The next day she was going to the poor-house, and nobody but the three selectmen of Pembroke knew it.

She had begged them, almost on her knees, to tell nobody until she was there.
That night she rolled away the guardian stone from before the door with the feeling that it was for the last time.

All that night she worked.

She could not go to bed, she could not sleep, and she had gone beyond any frenzy of sorrow and tears.

All her blind and helpless rage against life and the obdurately beneficent force, which had been her conception of Providence, was gone.