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Show -7- lighthearted and merry, she silent and deep, the serious one. "Think of us five years from now," he said, and she knew he imagined them sturdy and strong, with their rosy-cheeked children. "In ten years!" he laughed. "In twenty!" and she knew he saw them ripe like the berries, entwined like the vines on the frame of the old oval mirror. She would be serene, secret, profound; he would be jolly and wise, and would chew at the stub of a favorite pipe. "Fifty years!" he cried, delighted, "imagine! You will wind your hair in a bun; I will walk with a cane." But she shrank from the mirror, suddenly naked and cold. "I cannot imagine that far," she lied, for she knew what she suddenly saw: herself, shriveled and thin, turning over and over, in terrible hands, a faded photograph of him. A -'' -'- They continued to live in their great warm kitchen, with occasional laughter and with their three small daughters playing about. Yet something was wrong. She had seen happiness ahead, laughing to her in the sun at the end of a road, but now it was gone, and a dark, spectral figure hung there instead: herself, alone. She had long believed maturity would be the best part of life, but now she saw that she was wrong: she had wed only a hollow cottage, a widen-;'s meagre pension, the uninterrupted creak of a single rocking chair. She remembered the sickroom supplies that she had hidden in the dining room, and now she understood: in some loyal part, of her, she was facing the |