BY ROSE SIDNEY
From The Pictorial Review
The wind rose in a sharp gust, rattling the insecure windows and sighing forlornly about
the corners of the house. The door unlatched itself, swung inward hesitatingly, and hung
wavering for a moment on its sagging hinges. A formless cloud of gray fog blew into the
warm, steamy room. But whatever ghostly visitant had paused upon the threshold, he had
evidently decided not to enter, for the catch snapped shut with a quick, passionate vigour.
The echo of the slamming door rang eerily through the house.
Mart Brenner's wife laid down the ladle with which she had been stirring the contents of
a pot that was simmering on the big, black stove, and, dragging her crippled foot behind
her, she hobbled heavily to the door.
As she opened it a new horde of fog-wraiths blew in. The world was a gray, wet blanket.
Not a light from the village below pierced the mist, and the lonely army of tall cedars on
the black hill back of the house was hidden completely.
"Who's there?" Mrs. Brenner hailed. But her voice fell flat and muffled. Far off on the
beach she could dimly hear the long wail of a fog-horn.
The faint throb of hope stilled in her breast. She had not really expected to find any one at
the door unless perhaps it should be a stranger who had missed his way at the cross-
roads. There had been one earlier in the afternoon when the fog first came. But her
husband had been at home then and his surly manner quickly cut short the stranger's
attempts at friendliness. This ugly way of Mart's had isolated them from all village
intercourse early in their life on Cedar Hill.
Like a buzzard's nest their home hung over the village on the unfriendly sides of the
bleak slope. Visitors were few and always reluctant, even strangers, for the village told
weird tales of Mart Brenner and his kin. The village said that he--and all those who
belonged to him as well--were marked for evil and disaster. Disaster had truly written
itself through-out their history. His mother was mad, a tragic madness of bloody
prophecies and dim fears; his only son a witless creature of eighteen, who, for all his
height and bulk, spent his days catching butterflies in the woods on the hill, and his nights
in laboriously pinning them, wings outspread, upon the bare walls of the house.
The room where the Brenner family lived its queer, taciturn life was tapestried in gold,
the glowing tapestry of swarms of outspread yellow butterflies sweeping in gilded tides
from the rough floors to the black rafters overhead.
Olga Brenner herself was no less tragic than her family. On her face, written in the acid
of pain, was the history of the blows and cruelty that had warped her active body.
