garden plowed up, and the house, turned into a granary, stood with
boards nailed across its dusty cobwebbed windows. The tears
started into the man's eyes; he stood staring at it silently.

In the face of this house the seven years that he had last lived
stretched away into a wild waste of time. It stood as a symbol of
his wasted, ruined life. It was personal, intimately personal, this
decay of her home.

All that last scene came back to him: the booming roar of the
threshing machine, the cheery whistle of the driver, the loud,
merry shouts of the men. He remembered how warmly the
lamplight streamed out of that door as he turned away tired,
hungry, sullen with rage and jealousy. Oh, if he had only had the
courage of a man!

Then he thought of the boy's words. She was sick. Ed abused her.
She had met her punishment. A hundred times he had been over
the whole scene. A thousand times he had seen her at the pump
smiling at Ed Kinney, the sun lighting her bare head; and he never
thought of it without hardening.

At this very gate he had driven up that last forenoon, to find that
she had gone with Ed. He had lived that sickening, depressing
moment over many times, but not times enough to keep down the
bitter passion he had felt then, and felt now as he went over it in
detail.

He was so happy and confident that morning, so perfectly certain
that all would be made right by a kiss and a cheery jest. And now!