“I’m his wife,” thought Annie Dean with inarticulate tenderness.  “I’m going to try to be everything a wife ought to be.”

The next morning he was his old self again, laughing, joking, teasing her as usual.  The scene of yesterday seemed to have gone utterly from his memory, though he must have known that she had seen and heard it.  But he made no allusion to it, nor did she.  The farm work was pressing; the warm spring days foretold an early season.

As he went whistling out toward the barn Annie heard him salute Unc’ Zenas with familiar friendliness: 

“How’s tricks this morning?  Think the Jersey’ll be fresh next week?”

Aunt Dolcey heard him, too, and she and Annie exchanged long glances.  The old woman’s said, “You see—­what I told you was true”; and the young woman’s answered, “Yes, I see, and I understand.  I’m going to see it through.”

But something in her youth had definitely vanished, as it always does when responsibility lays its heavy hand on us.  She went about her new life questioningly eager for understanding.  There was so much for her to see and learn—­the erratic ways of setting hens, the care of foolish little baby chicks; the spring house, cool and damp and gray-walled, with its trickle of cold water forever eddying about the crocks of cream-topped milk; the garden making, left to her and Aunt Dolcey after the first spading; the various messes and mashes to be prepared for cows with calf; the use of the stored vegetables and fruits, and meat dried and salted in such generous quantity that she marvelled at it.  All the farm woman’s primer she learned, bit by bit, seeing how it supplemented and harmonized with that life of the fields that so engrossed and commanded Wes.

But through it all, beneath it all, she found herself waiting, with dread, for another outburst.  Against whom would it be this time—­Unc’ Zenas again—­Aunt Dolcey—­one of the animals—­or perhaps herself?  She wondered if she could bear it if he turned on her.

She was working in the spring house mixing cream with curd for cottage cheese, very busy and anxious over it, for this was her first essay alone, when she heard Wes again in anger.  She dropped her spoon, but did not go to look, only concentrated herself to listen.

This time he was cursing one of his horses, and she could hear the stinging whish of a whip, a wicked and sinister emphasis to the beast’s snorting and frenzied thumping of hoofs.  Her blue eyes dilated with fear; she knew in what pain and fright the horse must be lunging under those blows.  And Wes, raucous, violent, his mouth foul with unclean words—­only this morning he had told her that when Sunday came they’d go into the woods and find a wild clematis to plant beside the front door.  Wild clematis!  She could have laughed at the irony of it.

At last she could bear it no longer; she put her hands to her ears to shut out the hideousness of it.  After an interminable wait she took them down.  He had stopped—­there was silence—­but she heard footsteps outside, and she literally cowered into the darkest corner of the spring house.  But it was only Aunt Dolcey, her lips set in a line of endurance.