So now she resolved to gain her husband to her side by her version of the story, and before dinner she had told him how August had charged her with being false and cruel to Andrew many years ago, and how Jule had thrown it up to her, and how near she had come to dropping down with palpitation of the heart.  And Samuel Anderson reddened, and declared that he would protect his wife from such insults.  The notion that he protected his wife was a pleasant fiction of the little man’s, which received a generous encouragement at the hands of his wife.  It was a favorite trick of hers to throw herself, in a metaphorical way, at his feet, a helpless woman, and in her feebleness implore his protection.  And Samuel felt all the courage of knighthood in defending his inoffensive wife.  Under cover of this fiction, so flattering to the vanity of an overawed husband, she had managed at one time or another to embroil him with almost all the neighbors, and his refusal to join fences had resulted in that crooked arrangement known as a “devil’s lane” on three sides of his farm.

Julia dared not stay away from dinner, which was miserable enough.  She did not venture so much as to look at August, who sat opposite her, and who was the most unhappy person at the table, because he did not know what all the unhappiness was about.  Mr. Anderson’s brow foreboded a storm, Mrs. Anderson’s face was full of an earthquake, Cynthy Ann was sitting in shadow, and Julia’s countenance perplexed him.  Whether she was angry with him or not, he could not be sure.  Of one thing he was certain:  she was suffering a great deal, and that was enough to make him exceedingly unhappy.

Sitting through his hurried meal in this atmosphere surcharged with domestic electricity, he got the notion—­he could hardly tell how—­that all this lowering of the sky had something to do with him.  What had he done?  Nothing.  His closest self-examination told him that he had done no wrong.  But his spirits were depressed, and his sensitive conscience condemned him for some unknown crime that had brought about all this disturbance of the elements.  The ham did not seem very good, the cabbage he could not eat, the corn-dodger choked him, he had no desire to wait for the pie.  He abridged his meal, and went out to the barn to keep company with his horses and his misery until it should be time to return to his plow.

Julia sat and sewed in that tedious afternoon.  She would have liked one more interview with August before his departure.  Looking through the open hall, she saw him leave the barn and go toward his plowing.  Not that she looked up.  Hawk never watched chicken more closely than Mrs. Anderson watched poor Jule.  But out of the corners of her eyes Julia saw him drive his horses before him from the stable.  At the field in which he worked was on the other side of the house from where she sat she could not so much as catch a glimpse of him as he held his plow on its steady course.  She wished she might have helped Cynthy Ann in the kitchen, for then she could have seen him, but there was no chance for such a transfer.