“Cold, Amos?”

“Of course.  What else should I be, woman?”

His wife made no reply.  His unusual impatience only saddened her eyes a little.  She was one of those women who would have borne a life-long oppression with dumb lips.  Amos Ryck was not an unkind husband, but it was not his way to be tender; the years which had whitened his hair had brought him stern experiences:  life was to him a battle, his horizon always that about a combatant.  But he loved her.

“Most ready to sit down, Martha?” he said at last, more gently.

“In a minute, Amos.”

She finished some bit of evening work, her step soft about the room.  Then she drew up the low rocking-chair with its covering of faded crimson chintz, and sat down by her husband.

She did this without noise; she did not sit too near to him; she took pains not to annoy him by any feminine bustle over her work; she chose her knitting, as being always most to his fancy; then she looked up timidly into his face.  But there was a frown, slight to be sure, but still a frown, upon it, neither did he speak.  Some gloomy, perhaps some bitter thought held the man.  A reflection of it might have struck across her, as she turned her head, fixing her eyes upon the coals.

The light on her face showed it pale; the lines on her mouth were deeper than any time had worn for her husband; her hair as gray as his, though he was already a man of grave, middle age, when the little wife—­hardly past her sixteenth birthday—­came to the farm with him.

Perhaps it is these silent women—­spiritless, timid souls, like this one,—­who have, after all, the greatest capacity for suffering.  You might have thought so, if you had watched her.  Some infinite mourning looked out of her mute brown eyes.  In the very folding of her hands there was a sort of stifled cry, as one whose abiding place is in the Valley of the Shadow.

A monotonous sob of the wind broke at the corners of the house; in the silence between the two, it was distinctly heard.  Martha Ryck’s face paled a little.

“I wish—­” She tried to laugh.  “Amos, it cries just like a baby.”

“Nonsense!”

Her husband rose impatiently, and walked to the window.  He was not given to fancies; all his life was ruled and squared up to a creed.  Yet I doubt if he liked the sound of that wind much better than the woman.  He thrummed upon the window-sill, then turned sharply away.

“There’s a storm up, a cold one too.”

“It stormed when—­”

But Mrs. Ryck did not finish her sentence.  Her husband, coming back to his seat, tripped over a stool,—­a little thing it was, fit only for a child; a bit of dingy carpet covered it:  once it had been bright.

“Martha, what do you keep this about for?  It’s always in the way!” setting it up angrily against the wall.

“I won’t, if you’d rather not, Amos.”