepy air about her magnified her labor. She had never heard of such a thing, her mother never would have done it! and was Abel to go over to Sidney’s on an empty stomach? But her will to get dinner seemed paralyzed.

There was a small swirl and soar of dust up the road, as of a strong summer wind. The trees swished outside, the new cool air billowed up the little hall. The woman looked out again at the sheltered place in the yard; then she picked up the small rug by the door and went out.

It was a dry, cool place, under blue-green layers of maple boughs. There were lumps and hollows in the turf, and the grass was fat and long. The branches plashed gently as a faintly piping bird pushed through them. Two or three small leaves blew down and stirred in the woman’s hair. The grass protruded gently against her face; every breath renewed the fresh smell of it. Far away clicked a hay-gathering machine, in the olive, billowy, upland fields—thick timothy starred with goldenrod. Her eyes closed on the white road, curving down hill between cushiony meadows, but from an infinite drowsy distance she heard a tin pail swing with a creak, and dimly fancied the glare on it.

At noon, Abel finished the patch, dropped his pitchfork, and tramped up across the lumpy ground. His blue shirt was hot and damp, pricked through by the dazzle. He could almost see the tan thicken on his hands. The swing of walking and walking towards home and towards dinner was keen pleasure. He liked to lift his great boots and stamp down the dry, puffy sod.

Inside the kitchen door there was a sleepy and motionless air; nothing hummed on the stove but the multitudinous flies about the boiler. Cups and saucers gleamed whitely through the glass pantry door.

“Clara!”

“Clara!” Twice Abel’s voice cut the monotone, but it closed in again like deep water.

He burst through the hall and swung back the front door. In the flood of daylight his eyes caught the red and white stripes of her skirt, low among fringes of grass under the maple.

His heart jumped in a great fright. There seemed to be insects in his blood that buzzed. His pulses dinned and pounded. The skin was drawn tight to bursting round his neck. He stopped still, than ran and jumped the piazza railing with a smothered shout. He stumbled across the lawn, hindered by his tense veins as by strings. His body seemed to have swollen in a sort of anger.

She lay there on the hall rug. One hand stirred in the sleek grass as an eager little ant crept over it.

Abel’s breath came easier.

He sat down by her on the sod. She had become so valuable that he could not bear to touch her or speak to her, but he reached up and lightly shook the branches. An insect was flung down in confusion, a mass of kicking black legs.

She looked up with surprised eyes at the broad blue chest and the bared arm just letting go the bough. Abel leaned over and flicked a caterpillar from her sleeve. Her hand shrank away, and he took hold of it, drawing her sidewise until she sat up.

“I thought you—well, I had a good scare!” said Abel.

“It was dreadful hot,” she said stupidly, “and I was so tired I couldn’t—oh, you haven’t had no dinner, and you got to go over to Sidney’s! oh my, what time is it? I forgot. I don’t know how I forgot. I just let it go. Oh, what possessed me? well, I was so hot and tired, I just couldn’t”——

“There! I don’t care a snap!”

He sat looking at her warm throat and face. “Say, I’ll skirmish ’round and git dinner myself,” he added. “You stay right here—or, come—I’ll help you int’ the house.”

He threw the rug over one arm and put the other round her waist. He would have liked to push the stars aside for her. She put her head on his shoulder.

Sarah Norcliffe Cleghorn.