In the morning, on coming out from her bedroom, she found Claude asleep on the lounge, dressed, with his overcoat on.  She had a moment of terror and bent over him, but she could not detect any smell of spirits.  She began preparations for breakfast, moving quietly.

Having once made up her mind to go out to her sister, Enid lost no time.  She engaged passage and cabled the mission school.  She left Frankfort the week before Christmas.  Claude and Ralph took her as far as Denver and put her on a trans-continental express.  When Claude came home, he moved over to his mother’s, and sold his cow and chickens to Leonard Dawson.  Except when he went to see Mr. Royce, he seldom left the farm now, and he avoided the neighbours.  He felt that they were discussing his domestic affairs,—­as, of course, they were.  The Royces and the Wheelers, they said, couldn’t behave like anybody else, and it was no use their trying.  If Claude built the best house in the neighbourhood, he just naturally wouldn’t live in it.  And if he had a wife at all, it was like him to have a wife in China!

One snowy day, when nobody was about, Claude took the big car and went over to his own place to close the house for the winter and bring away the canned fruit and vegetables left in the cellar.  Enid had packed her best linen in her cedar chest and had put the kitchen and china closets in scrupulous order before she went away.  He began covering the upholstered chairs and the mattresses with sheets, rolled up the rugs, and fastened the windows securely.  As he worked, his hands grew more and more numb and listless, and his heart was like a lump of ice.  All these things that he had selected with care and in which he had taken such pride, were no more to him now than the lumber piled in the shop of any second-hand dealer.

How inherently mournful and ugly such objects were, when the feeling that had made them precious no longer existed!  The debris of human life was more worthless and ugly than the dead and decaying things in nature.  Rubbish... junk... his mind could not picture anything that so exposed and condemned all the dreary, weary, ever-repeated actions by which life is continued from day to day.  Actions without meaning....  As he looked out and saw the grey landscape through the gently falling snow, he could not help thinking how much better it would be if people could go to sleep like the fields; could be blanketed down under the snow, to wake with their hurts healed and their defeats forgotten.  He wondered how he was to go on through the years ahead of him, unless he could get rid of this sick feeling in his soul.