She rose in a plunge from the rocker. She wasn’t done with them yet. . . . She opened the door a few inches and listened. The muffled sound was unmistakable. It was the choked gasping of a child that has cried itself breathless. It came from the edge of the hammock. Where the pines began she could distinguish a huddle on the ground that was neither stump nor bushes. She closed the door.

Trax was gone—and Elly was here.

He had flung away and left her behind. She was discarded, as Matt had been long discarded. He was through with Elly, too. For the first time the woman was able to conceive of them separately. And the one was gone, and the other was here. She groped her way stupefied to the kitchen, lighted a kerosene lamp, and made a fire in the range. She wanted a scalding pot of tea to stop her shivering. She split a cold biscuit and fried it and sat down with her plate and tea-cup. She breathed hard, and ate and drank mechanically.

“He was done with her a long ways back.”

He had driven off alone in the blue sedan, not to infuriate, but because there was nothing else to do with the girl. Matt chewed her biscuit slowly. She laughed grimly.

“I give him too much credit for smartness.”

A flash of anger stirred her, like a spurt of flame from an old fire, that Elly should be now at the edge of the hammock.

“Trax wa’n’t man enough to take off his mess with him.”

She sipped her cooling tea.

She remembered grudgingly the girl’s contentment. The shadow of the man, passing away, left clear the picture of a child, pulling moss apart and cutting paper dolls. Rage at Trax possessed her.

“I’d orter hided him for takin’ sich a young un along his low-down way.”

In a burst of fury she conceded the girl’s youth. Elly was too young . . .

“I’d orter been hided. Me an’ Trax together.”

Matt rose from the table and gathered up the few dishes. She stopped in the act. She looked at her hands as though their knotty strength were strange to her.

“Snatchin’ off a young un’s rations . . .”

She leaned heavily on the table. Emptiness filled the house.

She strode abruptly out the door and through the hammock to the pines. The moon had swung toward its setting and the rays lay long under the trees. The girl lay crouched against a broad mottled trunk.

Matt said, “You kin come on back.”

The emaciated figure wavered from the ground on spindling legs. It tried to crowd close to the warmth of the woman’s body. As they moved toward the house, the girl stumbled in the run-over slippers.

Matt said, “Here. Gimme them crazy shoes.”