waist had been crisply ironed, her shoes were rubbed
bright and neatly tied. He recalled this similitude
suddenly, and it brought before him a clearly defined
vision of Lettice, not as his wife, but of the girl he
had driven to and from the school at Stenton. He
had not thought of that Lettice for months, for three
years; not since before she had died; not, he corrected
himself drearily, since he had killed her.
He had remembered the last phase, of the glazed and
bloodless travesty of her youth. But even that
lately had been lost in the fog of nothingness settling
down upon him.

And now this girl, on a box back of Simmons'
store, brought the buried memories back into light.
They disconcerted him, sweeping through the lassitude
of his mind; they stirred shadowy specters of
fear... The voice of the sheriff carried to them,
describing the excellent repair of incidental sheds.

"I nailed all the tar-paper on the -- the chicken
house," she told him in a fresh accession of unhappiness,
the tears spilling over her round, flushed
cheeks.

It annoyed him to see her cry: it was as though
Lettice was suffering again from old misery. His
irritation grew at this seeming renewal of what had
gone; it assumed the aspect of an intentional reproach,
of Lettice returned to bother him with her
pain and death. He turned sharply to continue on

[[287]]

p286 _ -chap- _ toc-1 _ p287w _ toc-2 _ +chap+ _ p288

v?