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 onto the porch and stood beside her. "They found Uncle Jabez dead in his bed to-day—Aunt Selina found him."

"Uncle Jabez!" was all she could say; and a great void seemed to spread itself around her. Through the void she heard Jerry's voice coming as if from a long distance.

"Yes, it was the flu, I reckon. Nobody hadn't seen him for three four days. An', Judy, I won't never be able to forgive myse'f. Tuesday I was by his place an' he said he wa'n't feelin' a bit good an' strung me out some o' that Bible stuff o' hisn about how the Lord had made his flesh an' skin old an' broke his bones. He looked bad too. He said he reckoned it was the flu. Thursday I was past there agin a-chasin' the roan caow, an' I'd ought to a stopped in, an' I thought of it too. But the caow was a-gittin' fu'ther away every minute an' I kep' on a-goin' after her. An' if I'd on'y a stopped in he might a been saved, an' anyway he wouldn't a died there like a dawg with nobody near to turn a hand for him. It seems awful to think I never went in, don't it, Judy?"

She did not answer. In that moment the manner of his death and Jerry's negligence were nothing to her. All she could think of was that he was dead, that she would never again watch him warm his great hands over her stove, see the fine lines quiver about his mouth and hear the deep bass rumble of his voice, never again listen to his careless singing as he loitered boylike across fields, soaking in the sunshine, tasting the calm of the twilight, stalking giantlike through the light of the moon, and in the dark nights knowing the path with his feet as an old horse knows the road home. In that moment she realized that to know that he was dead was to fill her world with emptiness. What light and color had remained for her in life faded out before this grim fact into a vast, gray, spiritless expanse. Now for the first time she knew what his mere presence in her world had meant to her. The things that remained to her to raise her life above the daily treadmill were the things that she held in common with him: joy in the beauty of the world, laughter and contemplation. These things no one but he had ever shared with her. He had been the one