There seemed nothing more to say.  In the darkness tears were slowly trickling down Annie’s cheeks, and she could not stop them.

“Well—­good-night.”

“Good-night, my lamb, good-night.  I gwi’ name you en your tribulations in my prayers dis night.”

She had never felt so abandoned, so alone.  She could not even make the effort to force herself to believe that Wes would not commit this crime against all Nature; instead, she had a vivid and complete certainty that he would.  She went over it and over it, lying in stubborn troubled wakefulness.  She put it in clear if simple terms.  If Wes persisted in his petty childish anger and wasted this wheat, it meant that they could not save the money that they had intended for the child that was coming.  They would have, in fact, hardly more than their bare living left them.  The ridiculous futility of it swept her from one mood to another, from courage to utter hopelessness.  She remembered the first time that she had seen Wes angry, and how she had lain awake then and wondered, and dreaded.  She remembered how, later, she had planned to manage him, to control him.  And she had done nothing.  Now it had come to this, that her child would be born in needless impoverishment; and, worse, born with the Dean curse full upon him.  She clenched and unclenched her hands.  The poverty she might bear, but the other was beyond her power to endure.  Sleep came to her at last as a blessed anodyne.

In the first moment of the sunlit morning she forgot her trouble, but instantly she remembered, and she dressed in an agony of apprehension and wonder.  Wes was gone, as was usual, for he got up before she did, to feed his cattle.  She hurried into her clothes and came down, to find him stamping in to breakfast, and with the first glance at him her hope fell like a plummet.

He did mean it—­he did!  He did not mean to cut that wheat.  She watched him as he ate, and that fine-spun desperation that comes when courage alone is not enough, that purpose that does the impossible, took hold of her.

When he had finished his silent meal he went leisurely out to the little front porch and sat down.  She followed him.  “Wes Dean, you going to cut that wheat?” she demanded; and she did not know the sound of her own voice, so high and shrill it was.

The vein in his forehead leered at her.  What was she to pit her strength against a mood like this?  He did not answer, did not even look at her.

“Do you mean to say you’d be so wicked—­such a fool?” she went on.

Now he looked up at her with furious, threatening eyes.

“Shut your mouth and go in!” he said.

She did not move.  “If you ain’t going to cut it—­then I am!”

She turned and started through the house, and he leaped up and followed her.  In the kitchen he overtook her.

“You stay where you are!  You don’t go out of this house this day!” He laid a rough, restraining hand on her shoulder.