“They’ve gone out West, to Ohio, to Mis’ Merritt’s cousin, Mary Jane Anstey, that was; she married rich, years ago, and went out there to live, and Abigail ‘ain’t seen her since.  She’s been teasin’ her to come for years; her own folks are all dead an’ gone, an’ her husband is poorly, an’ she can’t leave him to come here.  Camilla, she paid the expenses of one of ’em out there.  Lucina’s been real miserable lately, an’ they’re worried about her.  The Squire’s sister, that she was named for, went down in a decline in six months; so her mother has taken her out there for a change, an’ they’re goin’ to make a long visit.  Lucina is real poorly.  I had it from ’Lizy Wells.  Camilla told her.”

Jerome shifted his back towards his aunt as he sat on his bench.  His face, bent over his work, was white and rigid.

“You’re coldin’ of the shop off, Belindy,” said Ozias.

“Well, I s’pose I be,” said she, with a pleasant titter of apology, and backed off the threshold and shut the door.

“That’s a woman,” said Ozias, “who ’ain’t got any affairs of her own, but she’s perfectly contented an’ happy with her neighbors’, taken weak.  That’s the kind of woman to marry if you ain’t got anythin’ to give her—­no money, no interests in life, no anythin’.”

Jerome made no reply.  His uncle gave a shrewd glance at him.  “When ye can’t eat lollypops, it’s jest as well not to have them under your nose,” he remarked, with seemingly no connection, but Jerome said nothing to that either.

He worked silently, with fierce energy, the rest of the morning.  He had not heard before of Lucina’s ill health; she had not been to church the Sunday previous, but he had thought of nothing serious from that.  Now the dreadful possibility came to him—­suppose she should die and leave his world entirely, of what avail would all his toil be then?  When he went home that noon he ate his dinner hastily, then, on his way back to the shop, left the road, crossed into a field, and sat down in the wide solitude, on a rock humping out of the dun roll of sere grass-land.  Always, in his stresses of spirit, Jerome sought instinctively some closet which he had made of the free fastnesses of nature.

The day was very dull and cold; snow threatened, should the weather moderate.  Overhead was a suspended drift of gray clouds.  The earth was stark as a corpse in utter silence.  The stillness of the frozen air was like the stillness of death and despair.  A fierce blast would have given at least the sense of life and fighting power.  “Suppose she dies,” thought Jerome—­“suppose she dies.”

He tried to imagine the world without Lucina, but he could not, for with all his outgoing spirit his world was too largely within him.  For the first time in his life, the conception of the death of that which he loved better than his life was upon him, and it was a conception of annihilation.  “If Lucina is not, then I am not, and that upon which I look is not,” was in his mind.