As for Mrs. Field, she was no longer eager to attend meeting; she went rather than annoy Lois.  She was present at both the morning and afternoon services.  They still had two services in Green River.

Jane Field, sitting in her place in church through the long sermons, had a mental experience that was wholly new to her.  She looked at the white walls of the audience-room, the pulpit, the carpet, the pews.  She noted the familiar faces of the people in their Sunday gear, the green light stealing through the long blinds, and all these accustomed sights gave her a sense of awful strangeness and separation.  And this impression did not leave her when she was out on the street mingling with the homeward people; every greeting of an old neighbor strengthened it.  She regarded the peaceful village houses with their yards full of new green grass and flowering bushes, and they seemed to have a receding dimness as she neared some awful shore.  Even the click of her own gate as she opened it, the sound of her own feet on the path, the feel of the door-latch to her hand—­all the little common belongings of her daily life were turned into so many stationary landmarks to prove her own retrogression and fill her with horror.

To-day, when people inquired for Lois, her mother no longer gave her customary replies.  She said openly that her daughter was real miserable, and she was worried about her.

“I guess she’s beginning to realize it,” the women whispered to each other with a kind of pitying triumph.  For there is a certain aggravation in our friends’ not owning to even those facts which we deplore for them.  It is provoking to have an object of pity balk.  Mrs. Field’s assumption that her daughter was not ill had half incensed her sympathizing neighbors; even Amanda had marvelled indignantly at it.  But now the sudden change in her friend caused her to marvel still more.  She felt a vague fear every time she thought of her.  After Lois had gone to bed that Sunday night, her mother came into Amanda’s room, and the two women sat together in the dusk.  It was so warm that Amanda had set all the windows open, and the room was full of the hollow gurgling of the frogs—­there was some low meadow-land behind the house.

“I want to know what you think of Lois?” said Mrs. Field, suddenly; her voice was high and harsh.

“Why, I don’t know, hardly, Mis’ Field.”

“Well, I know.  She’s runnin’ down.  She won’t ever be any better, unless I can do something.  She’s dyin’ for the want of a little money, so she can stop work an’ go away to some healthier place an’ rest.  She is; the Lord knows she is.”  Mrs. Field’s voice was solemn, almost oratorical.

Amanda sat still; her long face looked pallid and quite unmoved in the low light; she was thinking what she could say.

But Mrs. Field went on; she was herself so excited to speech and action, the outward tendency of her own nature was so strong, that she failed to notice the course of another’s.  “She is,” she repeated, argumentatively, as if Amanda had spoken, or she was acute enough to hear the voice behind silence; “there ain’t any use talkin’.”