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Huldah knew very well then that there was no husband for her in the next hour, nor most like in the next or the next. She knew very well too what she had to do; and, knowing it, she did it. She tied on her hood, and buttoned tight around her her rough sack, passed through the shed and crossed that bare strip to the barn, opened the door with some difficulty, because snow was already drifting into the doorway, and entered. She gave the cows and oxen their water and the two night horses theirs,–went up into the loft and pitched down hay enough for all,–went down stairs to the pigs and cared for them,–took one of the barn shovels and cleared a path where she had had to plunge into the snow at the doorway, took the shovel back, and then crossed home again to her baby. She thought she saw the Empsons’ chimney smoking as she went home, and that seemed companionable. She took off her over-shoes, sack, and hood, said aloud, “This will be a good stay-at-home day,” brought round her desk to the kitchen table, and began on a nice long letter to her brother Cephas in Seattle.

That letter was finished, eight good quarto pages written, and a long delayed letter to Emily Tabor, whom Huldah had not seen since she was married; and a long pull at her milk accounts had brought them up to date,–and still no John. Huldah had the table all set, you may be sure of that; but, for herself, she had had no heart to go through the formalities of lunch or dinner. A cup of tea and something to eat with it as she wrote did better, she thought, for her,–and she could eat when the men came. It is a way women have. Not till it became quite dark, and she set her kerosene lamp in the window that he might have a chance to see it when he turned the Locust Grove corner, did Huldah once feel herself lonely, or permit herself to wish that she did not live in a place where she could be cut off from all her race. “If John had gone into partnership with Joe Winter and we had lived in Boston.” This was the thought that crossed her mind. Dear Huldah,–from the end of one summer to the beginning of the next, Joe Winter does not go home to his dinner; and what you experience to-day, so far as absence from your husband goes, is what his wife experiences in Boston ten months, save Sundays, in every year.

I do not mean that Huldah winced or whined. Not she. Only she did think “if.” Then she sat in front of the stove and watched the coals, and for a little while continued to think “if.” Not long. Very soon she was engaged in planning how she would arrange the table to-morrow,–whether Mother Stevens should cut the chicken-pie, or whether she would have that in front of her own mother. Then she fell to planning what she would make for Cynthia’s baby,–and then to wondering whether Cephas was in earnest in that half nonsense he wrote about Sibyl Dyer,–and then the clock struck six!

No bells yet,–no husband,–no anybody. Lantern out and lighted. Rubber boots on, hood and sack. Shed-shovel in one hand, lantern in the other. Roadway still bare, but a drift as high as Huldah’s shoulders at the barn door. Lantern on the ground; snow-shovel in both hands now. One, two, three!–one cubic foot out. One, two, three!–another cubic foot out. And so on, and so on, and so on, till the doorway is clear again. Lantern in one hand, snow-shovel in the other, we enter the barn, draw the water for cows and oxen,–we shake down more hay, and see to the pigs again. This time we make beds of straw for the horses and the cattle. Nay, we linger a minute or two, for there is something companionable there. Then we shut them in, in the dark, and cross the well-cleared roadway to the shed, and so home again. Certainly Mrs. Empson’s kerosene lamp is in her window. That must be her light which gives a little halo in that direction in the falling snow. That looks like society.