PART II

1

Far from the highways, a hundred miles, two hundred miles inland from the coast, there are many scattered villages, many road-strung hamlets like Heathville, some in the valleys, some daring the hill-tops, some clustered about an ancient mill now falling to ruin or transformed to some more placid use. It may be that over the rutted, narrow roads stage coaches once swirled by on the way to Albany, disgorging their tired travelers at the largest house whose size alone now proclaims its earlier uses. It may be that people built other houses near the tavern in human gregariousness, longing to feel themselves in touch with the world of affairs. There are other roads over which stage coaches never passed. They remained for the conquest of the rural-delivery mail carrier. There are a few that even the mail carrier does not attempt, that climb and wind and drop to wind again for miles between house and house. Always where those roads begin there stands a row of wooden or metal boxes set on posts of varying height, storm-bent to varying angles, where the postman stops. The row of boxes and the postman’s automobile are to the people who live along that road what stage coach and tavern were to their progenitors--their link with the world of affairs. Otherwise life goes on for them with much the same unbroken round as through two centuries. Birth and death, toil and Sunday rest. Goodnesses, evil. A few fields wrung from the grip of granite, a few growing back to underbrush. Sun and blight, good crops and failures. New shingles on a roof here, a new grave yonder. In every village there is a church, in every one a schoolhouse with a flagpole in front.

The road to Heathville begins at a railroad station where a train from the south stops once a day, not to be outrivaled by the train from the north. As though disdaining things as modern as railways, it rises hurriedly from the station, crosses a bridge and runs for a mile or two along a crest of red sandstone; then it takes its own way up hill and down, beside a tumbling stream winding through fern-sweet woods, past fields where willow and hazel tread along the brooks, past rocky pastures where cattle wear their paths among cedars and laurel and blueberries to graze on the rough thatch of grass between granite outcroppings. At last it emerges into a country gentler because it has submitted to the hand of man. Orchards and great red barns come closer together. Finally, on the summit of the last rocky lift, a white church steeple points towards the gilded cock that sways to the wind and looks down upon a dozen houses.

Anne arrived there at the hour when dusk had faded into night, a kindly curtain softly dropped between her and the life she had left; kindly, as though to blot distress out of her unhappy consciousness; and softly, as though to indicate the measure of the life that was waiting for her in the weeks and years to come. But she was not aware of the dropping of the curtain; she had no sense of being the spectator at a play. The drama, or the tragedy, was of herself. What had been and what was still to come was all that mattered to her. The people in the train, those she had left behind, those she might meet in Heathville, all were no more than settings of her stage. There was no other stage than hers, no other play than this mad misery of which she was the victim, this sequence of events which had caught her up and was carrying her along with it. Yet as at a play, Anne had a sense of definite divisions of time. One act was over. Now she was going through another. Again there should be action, directed by herself, staged by herself, brought to some conclusion of her own contriving. For the time being she was trapped. For months, perhaps for a year, the best she could do would be to escape those irritating contacts, to wait with endurance if not with patience, until she should be physically free again. Looking forward, she had no intention of remaining in the trap forever. What if Brice were not found? What if she had indeed failed with him? What if their marriage were wrecked forever? Once past this miserable bondage of the body, would not her courage and her intention reassert themselves, and her pride? Had those ever failed her? Could one lose, or drop like a garment, all one’s characteristics, merely because one had been mistaken and found one’s self involved in an unwelcome human commonplace like the one awaiting her? This child--of course one became fond of her own child. But she was not of the maternal type, not the sort of woman who would lose her identity in becoming a mother. The child, if it lived--perhaps it would not!--should be properly loved and cared for. Of course, there would be its future to think about. There would be difficulties there, if Brice did not come back. But if he did--ah, he would admit, then, how right she had always been in her ambitions. Yet for the present there was this slow-dragging time ahead. By that, and by the uncertainty about Brice, she was trapped.

Only Nicky had approved of her journey. The thought of it came to Anne on the day she found Miss Willy’s letter; her plan matured quickly, inevitably.

“Oh, Nance dear,” Alice protested. “You can’t go away, not with all this uncertainty.”

“The uncertainty is worse here, Alice, than it will be there. No one knows me there, except Willy. No one will be watching and speculating.”

They were all in the room when she told of her plan, Nicky and Ambrose and the Copelands. George Copeland, large and shy, told her:

“There’s plenty of room here, Anne. Like to have you.”

“I know you would, George. But don’t you see? I’ve got to get away.”

Nicky gave Ambrose a look. Anne understood. They had been talking it over between them, probably quarreling, as always.

“Anne has the right to do what she wants,” Nicky declared. “Brice seems to have done it. Don’t get sentimental about it, George, nor you either, Alice. Anne doesn’t want sympathy, nor a soft bed to lie on. What she wants now is to get away. Don’t you see that? To get away. It strikes me as perfectly natural.”

Alice said nothing. Her eyes rested softly on Anne. Oddly enough, it was Ambrose who made Anne’s way clear for her. The house could be rented. It would bring sixty, perhaps seventy dollars a month, half to be held as interest on the mortgage, and something, of course, for upkeep. There was the money that Ranney Copeland had. George could see to that, properly reinvest it. There would be an assured income, minute, to be sure, but something.

On the train Anne thought of her last words with Nicky. “How did you know?” she had asked, when they had a moment together alone, before

## parting. “How could you know I wanted to get away?”

“Doesn’t everyone?” Nicky returned, with a shrug.

“I never did, before. I wanted to go on into things, not away. Now I want to get away from everything, from myself and everything.”

Nicky gave her a look in which mockery lurked. “Oh, well, as to that! Good luck to you!”

For the last two hours on the train Anne’s thought blurred like the passing landscape. She saw the river, the villages and hills, the woods and fields. She sensed the past, believed she sensed the future. The train was an overheated, rumbling discomfort that had to be endured, and the country it bore her through mattered nothing. Her own physical lassitude reacted upon her mind until both past and future were lost in her miserable realization of the physical. At last the name of her station was called. She looked about her on the dark platform, and almost immediately was aware of the quaint, small person talking as she came. She had forgotten how tiny Miss Willy was, and how intensely herself, whatever the circumstances.

“Annie, dear child! To think of your coming to see me at last! My beet-greens are up--your dear father used to love them so. I remember you didn’t, though. I’ve brought an automobile. It’s Mr. Wilkinson’s. He’s careful, real careful. Where’s your trunk, child? I knew you’d be used to riding in them, coming from the city and all. All those things yours? My, but you must have a lot of clothes. Still, I dare say you’d need ’em. Living like you do. No, I can get in alone. Let me look at you! My, but you’re pale, child. You ain’t sick are you?”

That was Miss Willy.

“And how is dear Brice?” asked Miss Willy, before they were out of the town. “So handsome! I knew he would take good care of you.”

“I want to know how you are,” Anne evaded. “I’ll talk about Brice tomorrow.”

“Oh, I’m well. I’m always well. I can do a day’s work yet, and not have to thank anybody to help me. Why, what do you think, child? Somebody called me an old lady, only the other day. Or maybe a few months ago. Seems like the other day.”

“You’re not old,” Anne said, putting her hand over Miss Willy’s. Cotton gloves, the finger-tips long, too long. Knuckles, work-worn, bony, enlarged. Cotton gloves. Age. She shivered.

“Well, I just guess I am not,” said Miss Willy. “I’m only just seventy-two. That’s not ninety-two, is it? No, nor eighty-two. Oh, I can do a day’s work yet!”

The car lurched on, the chatter continued. Anne caught bits of it as she caught glimpses of woods and fields under the stars.

“The day you were married. So sweetly innocent. All in white. I couldn’t help crying. Going off with the man of your heart. So handsome. Woman’s lot in life. Life is hard for some. Not that I mean--good gracious, no! Dear Brice! So good of him to let you come to see me. Good of him to spare you.”

On and on it went, on and on. Her childhood--like that, on and on.

“Each day brings it own troubles. Not that I mean--no, of course not. But sufficient unto the day--_you_ know. Annie dear--_you_ know!”

“Yes. Yes, of course.”

“I believe you weren’t listening. It’s pretty scenery, here in the glen. Too dark now to see. But you will see it. You’re going to stay a while, ain’t you? Annie, ain’t you going to stay a while? Come so far and all?”

“Yes. I’m going to stay--a while.”

“Dear Brice. So good of him to let you come. I guess he thought you needed the change. It’s wonderful the way a man will do everything for one he loves. So romantic. Like Mazeppa. Or Hero and that what’s-his-name--the one that swam the river.”

“Leander--wasn’t it?”

“Leander. Yes. Pa had a horse once named Leander. Sorrel. But I’m sure I wouldn’t want anybody to risk his life swimming a river or anything for me. Human life--the breath of the Almighty.”

What was she saying? Was it really as bewildering as it sounded, or was Anne’s own mind chaotic? It didn’t matter. She heard herself answering again. “Not a river, was it? A strait.”

“It’s the same thing. Salt water. And whales. Most uncomfortable, I should think. Night air’s always damp. Especially if the weather’s cold. That reminds me. I do hope Dorilliam won’t leave the milk before we get there. It’ll sour before morning, if he does.”

At last the chatter ceased. The car made an abrupt turn. Miss Willy grasped Anne’s arm as it veered. A small house loomed in the darkness.

“I was afraid to leave the lamp burning,” Miss Willy said. “You wait outside, child, while I strike a light.”

The milk was on the doorstep, and a large black cat that Anne trod on in the dark. Her bags were set inside at last.

“The kitchen’s no place to bring you into,” said Miss Willy, “but I got to see to the milk.”

Anne sank into a rocking-chair, closed her eyes. In a moment Miss Willy was back. “My goodness, you’re pale as an appagotion!” she cried. “I’ll get you some tea. ’Twon’t take a minute.”

She talked while she busied herself. At the table, the cat jumped into her lap. “Poor Buster! Poor little Buster! The lady didn’t mean to walk on his tail. Auntie’s baby! Ain’t he handsome, Annie? Is your tea right?”

“You always had a black cat,” Anne said. Willy’s voice, the jumble of her words. Long ago, childhood, strangely mixed with the present. What--what--oh, that languor, that heaviness, and the chatter going on.

“I call myself his auntie. Cats are so sensitive. He’d feel dreadfully hurt, Buster would, if he suspected he wasn’t a member of the family. I never was married. I don’t like to say I’m--but he knows as much as a child. You’ll see, Anne, he knows just as much as a child.”

That kitchen. Sounds going on and on. Later, the narrow dark hall and the straight flight of stairs, the bedroom above, the bed. Longing for rest, for cool sheets.

“Now you sleep as late as you can,” said Miss Willy. “You just make yourself right at home here. To think of your coming to see me.”

Sleep. This low-ceilinged room her refuge. Sounds outside, perhaps only insects, but like a lawn-mower, clicking, rattling, whirling. They reminded her of too much. Of people on porches, of Brice, walking, walking behind a lawn-mower, of things she wanted to shut out of her memory forever.

Yet that night she slept soundly and without dreams. She awoke slowly to realization of where she was. A band of sunlight lay on the floor, and through the open windows came the soft sounds of earliest summer, birds, and a low humming that she could not place. Far off, someone was whistling. She had not wound her watch. She went to the window, but to her eyes there was no beauty. The loveliness of the rolling hills, the freshly green pastures and orchards, the little garden below with its neat rows of vegetables already proclaiming old Willy’s diligence--this was only the country. Always she had thought of the country as of a place where lives were rough and barren of enjoyment, crude, as necessary to the maintenance of man as were mills, but as far beyond her interest as the manufacture of soap. The morning was warm, but she shivered. To be here, in this emptiness! That church up the road; across the way the gray house with an ell, and the few other houses beyond--what sort of people could live in those houses, center their lives about that bare church? Bare--yes, that was it; she had come to this bareness, to hide. To hide; but not to remain. Impossible, that. Time would pass, the long dragging months. Meanwhile, she would have to make things as easy as possible. Willy was happy at having her. Willy was kind and willing, devoted.

“I let you get your sleep out,” Miss Willy said, beaming, when at last Anne went down to the kitchen. “I always say there’s nothing like sleep for the young. As for me, I like to get up in the morning, so’s to get my chores out of the way. My, you look pretty!”

Anne breakfasted at the kitchen table, the cat Buster staring up at her with yellow eyes and Miss Willy talking the while.

“Auntie’s boy was naughty this morning. He caught a poor, poor little robin. Come out to the porch, Annie-my-dear. I’ll show you the nest.”

Anne felt no interest in nests, nor in the wide-opened beaks that arose from the one in the grapevine, but it was easier to follow old Willy than to remain indoors. Alone, she would have to think. The garden was a tangled, blossomy place, iris and peonies massed in bloom, roses budding; bees hummed there, a cat-bird called.

“The flowers take care of themselves,” said Miss Willy. “Funny how the Lord seems to be able to trust things that are only meant for looks to take care of themselves, while what’s meant for use has to give us a lot of hard work and all. I want you should see my vegetables.”

They passed a row of flaunting rhubarb. A cooped hen beat back and forth behind slats because her chicks were rambling and scratching under the broad leaves.

“There, look at my beet-greens. And the radishes. They’re not quite ready. I got the peas in good and early. Ain’t it a handsome sight?”

Anne had to say something; the small bright-eyed face was expectant. “Wonderful! Who does it all for you?”

Miss Willy laughed. “I just knew you’d ask that. Nobody does it but me. Not a soul helps me. I just guess I can do my day’s work yet.”

“But, Willy, you don’t plant and dig. You can’t!”

The little head tossed. “Oh, don’t I? It’s my garden. I do it all. Well”--she gave Anne a fleeting look--“well--all but the spading. Dorilliam does that. I don’t want to take praise for what I don’t do. And--my gracious!--that reminds me! I ought to’ve gone over this morning and had him drive down for your trunk. Now I can’t get him till noon. You did bring a trunk, didn’t you? You going to stay a while?”

Suddenly Anne felt dizzy. “Can’t we go back to the house?” she asked. “Can’t we go in? I must tell you----”

In the cool kitchen Anne told her. Miss Willy sat upright, sometimes her eyes on Anne’s face, sometimes on the hands folded tightly together on her apron. She asked no question, made no comment. When Anne had stopped speaking she sat for another moment silent; her lips twitched a little. Then she said, not looking at Anne:

“And to think it was me you came to. I--I’ve always wanted a baby to hold all I’d a mind to.”

Anne pressed her hands to her cheeks, started to speak again.

“I wouldn’t talk any more, if I were you,” said Miss Willy. “I can see you been through a lot. Talking won’t help it. You’ll feel different, after the baby comes.”

“Ah--different! I hope so. But the baby is such a small part of it.”

“No it ain’t, either. You’ll see.”

“I suppose there is always a way out of everything,” Anne said, from her mood of utter weariness. “We may both die.”

Miss Willy stood up. “Now look here, Anne Warren! I’m glad you come to my house. I’m glad to have you here. I want you should stay. But it’s my house, and there’s one thing I won’t have in my house. I won’t have the Lord’s ways blasphemed nor questioned.”

Anne flushed. “I can go, I suppose.”

“Well, you won’t go. You’ll stay where you be. But you’ll use what sense you got while you’re doing it.”

“Willy----!”

“I mean it. And I’ll say whatever I’ve a mind to. There ain’t anybody else to do it, and I knew you when you were a child. You were a little cantankerous imp, all the time wanting your own way, no matter what it might lead to. Many’s the time I longed to turn you over my knee. Many’s the time I wondered whether Solomon didn’t know better than folks nowadays, when he said that about sparing the rod. Still and all, a man with as many wives as he had must have been tried beyond patience when it come to the children. So I never laid hands on you, more’s the pity, and you’re past spanking, now. But you’ll stay here and act sensible. And you won’t talk about dying. That’s in the Lord’s hands, not yours.”

Anne stood up. How weary she was, how spent. How futile and foolish old Willy, with her primitive talk. That to go on for months. Yet after her waiting was over there would be other months. “Dear old Willy, you are kind. I want to stay here for a time, until--afterwards. I can pay a little.”

“Well then, so you shall,” said Miss Willy. “It’s a grand thing, to feel independent. Like me.”

2

The days were long, but she dreaded the fall of evening, when the insects began their rattling song. There were letters from Alice. Twice Ambrose wrote, inclosing the monthly check. There was no word of Brice. On that subject Ambrose wrote only a line each time. Alice recounted in detail, from which Anne’s mind shrank away, his endeavors and George’s. What it all summed up to was that Brice had vanished. And the crickets and locusts clicked on, like lawn-mowers. George still wished for publicity, but to that Anne refused her consent. She could see those headlines, or the veiled salaciousness of those small surreptitious paragraphs in the column marked “Personal.” Her affairs should never be aired there. Never would she consent to that final blow to her pride, never to the surmises and smiles that would cause. Besides, now she did not want him to come back, did not want to see him. He had done enough, hurt her too much, put too much upon her. Let him stay away forever! She tore Alice’s letter to bits, wept with anger. Miss Willy, hearing the sobs, ran to the gray house across the road, came back with the doctor.

It was the beginning of a friendship. A grizzled man, humorous, short of temper, Anne liked him. Gradually she came to look forward to his visits, always unexpected, apt to be lingering.

“Well, what of it?” he asked her one day when she complained of a headache. “Be gone by tomorrow.”

She was nettled. That, from a doctor. “But what of today? It’s really quite bad.”

“I dare say. But you’ve got to expect a pain here or there. I’m not going to dose you for that, Mrs. Denison.”

“Do you treat all your patients this way?”

“Not all. But part of the time. Words to you, syrup to others. When there’s nothing the matter with ’em.”

“You think there is nothing the matter with me?”

“You’re sharing the common lot. Women in your condition always think it’s uncommon. But it isn’t.”

She flushed. Her condition, the common lot. “I know what you mean. But my position is not quite the same----”

“I wonder if you do know what I mean?” he interrupted. “I’m not thinking of your physical condition. Call it mental. Or moral, if you like.”

“Doctor Severance! Moral!”

“Yes. Not speaking of morals. You find yourself in a situation. I’m a physician, so I called it a condition. You think it’s uncommon, unique, I dare say. It is not. Not a bit of it!”

“Who has been talking to you of my affairs, Doctor Severance?”

“You have. Not in words, no. Nor anyone else. No need to. Plain enough. Something’s gone wrong. You think it’s shaking the world. All women do. A teacup drops, there’s no other teacup. But isn’t there? Patterns vary, of course. But there remain plenty of teacups. All hold tea or coffee, most have handles.” He smiled, kindly, tolerantly. “Be mistress of yourself, Mrs. Denison, though your teacups smash.”

Anne stood up, biting her lip. “It seems to me,” she said, “that I have been mistress of myself!”

“Possibly too much, in a sense,” said he. “Bluff. All women use bluff. Some can’t find anything better. Some don’t want to. Some don’t need to. Some get away with it, even to bluffing themselves. You’ve been trying to do that, Mrs. Denison. I doubt if you can.”

“What else can one do?” she cried, with a gesture of impotence.

“Ha! Think it out. There’s a prescription for you. A new one,” he chuckled, “for headaches.”

Others of his prescriptions she tried to follow. She must walk every day, he insisted, meet the neighbors. But she had never walked without objective. Up the hill past the church, over the covered bridge to the store, where men and children stopped talking when she entered and stared at her curiously; in the other direction, down the road to nowhere, and back again. There was no sense in that. Better stay in the garden with Willy, or sit in the kitchen while Willy was busy at stove or sink. Aimless walks were intolerable.

“All right, then,” said the doctor. “See that hill over there? You walk to the top of that hill every day. No detours. There’s a brook or two. Jump them. Bit of a marsh. Find the tough clumps of grass. Wet feet won’t hurt you. Rocks. Go over them. Don’t go around. Straight up and straight back, if you want to.”

“But there are cattle!” she protested.

“Plenty,” said he. “Good company, cattle. Try to find out what they’re thinking.”

“But the sun is so hot!”

“All right. Go at night, then,” he laughed. “Good medicine, madam!”

For a time she obeyed him. When the sun dropped below the hill’s summit she would go warily down through the fields, over the marsh and the deep, narrow brooklets, watchfully among the cattle who stared, slowly followed, at last overcame their own shyness and her panic and nosed at her hands and her skirt.

“Take ’em some salt,” said Miss Willy.

Anne laughed aloud the first time she felt the warm roughness of their tongues on her palm and discovered that after all she was not afraid.

At first she thought only of reaching the top of the hill and returning. So much to be done with, got out of the way. But one day she lingered there until sunset. Another, she came back with her hands full of forget-me-nots. It was cool on the shaded hillside, warm on the crest, where the sun still shone. The rocks had gray velvet over them. There were strange little blossoms in the grass. Things she had never noticed before began to present themselves. The walk began to be not merely a prescription, a climb up a hillside. Gradually it was becoming an adventure, an exploration. But there were days so hot that she could not go out, even when the shadows were long; days when the walls of the house seemed to flicker in the intensity of the heat like the air above a fire. Then even the twitter of birds rasped her nerves. The humming of bees and the cooing of doves were as irritating as a siren’s whistle. There were days when she was too languid to do more than lie on her bed and endure; other hours when the attempt at enduring became almost madness, when she could have shrieked aloud in protest at her helplessness. That was what hurt. To be helpless, to have to wait, to endure, rebellious and bitter at the thought of what life had done to her. Life, and Brice. No, she did not want Brice to come back. She hated Brice, hated those years when his silence had fooled her, hated her memories and could not get away from them. They pursued. To look at the sun did not shut them out, nor to cover her eyes. Memories? They leaped out at her. That sofa. Brice’s frown of anxiety. The chair in the living-room, hideous, out of place. Why hadn’t he let her tuck it away upstairs? Why did she remember it so?

When she had been there a while the neighbors began to call. Prim women, strangely dressed, figures bulging or angular.

“Oh, I can’t see anyone,” Anne said, when the first ones came. “Tell them I’m not at home, or something.”

Miss Willy stood in the bedroom door. For a moment she pressed her lips together. Then she said, “Now look here, Annie Warren, I won’t have you behave so. They’ve come to call. You put on that lavender dress and come down.”

“You’re not dressed up,” Anne said, smiling a little. During her childhood Willy had called her Annie. She had loathed the diminutive. Willy knew it. But Willy knew, too, that in submitting to that Anne would have to submit to more. It held her in bounds, became the symbol of Willy’s authority. Willy was taking the same line now.

“I’m folks. I’m not company. You do as I tell you.”

Anne did more, did her best, but she could not make conversation with them. Their talk was of gardens and children, of intimate illnesses and more intimate affairs in their neighbors’ houses.

“I suppose they are curious about me,” she said, one day, when she was watching old Willy perform the rite of making doughnuts.

“That’s as may be,” said Miss Willy, dryly. “When you’ve lived in the country as long as I have you’ll know the easiest way to stop folks from bein’ curious is to get in the first word. I told ’em you are my niece. I lied. But I don’t doubt the Lord will forgive me. I said you’s a widow, come to live with me to help out. I said you’s going to take care of me in my old age. No harm in that. It’s a long way off from me yet, praise be. You don’t have to be scared.”

“Willy! Do I deserve that?” Anne cried, not so much in protest as in wonderment. It was like looking into a mirror, and finding an unaccustomed expression on her own face.

“I’m sure I don’t know,” said Miss Willy, dryly. “I been wondering a good deal. I don’t know what you aim to do. But it seems to me you’re not bracing yourself. You’re hiding away from yourself. Trying to. Nobody can, in the end, far as I know.”

Anne thought a moment. “Yes,” she said, “yes. That is just what I am trying to do. What else is there?”

“You got your life to live.”

“My life. You call it my life. It is not. This thing that is coming, and what Brice has done to me--my life, my own life has been taken away from me. I’m walled in. I’m trapped.”

“Most folks are walled in, with one thing or another. I never met one that wasn’t. You ain’t making use of your wall.”

“Use of it?”

“What else are walls for?” asked Willy, waving a long fork over the frying pan. “Folks wouldn’t build ’em for nothing. They don’t, if it’s only to get the rocks out o’ the fields. God doesn’t, either. Walls are useful, if it’s only to brace up against.”

“Oh, what can I do? It’s easy enough to talk about bracing, setting one’s feet firm! My whole world has slipped. What is left?”

Miss Willy smiled. “I am, for one thing.” She returned to the table, began to cut out more rings of dough.

Anne reached her hand across. “Willy, I’m not ungrateful. I appreciate everything you do for me. I know I don’t pay what it’s worth----”

“Now look here, Anne Warren! I take your pay ’cause I got to, and to make you feel better. But when you talk about gratitude--well, that’s your business, not mine. Folks that do things for gratitude do them from vanity. I hope I ain’t vain. Maybe I am. But I try not to be. Our Lord wasn’t vain when he healed the leper and raised up the dead.”

She dropped a plateful of rings into the smoking fat. Anne’s eyes were smarting. “Willy, you make me ashamed,” she murmured.

“That’s good,” said Miss Willy.

“What can I do? Don’t you see how helpless I am?”

“Well, since you ask, there’s one thing you can do. You can think of the folks around here as folks, not lumps of clay. That’s what you been doing. But you listen to me, Anne Warren! There’s all sorts of clay. I’m not saying you’re our sort. Some clay’s good for bricks, and some for fine china. There’s some that ain’t good for a thing, as far as I know, but to keep things from growing. Still and all, the Almighty used clay. Didn’t look about him for anything better. He’d just finished making a new world, too, all spick and span, with flowers and waters and snakes and everything. Might have taken his pick, but he found clay plenty good enough. There! That’s the last. Want a hot one?”

Anne took the doughnut, went out of doors to a chair under the apple tree. The old woman’s talk had startled her. Notwithstanding a lurking sense of shame and deserved admonishment her thoughts were not of herself. Where had old Willy learned her philosophy? Surely philosophy, or wisdom, did not accrue to one. It was no thistle-seed, to be blown white-winged on the wind, to germinate wherever it fell, on rock or roadside or--clay. Willy’s life had been bare, so bare. Anne’s thought brought back, in one of those oddly photographic flashes with which the mind visualizes a long train of circumstance in a single picture, the coming of Willy to her father’s house and events leading up to it. There had been many women, called, in the small-town phraseology, housekeepers. Between the time of her mother’s death and the coming of Willy, Professor Warren’s continuous advertisements for help were the joke and the pity of his neighbors. Anne could not remember her mother, but she remembered the succession of housekeepers, not as individuals, but as people who got in her way, who tried to restrain her, on whom she used all her childish arts of retaliation and torment until they left in despair or dudgeon. She remembered the day when Miss Willy came, a small gray-clad person with a carpet bag that instantly claimed the child’s attention and afterward became an object of admiration. There was no other like it in town, and she used to bribe Alice into docility, and even occasionally Nicky, by a sight of it in the attic. Sometimes Nicky held out for the further bribe of being allowed to march up and down the length of the attic with it in her hands, while Alice and Anne would chant, “Tramp, tramp, tramp, the boys are marching.” Alice always wanted to sing “Onward Christian Soldiers,” but Nicky and Anne agreed that a carpet bag was not an appropriate implement for Christian soldiers. Besides, one couldn’t step as quickly to that tune as to the other.

But that first day Anne had eyed Miss Willy solemnly, biding her time. She had no doubt that this new one would be like the others, easy to vanquish.

“Her name’s Willy,” she told her father that night at the supper table. The professor, harassed, poor man, as he always was when confronted with his daughter after a long day at the high school, weakly remonstrated. “That’s what she said it was,” Anne insisted. “She told me to call her that.”

“But, surely,” the professor protested, weakly, looking to the end of the table for help. Miss Willy was all placidity.

“She can, if she’s a mind to,” said she.

The good man’s frown of helpless perplexity had not lessened. “But surely, there must be another name, a name more, ah----”

“I know,” Miss Willy had answered, tranquilly. “Folks do seem to find it kind o’ queer. But that’s what I was christened. After my pa. Not Willamena nor anything like that. Just plain Willy.”

“Then I think your--ah--last name----”

“It don’t make much difference. That’s Willis.”

Anne was still solemn, her eyes demurely downcast. Willy Willis. She’d know how to deal with that! But her hopes and intentions met their small Waterloo no later than that same night. The campaign was short and decisive.

“I get to bed by myself,” she told Willy. But Willy replied, “Not this night, you don’t. Not till I get those snarls out o’ your hair, anyway.”

“I like it this way. I don’t like to have anybody else comb my hair.”

“Liking ain’t getting. You stand still. I won’t hurt any more than I got to. But those snarls come out.”

So Miss Willy remained, saw her married, and a year or two later watched while the professor’s life ebbed, while Anne and Brice were hurrying towards the town Anne had left with so little reluctance. Then she had come back to Heathville. That was old Willy’s life, as Anne knew it. Where and how had wisdom, philosophy, come to her?

That evening Anne asked, “Willy, have you ever lived anywhere else but here and with father and me?”

Miss Willy was knitting. “No,” she said. “Never was much of a mover.”

Anne smiled. “How did you happen to come to us?”

“I wanted my freedom,” said Willy.

“Freedom?”

“Yes. I guess maybe most folks do, sooner or later. My aunt was a good woman. This was her house. She took me in when ma died. But I wanted my freedom. So when I saw your pa’s advertisement, I packed up and went. Then I come back again. The house had been shut up for years. My land, it was dirty! I don’t know when I’ve had such a good time as I did cleaning it up. And the garden all weeds. When I was a girl, this place used to seem kind of little, shut off in the hills the way it is and all. There didn’t seem to be anything to do. Now--dear me, sirs! The days ain’t half long enough.”

“I must help you more,” Anne said.

Miss Willy looked over her spectacles, went on with her knitting, changing a needle. “I wasn’t hinting,” said she. “I like the work. Funny, it’s just what my aunt used to do, when I was a girl. Maybe the difference is now it’s my own. I don’t know. Only, I’m free now. I guess folks get to know about that, when they’re old. I had a squirrel once. It lived in a cage for years. Went round and round on a wheel thing at one side of the cage. I thought, ‘Poor thing! It’s old. It ain’t got long to live. I’ll give it its freedom before it dies.’ So I set the cage on the porch, and opened the door. The squirrel went out like a flash, and ran up a tree. But the next day it was back in its cage again, making the wheel go round and round.”

There were days when the heat was less, when midsummer quietude brooded upon the hills, and fields exhaled the odors of growing things and woods exuded their winter-stored moisture to the summons of the wind across the tree-tops; long mornings when Anne listlessly washed the dishes and made the beds and dusted, while old Willy toiled outside; and long afternoons when Anne walked, sometimes on the road through the glen, sometimes to the doctor’s prescribed hill-top and back, sometimes, as her strength grew, to farther pastures. To those walks she was driven and lured: driven by her desire to get away from the house, from Willy’s chatter, from her own thoughts; and lured as a child goes looking for fairies by a feeling that never quite came to consciousness that somewhere, sometime, she would find something, some balm of the spirit, some response or enlightenment. Sometimes she walked in desperation, taking with her the burden of her rebellion. This place, to be buried here! She must, must get away, anywhere, anywhere. But at least the long walks gave her dreamless sleep. In August Nicky came for a Sunday. Alice and the children were at the seashore. Nicky was in a quiet mood; they spent the long afternoon under the apple tree.

“You look at me as though I were one of your ‘cases,’” Anne said, aware of Veronica’s covert inspection.

“Do I?” Nicky calmly responded. “I wasn’t thinking about you at all, if you want to know. I was thinking about myself--and Ambrose.”

“He’d be glad to know that.”

Nicky was lounging back, one knee over the other, arms under her head. “You know, Anne--this mess of yours--it’s made me like Ambrose rather better.”

“Because I’ve proved your contention that marriage is a failure? Made you think you are right in your eternal argument with Ambrose?”

“Oh, no. I always knew I was. But Ambrose has been so mad about it. He was always so darned meek, before. I rather prefer Ambrose mad.”

“The rôle of the strong man, the cave-man,” Anne laughed. “Even you can’t escape the feminine complex, Nick, the longing to cling, to have something to cling to.”

Nicky chuckled. “There’s only one George,” she said, cryptically. “And time hasn’t finished with George yet, nor with Alice. One thing I’ve noticed about clinging vines, feminine and otherwise. They rot the stump they cling to. If it isn’t a stump, they smother it, keep it from fruiting. And if by any chance the old tree’s too strong for them, the vine is no good. There you are.”

Anne sat up. “Well, I have failed. I admit that. Or to put it the other way, maybe the right way, Brice failed. But just the same, Nicky, it does not have to be failure. There ought to be a sense of duty, if nothing more, that would bind. Brice failed in that. I never did.”

“Didn’t you? But anyway, this rot about duty. Oh, I know it has its uses. It helps along the propagation of the race. But when you think what it does to poor old humanity--! No, old girl. If I should marry I’d have to be jolly well certain that there’d be something more left after ten years than mere duty. That salt would have no savor for me. As it hasn’t for Brice, apparently.”

“I have stopped thinking about Brice. I prefer to stop talking about him.”

“All right, after I’ve given you a message from Ambrose. They’ve done all they can to trace Brice. Ambrose asked me to say that he cannot collect on the life insurance for you. Not evidence enough. He wants to know if you’d like to sell the house. He’d buy it himself on a quit-claim deed. Nobody else would, without Brice’s signature.”

“How Ambrose must have loved offering me charity,” said Anne, bitterly. “Tell him I thank him beyond words. But I have enough. Between forty and fifty a month.”

Nicky sat up, too. “Good Lord, Anne! Is that all? What’ll you--do?” she cried.

Anne bit her lip, made a helpless gesture with her hands.

Yet gradually, during the weeks she had been in Heathville, her sense of values had been readjusting themselves. Here there was all but nothing to spend money for.

“Why, you’re richer than anybody in this whole village,” Miss Willy had said, “unless it’s that Kent man and the doctor. Even the minister only gets two hundred a year, and he’s well off. Forty dollars a month--my land!”

She was watching the old woman at work in her garden one day, squatting between the rows, weeding. “Why do you work so for those things, stupid things like beets and carrots?” she asked.

“They’re for winter. The cabbages, too, and potatoes. Of course.”

“But why do you grow them at all? Why not buy them?”

Miss Willy looked up. “I just told you. They are for winter. What else’ll we eat?”

“But there’s a store!”

“A store? My goodness, child! Folks around here don’t buy things like them at the store. It don’t keep ’em, anyway. But even if it did, who’d buy what they grow in the garden?”

Yet even then Anne did not dream of the ways and means, the contrivings and savings, that went into life in the village, Miss Willy’s and that of her neighbors. Their meals were plain enough. Anne observed, without comment, that whatever was bought or brought in from the garden was eaten, sooner or later, to the last mouthful, by human or cat or fowl. Nothing was wasted.

She had noticed the clothes worn by the women, and there was the affair of Miss Willy’s best bonnet, donned only for Sundays and the monthly church supper. “I do think it becomes me,” said Willy complacently. “I’ve had it six years going on seven. It’s just as good as new.”

Then there was the boy Dorilliam. The name had amused her. She repeated it, smiling, one evening, and Miss Willy said, “Yes, it’s real high-sounding. He’s the seventh. Mis’ Wells, she wanted a girl, all the rest being boys. Had her heart set on calling it Dora. When it come, well, she was always romantic, Mis’ Wells was, and she never had much of a chance to break out. I guess it did her some good to call him Dorilliam.”

During the midsummer heat Anne protested against the old woman’s eternal work in the garden; she would pay Dorilliam to hoe.

“But it’s twenty cents an hour!” Miss Willy cried. “My goodness, child! Twenty cents for one hour, and sugar the price it is.”

In the early coolness of September her walks became longer. The heaviness of her languor was less, yet one day when she reached the crest of the hill and sat down in the shade of a weather-worn maple she knew that she was tired, not with that terrible weight of the spirit which had shadowed her for so long, borne her down, but as a workman is tired at noon and sits down, gratefully, that his body may refresh itself with food and rest and cessation from toil. From where she sat no habitation of man was to be seen. The world seemed a place empty of animate life, for even the cattle were below in the marsh, out of sight. Haze lay on the hills, merging them into the sky. The patches of sweetfern were already darkening to ripeness, and the rock at her side was warm to the touch. Asters and goldenrod glowed in the sunlight, the sumach was red. Beyond, down the valley, here and there in the woods, a white birch shone, slender, fastidious, seeming to tread its way daintily forward to the eye’s finding, like a conscious beauty at a ball. Upon the meadows cloud-shadows lingered, and under the maple was shade, quiet and shade.

Different. Why were things different, today? Many times she had looked on the same scene, inwardly shrunk from its emptiness. But this quietude in the drenching sunlight and the cool shade, this was not emptiness. Peace. Yes, it was a sort of peace, but something was going on in it, through it. There was life working. Not hurrying, not crowding, silent, but working on and on. Trees gnarled by winter storms, rocks laid bare and carved by frost and ice; a land worn rugged and seamed from its age-long battle, but still with vitality and a germ of things to be, things that would die to grow again, grow and become lovely with a perpetual renewing. And even after fruition and harvest, through winter, to spring, on and on, ever to be renewed. Life. Suddenly, there under the sheltering boughs of the old tree, there facing the sunlight, she put her hand to her heart. Another heart within her was beating, another life had stirred.

For an hour she sat there, her arms clasping her knees, her head bowed above them. A great stillness pervaded her. Life going on, herself part of it, needed. That was it, needed. Fitting in with it. Necessary to its scheme, a part of its plan; a utensil of service, and servant as well. And for so long she had thought there was no plan at all; or, if there were, that its parts were hopelessly jumbled. Strange. If one were a part, or were needed, then there was something to do, something to wait for, to hope for.

At last she stood up, and looked again over the drowsy loveliness of the world. Slowly she went down the hill, and placidly. There was nothing to hurry for, no need now to walk and walk so that she could not think. When she came in sight of the spire and houses of Heathville, even those looked different, less poor and sordid, friendlier. Miss Willy was not in the kitchen. There came a faint echo of hammering from the direction of the hen-house, and Anne took her way towards it. The downy chicks that had scratched under the rhubarb had long since grown into frisky birds large enough to be promoted to the privilege of roosting with their mothers and aunts in the hen-house. Miss Willy was there now, mysteriously wielding a hammer.

“What on earth are you doing?” Anne asked, from the doorway. “Carpentering--you?”

Miss Willy turned, her mouth as full of nails as a seamstress’s of pins. “I’m making a walk for that poor blind chicken,” said she. She took the nails from between her lips, and pointed with pride to a contrivance she had achieved, a board slanting from floor to roost, with occasional cross-pieces on it. “There, look at that! Ain’t that grand? Dunno why I didn’t think of it before. That poor chicken has been trying its level best to jump on the roost every night, and bumping its head on the board and all. Must a felt like a body knocking at the Gate and Saint Peter away on vacation.”

“But what good is that queer-looking board?”

“Can’t you see, child? Use your eyes! That’s a walk. I been coming out here every night to put that poor thing on its roost. Come winter, and I’d get good and tired of it. Besides, think of its feelings. Now I’ll just train it to peck around and find its own walk and climb up. Get on the roost like its folks, without having to be helped all the time. Nobody likes to be helped all the time.”

Anne’s face softened a little. “And I would have killed that blind chicken long ago,” she said, thoughtfully.

“Well, then, I wouldn’t. Lots o’ folks with two eyes in their head see less than that chicken and have no more sense. It’s got a right to live.”

3

When autumn came, Dorilliam set up a stove in the front parlor, that room which until Anne’s arrival had been kept for the most part closed, a ceremonial elegance of which Miss Willy was very proud. The house itself had none of the dignity of the doctor’s and some of the other older ones. Apparently it represented the imaginative efflorescence of some country builder of half a century before, limited in means and method. There were but two sizable rooms on the first floor, parlor and kitchen. Miss Willy’s bedroom opened off from the kitchen, little more than a large cupboard, its space amply filled with bed and pine bureau, while back of the kitchen, longer than the house itself, was the shed where wood was stored and a miscellany of oddments that were mysteries to Anne. She had pleaded to have the wall-papered fireboard taken away from the parlor. An open fire would have made of the room a different place. But Miss Willy looked troubled.

“But how’d we heat your bedroom?” she asked. “Mine’s real nice and warm, opening off from the kitchen like it does. But if the stove pipe don’t run up through yours, child, how’ll we heat it?”

For the first time Anne understood the purpose of the round hole in her floor that had seemed so mysterious, the hole through which she could see one red rose on the parlor carpet. She had supposed that it was left for the purpose of being able to look down upon callers. It amused her to be brought face to face with so elemental a problem as heating a house. It had startled her to find that there was no bathroom, surprised her that the water in the kitchen came from a pump, not from a faucet. Yet those things did not concern her, and in the matter of the fireplace she yielded. In time Dorilliam set up a stove. When she first saw Willy come staggering in with an armful of wood, she protested. It was not woman’s work. Dorilliam must do it. But thereafter, mysteriously, the fire in the stove seemed to feed itself, and in the evenings old Willy would drop wearily into her chair and nod. Vaguely Anne wondered why she was so tired, now that the garden work was over, the small crops harvested and stored away in the cellar. Yet, after all, the endless monotony of the days were enough to weary anyone. Morning, drudgery, night, morning again, and more drudgery. That summed up life in Heathville, as far as she could discern.

With the autumn rains her restlessness returned and times of rebellion, now not against the coming of the child, but at the aridity she was living through. Alice wrote insistently that she should come to stay with her and George, later to go to a hospital. Anne refused less because of reluctance to accept Alice’s bounty than because she was unwilling to encounter old friends, old acquaintances, to have to meet their pity or amusement. Now she would not let her mind dwell upon the difficulties of the future because that would be bad for the child. This was a time when she could do nothing but wait, and this was as good a place as any. Later, of course, she must find some means of making a real livelihood. Live in Heathville, her child, hers? Of course she would find some means of escaping that.

During the radiant days of October she frequently drove with the doctor on his rounds in a small battered car that possessed a personality of its own. She liked the doctor. He was “country-queer,” as he described himself, but his was the only mind she had encountered in Heathville that could think, or express its thoughts. As to that, she believed that Dorilliam’s mother and the other women she had met did not think at all, but lived by instinct, or went about their tasks like trained animals, except that for them there was no reward of caress or tidbit. Purposeless, stupid, they seemed to her. Dr. Severance was neither. He called his car Sally.

“Named her after an old mare I had. Died in the harness, as I hope to. One thing she does almost as well as old Sally did. She gets me there.”

Yet apparently Sally did not always hold that intention. More than once the doctor had to dismount and do mysterious things to Sally, almost at times, as Anne once told him, laughing, amounting to major operations. Once Sally’s temperament overcame her not far from a small brown cottage set back in the woods; after some minutes of futile ministrations on the doctor’s part, Sally still remained where she had stopped, soundless and motionless. Anne had stepped down and was walking along the road through the yellow leaves. As she repassed the cottage a man came out and after a look towards the car beyond smiled at Anne. She had become used by now to the friendly custom in the country of taking acquaintanceship for granted. They walked back to the car together. The doctor, hands on hip, glared in mock ferociousness at the other man.

“Come to try one of your faith cures on her, I suppose,” he growled.

The other man chuckled. “Might try it on you, Tom,” he remarked. “You’re a little excited, aren’t you?”

“Well, I’ve worked on the blame thing an hour at least. She won’t go,” spluttered the doctor.

“That’s like you medical men. You fiddle and tinker and dose, and think you’ve done all of it. You’re always forgetting there’s something else.”

The doctor snorted. “I’ve heard you say that before! Look here, you Rufus--you use faith on Sally and get her to start, and I’ll take up some stock in that faith of yours.”

The man called Rufus had moved to the side of the car. His hair was quite white, his shoulders were stooped, and life had worn marks on his face; but he bore the indefinable stamp of the intellectual. Anne decided at once that he was not a native of Heathville. He seemed to smile easily, or else the smile never quite left his eyes. Now he bent towards the driving-wheel of the car, peering as though from near-sightedness, and stood up to grin at the doctor.

“I’ve long since discovered, as I’ve told you before--as you say, Tom, quite as you say!--that there is some eternal spark that moves things. There must be a spark, Tom, somewhere. In the case of your Sally why not turn on your spark, Tom, and see----”

The doctor’s mouth opened. A blank look came over his face. But he, too, came up to the side of the car. He reached over, touched a small lever, and instantly Sally responded with rattles and tremblings.

“Hell!” said the doctor. Anne laughed aloud, long and gayly as she had not laughed in months. “I beg your pardon,” the doctor muttered. “Ladies present.”

But Anne’s laugh still rang out, and the man called Rufus was chuckling with her. The doctor was red. He climbed into the car.

“Who was that?” asked Anne, when they had passed the brown house with the woods at its back.

“Old fool,” said the doctor.

Anne bit her lip. “Well, but who else?”

The doctor permitted himself to smile. “Name’s Kent, though you’re likely to hear him called ‘The fellow that bought the Carscadden place.’ Nobody knew where he came from, nor who he was. Had to call him something, so the title sort o’ got itself hung on to him. Folks thought, I believe, he was some relation of the Carscaddens, who hadn’t lived there for a generation.”

“Does he live there alone?”

“Lord, no; got a Jap servant, for one thing, and a wife, and there’s always a houseful o’ lame ducks, human and otherwise. You’ll have to go there and make his acquaintance some day. He’s a great friend of mine, really. But Sally don’t like him.”

“Oh,” said Anne. “Because of his principles, I suppose?”

The doctor sniffed. “Something like that,” said he.

Another day they were driving along together, slowly, in the lace-like shade of the woods. Anne had been saying little; these drives with the doctor brought a measure of soothing to her spirit. By this time the brilliance of the autumn foliage was past, lying in golden tribute on the earth that had given it life. Now and again the little car would stop before some house while the doctor went in, leaving Anne musing, outside.

“Good people, those,” the old man said, as he drove away from one little house.

“And so poor,” said Anne. “I saw four or five children there, in that tiny house.”

The doctor considered a moment. “In one sense,” he said slowly, thinking it out, “poverty is having the consciousness of poverty. Those people have never had more. They have no consciousness of being poor. They are not poor.”

“Oh, but the fact remains that they are. Look at the house, think of the lack of advantages.”

“And what are those?”

“Advantages? But, surely, one knows!”

“No, no! What are they, really, comprehensively? Can you say, Mrs. Denison? In the sense in which you mean, all a matter of comparison, aren’t they? Well, comparison with what? With something a man has not got and thinks he wants, or thinks he ought to have, or thinks somebody else has gotten ahead of him by possessing? What’s the end of that sort of thinking?”

“Ah, but not to think, not to want, not to aspire!”

“I wasn’t talking of aspirations.”

“But weren’t you?”

The doctor shook his head. “You’ll have to take that up with Rufus some day.”

“That queer man?”

“Yes, he’s queer. Old fool, as I said. Not that he’s old as he looks. But he is queer, though he’s got a lot of sound sense in him, too. He’s thought things out. You’ll have to know Rufus.”

“If he has thought out some sort of philosophy like the one you’ve been propounding it’s greatly to his credit, but it doesn’t affect the real question of poverty, does it?”

“Doesn’t it? Well, you’ll see. But let me tell you this, Mrs. Denison: the normal man is never a poor man.”

“Perhaps that accounts for so few being normal. So many are poor.”

“I don’t mean it that way. You know I don’t. I mean that the normal man cannot be poor, because he has all there is that’s worth while, because being normal about sums up to having a good digestion, doing a day’s work, getting a little happiness and giving some. Get that into life, and you’ve got about all there is, in the ultimate analysis.”

“I hear a doctor talking,” Anne commented, and added, “Your friend back there suggested one more element. He mentioned a spark.”

The doctor looked down at her sideways, pursing his lips. “H’m!” said he.

Her thoughts went back again and again to that conversation. Was that all? Must she endure, and find nothing more than that? Health and work, it summed up to, for happiness was only a fleeting illusion. She saw no riches in the doctor’s circle. Poverty was not merely having no money, and she shrank from poverty for herself and the child. Thinness of joy, meagerness? No, no! That should not be.

The thought set her pacing restlessly up and down the small overheated room on an evening when the rain beat against the windows. It was Sunday, and Willy observed the day by going to church in the morning, whatever the weather, and by having their dinner at two o’clock instead of at noon. The displaced meal hour set the day awry. Except for that there seemed to be no change from other days. Willy was forever busy at something.

“My goodness, child, that lamp’s smoking,” she said, when she came into the room. She took the low rocking-chair by the table, the cat Buster jumping into her lap. “I been thinking,” she went on. “When I was a child, they used to call Sunday the Lord’s day. That’s funny, now ain’t it?”

Even old Willy’s chatter was better than the dreary persistence of the rain. “Funny?” Anne asked, smiling a little. “Why?”

“As if every day isn’t the Lord’s day,” said Willy, her faded eyes looking at Anne, looking away again. “I just guess he sees to that. He’s got us all in his hand every day, Sundays and all; and every day, come day go day, he keeps right on working and looking out for us.”

Anne smiled a little. She had heard a good deal of Willy’s primitive theology during the past months.

“Not but what I know Sunday’s by rights set apart for us humans,” Willy went on. “A good thing it is, too. I’ve heard folks talk hard things about men, and about women, too, that does one way on weekdays and another on Sundays. But I say--land!--it’s better to behave decent one day of the week than never at all, poor critters. And if that’s being a hypocrite, well, it’s better to be a hypocrite one day than seven.”

Anne laughed aloud. Miss Willy stroked Buster, who purred like a tea-kettle.

“Another funny thing is how people’s mistakes get mixed up with their sins, in folks’s minds. I don’t doubt the Lord sees which is which. I don’t doubt he’s capable of handling ’em both. But I often think folks try too hard to do the untangling themselves. I don’t know. But I’m going on seventy-three. I’ve come to the conclusion we’d be better off if we’d just leave it all to the Lord.”

“That’s a comfortable doctrine, my dear,” Anne remarked. “But if you’d let it work out, wouldn’t it be a little like giving the kitten the work-basket to play with?”

Miss Willy looked at her over the top of her spectacles. “That’s just what the good Lord has done,” said she, “given us the work-basket to play with. And a real good snarl we make out of it, most of us. But having given us a work-basket apiece, as you might say, he don’t expect the kittens to take on themselves to say who’s to blame for the tangles. That’s where we don’t follow the Lord’s way.”

“There’s no question of that,” Anne agreed.

“No. And that’s what you’re doing, Anne Warren. You and Brice had one work-basket between you. Somehow it’s got into an awful mess. So you’re scratching at Brice, thinking it’s his fault.”

“I don’t want to talk about Brice.”

“I dare say. But I’m going to talk about him. Whenever I’ve a mind to. Right now what I got to say is, that baby that’s coming has got a right to his father, and his father has got a right to him.”

“Brice has gone. They have tried to find him. He’s gone.”

“Yes. Maybe. But you’re forgetting that he’s the baby’s father. I know. I don’t say they haven’t done all they could do to get hold of Brice. But they ought to do more than they can. There ain’t anything impossible, after you get it done. The baby belongs to him.”

Anne jumped to her feet. “No! No, he’s mine! All mine!”

“He’s the Lord’s, Anne Warren. And the Lord’s fixed it so’s he had to have father and mother both. You’re setting yourself up in the Lord’s place when you pass judgment on Brice.”

“He has set judgment upon himself. He has gone. If he never sees his son, that will be judgment. He deserves it. I am not sorry. No, I’m not sorry.”

4

After a time of weakness when she scarcely realized the small creature at her side, after other days of watching him with wonder, and days of sitting in the sunny window behind the geraniums with the baby asleep in a basket nearby, Anne said to Miss Willy:

“His name is Warren.”

Willy looked at her. Anne saw protest in the look, but she smiled, serenely, securely. “His name is Warren,” she repeated.

“H’m,” said old Willy. “Well. After your poor dear father. Well, you’re his mother. I suppose you got a right to call him what you’re a mind to.”

“I am his mother. Oh, I am,” Anne agreed, lifting the baby, snuggling him up to her face. She knew well enough what Willy implied. For this was Brice’s child, like Brice in every small feature, like him even in the soft, reddish hair on his head. But her whole being protested against what Willy wanted. Another Brice--all the more reason why he should not bear Brice’s name. No one should have a share in him, Brice least of all. She denied Brice’s share in him, even to herself. He was hers, all hers, miraculously flesh of her flesh, hers to love, to mold. He should be more and more hers. Often during that marvelous spring and summer the same jealous thought returned to her. The child flourished and grew, a sunny baby. His first smile was for Willy.

“Look at that, now,” the old woman cried. “Who’d a thought it? He knows me. He knows his old Willy.”

Anne snatched the baby up to her breast. She had watched for that first smile, longed for it, wanted it for herself. But a moment afterwards she was ashamed. Willy was the slave of them both, toiling and loving with a devotion as absolute as that of the nun whose life is centered in the cross on the altar and the red light before it, who spends her nights on her knees and would starve herself, castigate herself, readily give up her body and soul and her life bit by bit that her Lord might perceive and accept her adoration. Willy would come in a dozen times during the day to look at the child. Her face became rapt when his tiny fingers curled about one of hers.

“To think this should happen to me,” she said more than once. “To think of your baby being right here in my house, where I can see him and all.”

Then she would trot off to her work again, trotting more slowly and falteringly as the months passed. Anne, absorbed in the child, took it as a matter of course that things were done for them both. She did not observe that Willy’s hours of work were longer than they had ever been. One day in the spring she surprised the old woman spading the garden, and remonstrated.

“I can do it,” said Willy. “I like to do it.”

“Nonsense,” said Anne. “Dorilliam can do it in half the time. I’ll go up the hill after supper and tell him to come tomorrow.”

“Now look here, Anne Warren, I won’t have you wasting your money that way. You got to save.”

Anne laughed a little. “Save out of what I have? What’s the use? It would never amount to anything.”

“You got plenty to save something out of, if you don’t go frittering it away. You got to save for Warren’s education.”

“Land,” said Dorilliam’s mother, when she dropped in one morning while the baby was having his bath by the kitchen stove, “mine never had all those fixin’s. I just washed ’em off when they were dirty, and kept ’em well fed, and let ’em cry and let ’em sleep. A baby ain’t only a baby, when all’s said and done.”

Anne said nothing. That, doubtless, was true, as far as it went. But to compare the young Warren with these country children? As well compare grain-sacks and silk. There were things about her child that she had never observed in others. She never tired of pondering on all his small perfections. Her state was not peace, but absorption. The rest of the world was shut out, thrust aside, while she tended her baby and watched the developing wondrousness of him. For the first time in her life she was absorbed in something besides herself, yet this was inextricably herself, her own as nothing else had ever been. As his individuality developed she hugged that thought to her more and more. Even while she adored them and gloried in them, she was jealous of the will and impulses that came from somewhere within his small self. For when young Warren wanted to sleep or to stay awake, he did so. When he was hungry, he made his want known vociferously. He loved the warm water about his plump little body, and yelled when he was lifted out of it. He hated to have his nose and his ears touched, and decisively said so. Here was something apart from his mother, not hers at all, needs and preferences not springing from her, the will of another creature to which she must yield, which she resented and feared and adored.

“Got a will of his own,” said Willy one day when the two of them had tried in vain for an hour or more to get him to sleep. When their patience was threadbare, both vanquished by the utter helplessness of the adult before a baby’s unreasoned persistence, the boy had abruptly stopped crying, looked into the old woman’s face, smiled divinely, and dropped into slumber. She laid him down on the sofa. “Just wanted to make us understand once for all that he wouldn’t go to sleep till he got good and ready,” said she.

Anne bent over the child. “He’s his mother’s own boy,” she said, with the fatuous sentimentality of the parent who has just been worsted in a battle with her offspring and finds balm in her tenderness, pride in the strength of the victor.

Miss Willy sniffed. “He is, and he isn’t,” said she. She had no sooner dropped into the rocking-chair than Buster jumped into her lap. “Some of him’s yours and some is his father’s. You needn’t look at me that way, Anne Warren. And some of him belongs to himself, and a good part’s the Lord’s. What the Lord means him to be you can’t tell much about. It’s got to come out. I’ve always noticed that the Lord does a lot of mixing of his stuffs, before he finishes a job. Same as I do with my bread. And when he’s got a thing turned out at last, it’s cram full of most everything, good and bad, sense and foolishness. It works pretty well, but it needs a whole lot of oiling to keep it a-going. The baby’s like that. There’s a lot in that baby that’s going to come out, do what you will. You got to help him get started, but I guess when you think he’s all finished it’ll be just about the time he’s beginning to run with his own machinery, and if you poke your hand into it you’ll likely get pinched. He belongs to himself, Anne, and don’t you forget that. Not that you’re likely to get much of a chance to.”

Anne smiled. Willy was not a mother, Willy could not know.

There is no chart which tells how a mother’s time goes. Anne did not know how the months went. In the autumn Alice and George stopped for an hour. They had been motoring, and Alice was anxious to get back to the children.

“Darling, are you comfortable here? Why won’t you come back with us?” Alice asked.

Anne laughed. “No, I’m not comfortable, as you know comfort, Alice. But this is the place for me until Wanny is a little older. Of course I am not going to live here forever. When he is old enough to play with other children I shall have to take him away from here. There will be the question of school, too. I shall have to learn how to make money.”

They were alone under the apple tree. George had driven to the store for gasoline. For a moment Alice looked off, vaguely, at a distant hill-top where already a maple gleamed yellow; then without turning to Anne she asked,

“Did you hear that Ranney is married?”

“I supposed he would be. In the spring, wasn’t it?”

Alice shook her head. “No, just lately. Not to that girl he was engaged to. He treated that nice girl so badly. Kept putting things off. He has married a woman who was divorced. He’s so different from George. One wouldn’t think they could be brothers.”

Winter came and went by, and in earliest spring, before the glaze ice was gone, Miss Willy fell. Anne came down one morning to find the kitchen cold. She called, opened the door of the old woman’s bedroom. Then throwing a shawl about her she went out of doors. At the door of the hen-house she found her, huddled, eyes dim with pain.

“No, don’t you lift me,” said Willy, her lips blue, her face gray in the sunlight. “Something’s broke.”

Anne sped across the road for the doctor and on for Dorilliam, who came running back with his father and a brother or two. They carried old Willy into the bedroom off the kitchen, and for an hour while young Warren shrieked unregarded Anne stood by and helped. When the worst of it was over Miss Willy’s lips quivered to a smile. Anne followed the doctor out of doors. She was shaken and trembling. It was the first time she had ever seen torture administered that healing might come.

“No, she’s not likely to die,” the doctor told her. “Of course she has worked pretty hard, but it’s amazing how much vitality there is in her sort. I’ve known bones to knit even at her age. But with a broken hip--well, she may get around some, after a time.”

After a time. Anne looked at him, pale. He patted her shoulder. “Don’t worry too much, Mrs. Denison,” he told her. “Whatever happens, you can comfort yourself with one thing. It means a lot to Miss Willy to know you are here. I shall never forget the light in her face the day she told me her widowed niece had come to take care of her in her old age. They so dread being a burden, these people. And they dread even more having to be taken care of by strangers, maybe to go on the town.”

To take care of her. That brave lie told to shield Anne’s pride. She went back to the kitchen. To take care of her.

Bit by bit, Anne learned what that meant, to take care of someone. Day by day she learned what it had meant that old Willy had taken care of herself and the boy.

Things, unimagined things, things vaguely known about but never realized, had to be done, and not by someone else whom she could dismiss from her thoughts with pay; elemental things, that she had always taken for granted. The fire in the kitchen stove would not keep burning unless it were fed with some regularity. After a week that stove seemed to Anne like some ravenous maw that was always yawning, always devouring, never to be satisfied. There were twenty-two steps from the wood-pile at the end of the shed, with a step up and a step down each way. Twenty-two steps, to bring in coal or wood, that Miss Willy, at seventy-four, had trod how many times a day? There was food to be cooked, food that mysteriously scorched, or came from the stove as mysteriously hard. Water, the pump over the kitchen sink the only means of getting it. How had old Willy ever, oh, ever carried all those pails and pitchers of water upstairs and down again, for Anne’s needs and Warren’s? And she had always thought of water and food and fire quite simply as things that were, that existed, like air and sunlight, made for man’s use, and there waiting, simply, infallibly there.

Then, there was time. Hitherto time had been divided into a few broad parts, bed-time and rising-time, breakfast- and luncheon- and dinner-time; or, at Miss Willy’s, dinner- and supper-time. Now there were many bewildering subdivisions, and one had to hasten to meet them before their requirements or demands or whatever they were used for slipped over into another of the strange subdivisions, disastrously. Time to get up--oh, yes, but time also to make the fire, time to get it to going, time to get the stove hot and the breakfast cooked, time for young Warren’s increasing needs, while in her consciousness was always the fact that Miss Willy lay, patient, waiting, perhaps suffering. There were hens and the chicks to be fed, then a rushing for dinner. And in between, where there was not room to crowd a single second’s endeavor, a whole multitude of tasks that must somehow be got through. Cleaning. And washing. What those things did to her back, so much younger than Willy’s.

“It’s awful, you having to do everything,” Miss Willy said to her one day when she brought the boy into the room all fresh and rosy from his bath. She had got up at five that morning, but things were still waiting. Yet she looked down at Willy and laughed.

“It is. It is, isn’t it? Because I’m such a duffer at it, Willykin. You don’t know!”

Miss Willy did not laugh with her. Her lips trembled. “But if you wasn’t here, Anne, I’d--maybe I’d have to--go on--the town.”

Anne put the boy on the floor--he was beginning to creep about--and sat on the side of the bed.

“Willy,” she said, “something is happening to me. I don’t know what it is. But I think I was never so happy in my life nor so disgusted with myself. I do hate to see you lying there, but I think perhaps your breaking your funny old bones was just your last fine sacrifice for me. I think----”

But that was too much for old Willy. Her eyes struck dim fire. “Now look here, Annie Warren,” said she, with the first return of her old spirit that she had shown since her fall, “if you think the Lord’s put me here so’s you can get hold of a mite of sense, you’re mistaken. That’s putting too much on the Lord. I slipped on the ice because I wasn’t looking out. That’s what did it. My own fault. But I do say it’s high time you knew how to do things. Not that I should want you to tire yourself out. And--my goodness! Quick! Look at that child! He’ll be on the stove in a minute!”

Anne flew.

There were days, a while later, when she got up at four, when to stay in bed would have been sheer unwarrantable luxury, though her body still ached for rest and she told herself that she could not go through with the work ahead of her. Yet she arose, and the day’s work caught her up, whirled her on with it, herself not the force that accomplished but the means, the mere tool of that force.

When spring reluctantly gave way to summer people in Heathville hastily made their gardens. It was not safe to plant earlier lest the tender green shoots be nipped by late frost, nor later lest the first hot spell of June wither them.

“Memorial Day, that’s the right time to plant,” said old Deacon Bassett who lived up the road. “You ain’t likely to get caught either goin’ or comin’.”

Dorilliam had done the plowing, the spading, the leveling. Anne had supposed that Dorilliam would do all the rest. She had never felt interested in gardening, and now her time was too full to contemplate added work out of doors. But she sat at the kitchen table one night with pencil and paper after paying Dorilliam, her pocket-book open, what remained of its contents spread out before her. There had to be extra milk now, quarts of it, for young Warren. Oranges, too, that now had become not the inevitable breakfast fruit, but a daily expense of five cents, ten cents, a staggering total each month. The boy was beginning to walk; the delicate shoes she sent to town for wore out in a few weeks. Old Willy had always done their washing. That Anne was incapable of, and it had to be paid for. Moreover, she had discovered the extreme meagerness of the old woman’s supply of bedding and towels, and had bought more. Pity she had not thought of bringing some from that house whose contents she had never wanted to see again. The people who had rented it at first had departed. The next tenants had wanted it unfurnished, and she had insisted that everything should be sent to the auction rooms, everything, everything. She wanted nothing, no reminders. They brought a small fraction of what they had cost. At old Willy’s command, for it was more than suggestion, the little sum had been deposited in a savings bank, to be used for the boy’s education. That could not be touched. With herself as housekeeper, more was spent than under old Willy’s close management for food and fuel. Even kerosene had to be bought oftener. And now loomed the question of the garden. Anne counted her money, tried to estimate the hours during the summer that she would need Dorilliam, added up what that would cost, deducted. It could not be done. She spoke of it to Willy, the next day.

“I’ve decided that we won’t have a garden this year, dear,” said she. “I’m no gardener. You know that. We’ll just do without.”

For a moment the old woman lay without looking at Anne, without speaking. Her face against the pillow was wrinkled and pallid. Her age might have been beyond computing, like the Sphinx’s, and as silently as the Sphinx she might have been pondering the proposition implied in Anne’s words. Then she spoke.

“What’ll we eat?” she asked.

“Oh, anything, everything,” Anne said lightly, even while an inner sense warned her that the question was not a light one. “There’s always something to eat, isn’t there?”

“Well, what?” Willy persisted.

There is no question as tormenting as the one which puts its solution on the questioner. Old Willy lay looking impassively at a crack in the wall, but Anne looked at Willy. “There is always something to eat, isn’t there?” she had asked. But was there? Food. Food, the elemental, primal, ultimate necessity. Was it indeed always there? She thought of her pocket-book, her sheets of figuring. The thing faced her, simply, starkly, naked, stripped of everything, as hideous and uncompromising as a skeleton: was food always there? What would they eat? Where would it come from?

It was breath-taking, bewildering. She busied herself again and again with her pencil and paper, then consulted Dorilliam. Something, some remote shame or pride, forbade her from talking to Willy. That old woman lying there, who had met this problem so many years, now so helpless, probably thinking and thinking, perhaps worrying. No. If she had the thing to go through with, she would do it alone, for Dorilliam did not count as a person except in the sense of being a workman of sorts and of having to be paid.

“What you want to buy seeds for?” he asked, when she asked him as casually as she could what she would need to buy.

“To plant in the garden,” said she, sternly. She was always suspecting that Dorilliam held her in secret amusement and scorn, as those countrymen do who know a few things beyond the scope of someone they confront, and believe their knowledge surpasses all of the others. But the boy was honestly puzzled.

“Yeah. But what you want to buy ’em for? Why don’t you plant what you got?”

“What I have?”

“Sure. She’s got ’em saved up, ain’t she? Everybody saves ’em up for next year.”

So after all she spoke to Willy again about the garden, went to the place where Willy had stored the saved seeds, in jars and small packets tied about with bits of string. Economy had never held anything of beauty for Anne, but when she brought out those seeds, fruit of an old woman’s toil, so carefully cured and saved that the soil might be fruitful again the next year, something gripped at her throat. Here was a poignant significance that rose up at her. Here, too, was the germ of a new perception. The garden was made and tended that they might have something to eat. As simple as that. But there was more in it than that stark necessity. It was the child of other gardens. In the little packets of saved seeds there was not only harvest, but a link with gardens of other summers, with summers to come, as old Willy’s toil was linked with the labor of the ages, as her own would be. On and on, the treadmill, unending, however one ached. And after she had talked with Willy as to methods and means, she was confronted with her stupendous ignorance of what seemed so simple, what was, indeed, so elemental.

“Why, you just scrape out a row, and put ’em into it,” said Willy. “Then you cover ’em up.”

“With what?” she asked, for she had seen newspapers carefully spread over some of the old woman’s tender “cuttings” and wondered if that were a rite to be observed with everything else.

“Good land, child, ain’t you got any sense at all? You cover ’em up with dirt, and pat ’em all down, of course.”

Anne laughed a little. “Do they have to be patted? Shall I pull up the blankets and hear them say their prayers, too?”

Willy sniffed. “You don’t have to blaspheme just because you’re so ignorant,” said she, “though lots of folks do. Yes, they do have to be patted, or else trod on. The dirt’s got to touch ’em, or else they won’t sprout. And the dirt’s got to be fine, not all lumps. Sakes alive, I wish I could get out o’ this bed.”

“That’s sheer pride and jealousy, Willy. You think I can’t make this garden, and you want to do it yourself,” Anne laughed. But when she confronted the actual task she did not laugh. Before, she felt herself potentially able to cope with it. It must be quite simple, like driving a Ford, because people of such inferior intelligence mastered it. Of course it was not fit work for her, and she had not a minute to spare for it. But it must be easy enough, since even an old woman like Willy had accomplished it. Her only difficulty would be in finding time. So one morning she got up at four, just as dawn was flushing on the western hills, and betook herself to the place Dorilliam had raked at such a cost. Scrape out a row, Willy had said, and make the dirt fine. Easy, until her shoulders ached with the weight of the hoe.

Her row turned out to be a wandering path of varying depth. She dropped in the seeds. Willy had said there were enough in the bundle for a whole row, but they mysteriously gave out before the row was half filled. She considered the problem, carefully picked out seeds enough for the rest of the row. Then came the affair of making the dirt fine, to cover them with. She could not. It was heavy with dew, refused to crumble, persisted in becoming a tough, clayey substance under her hands. She had been out two hours, Warren’s cries could be heard, she was aching and angry. She had not achieved one single row in this miserable garden, and the piece of smoothed land stretched before her into a leering expanse as broad as an ocean. It was the first time she had ever discovered that to work with nature one must use nature’s time, wait on her moods. When she went to the garden again, later in the day, she was amazed to find that the earth crumbled easily enough. Thereafter she rose at the same early hour, but worked at other things until the garden was ready.

A few weeks later, again directed by one of Deacon Bassett’s pronouncements, she was working there with a hoe, the baby happy and noisy, playing in the dirt, his attention absorbed by filling a tin can with a hole in the bottom, watching the soil sift out, and filling the can again. Someone spoke to him over the fence. Anne looked up and nodded, but Warren deserted his game and promptly performed the acrobatic feat of making himself into a small pyramid, bracing his feet until they were steady by resting his hands on the ground, his inevitable method of arising. Then he toddled and tumbled towards Dorilliam.

“What’s them things for?” Dorilliam presently asked. He had come near, holding Warren’s hand.

Anne sat back, wearily, but with a sense of triumph, too. “Them things” were an achievement, and she took pride in making them well, first by scraping the earth up with a hoe, then rounding it off with her hands.

“They’re the hills for the corn, of course,” said she. “This is the week for corn. What should they be?” She rather enjoyed snubbing Dorilliam.

“I dunno,” said the boy. “Never saw nothing like ’em before.”

“And you’ve lived in the country all your life. I’m surprised at you. Mr. Bassett says it’s much better to plant corn in hills than in rows. It doesn’t blow over as easily.”

Dorilliam’s slow grin was a thing to see. “Here, you gimme that hoe,” said he, and forsook Warren’s hand so abruptly that the baby sat down with a soft thud. Dorilliam scraped out a shallow hole.

“Now that,” said he, “is a hill. You put your corn in there on top. Then you cover it over. Then you stomp on it. That’s the way to plant corn. Them things you made, they ain’t hills. They’re Mount Ararats.”

“My goodness,” Anne murmured, meekly. “A hill upside down.”

But the incident gave her a new feeling of humility, of helplessness, of respect: humility, that she, Anne Denison, should cope so badly with such primitive affairs; helplessness, because there seemed so many difficulties, however absurd and small; respect for these country people, even for Dorilliam, that they could perform with ease what she found so intricate.

Long before the last row was planted and walked on there were green things beginning to show in the first ones. By that time she had formed quite a friendship with the Deacon, a stern, gray old man. Often after supper he would come down the road to inspect her labors. Sometimes, when a new problem came up, she would tuck Warren under her arm and run to Bassett’s house for advice.

“Yes,” she complacently told him one evening, “they’re coming along.” That was a phrase he used; she had unconsciously adopted it. “And I do think Miss Willy’s seeds are wonderful. Ever so many more come up than I’ve planted, it seems to me.”

Bassett rubbed his chin. He shaved on Sundays only. “Yeus. Well, mebbe,” said he. “But I shouldn’t be s’prised if a good many of those green shoots are weeds. I s’ppose you ain’t got around to weedin’ yet.”

That, when she had begun to tell herself that her labors were all but over. She thought of her aching arms, of tasks waiting indoors, thought yearningly of Dorilliam. But old Willy had managed without the boy. So would she. Many an evening after she had washed the day’s grime from Warren and got him to sleep, and laundered some of his small garments, and made the kitchen neat after supper, she worked on her knees between the rows, weeding until it was too dark to see. Yet do what she might, there were disasters.

“Seems like our beet-greens is terrible slow, this year,” said Miss Willy. “You got ’em in in time, too. It’s funny, what a difference there is in seasons.”

No need to tell her that all the young beets had been carefully, laboriously, back-breakingly weeded up. And such futile things, anyway, beet-greens. To get the best of one, merely by being. It shamed her, that difficulty of coping with little things that she had scarcely realized existed except as insignificant parts of a whole that ordered itself. She had always been willing to battle with what she conceived to be big things, those that meant conflict with people. There was exhilaration in that. It got one somewhere. But this daily, hurrying conflict with nature and the bare routine of living was bewildering. It entangled her in all sorts of complicated trivialities, as though it could make any difference, for example, whether one planted corn in rows or in holes or on small Mount Ararats. To find that it did make a difference, that one had to discover and yield to the preferences of corn and of beans, was bewildering.

Bewildering; but slowly out of bewilderment there came a feeling of conducting a campaign. She was not going to let herself be conquered by a vegetable garden. It grew in importance, became a battle-ground. Eventually, victorious, she had such a feeling of triumph and achievement as not even the arrival of Warren had given her,--Wanny, that small-featured replica of Brice. The garden with all its failures and oddities, not in the least like Miss Willy’s neat, straight-rowed one, was a thing of her own creating, wrought by her own labor, by the veritable sweat of her brow and the grime of her hands and the ache of her body, something that contributed to the very foundation of life, something, quite simply, to eat. It was as though she had caused earth or air or water to come into existence. She had caused food to be. She did not regard her performance nor its results as beautiful, nor as clever, nor as amusing, nor as something bound up with the future, like Wanny. She had brought something that was elemental out of nothingness. She had become creative of that which was the very basis of existence.

5

So the summer passed in toil. No time for thoughts, nor for thought. No time, really, for anything, with so much to be done, so little that could be left undone. Hens, Anne discovered, could be as clamorous as babies. When a prideful, clucking absurdity emerged from a hidden nest with a brood of chicks she could have crushed the lot of them. They were hated, but they were important, for they were food, and after a day or two their very helplessness and dependency captured her. She was indignant and sorrowful when one fell prey to Buster’s rapaciousness. Miss Willy frequently asked after her flowers. There were weeds among them that Anne told herself could not go unregarded, whatever happened. The peonies bloomed so generously. How could she let their brave beauty smother in weeds? After a summer rain, the hollyhocks lay on the ground. There was no time for it, but she must find stakes, tie them up.

By midsummer Wanny was toddling everywhere. He possessed an ingenuity for getting into mischief beyond anything his mother had ever encountered. If he were silent or out of sight for too long she had to drop everything, hunt for him. And his clothes, those small costly shoes that wore out so soon, the rompers that had to be fresh every morning. There were days when his bath was no more than a hasty sponging away of grime before he was put to sleep, nights when she was so weary that she dropped on her bed without undressing, to wake in the dawn with a crowding sense of things waiting to be done, in a panic of fear lest she had over-slept. Everything was in the present. The future was something she had no time to think about. Work. Two to care for, three to provide for, hurriedly, rather chaotically.

Winter came, when she had thought there would be more time. But again there were stoves, lamps, sewing. The child had outgrown the first baby coat Alice had sent. Anne contrived to make him another out of an old skirt of her own. It had no air of elegance. She laughed when she dressed him in it.

“Pitty, pitty,” said Warren, smoothing his bulging front.

“Not so very pretty, old man,” Anne laughed. “But it will keep you warm.”

“Pretty is as pretty does,” said old Willy, and Anne, “Goodness, I hope not. If his looks had to be measured by his behavior----!”

Two years before she could not have tolerated that garment. Now she could laugh at it, was even rather proud of it. But she did not for more than a moment think of the change in herself. There was something else waiting to be done. Orderliness she had not begun to learn. There were neighbor women who came to see Miss Willy, bringing gifts of pies and doughnuts and “tastes” of jelly and jam and pickles. Seeing Miss Willy’s enjoyment of the delicacies, Anne remembered that the old woman had always managed to put up some of her own. Now the pantry shelves held none. She had never thought of making any. Where had Willy found time to do it? How did those other women, busy mothers of families, find time? Even the mere thought of their dish-washing staggered Anne’s imagination, now that she knew how mysteriously dishes piled up for only three. And there was their mending, their cooking, their washing. Yet those over-worked women found time to come to Miss Willy’s and “visit” sometimes for an hour or more. Anne found herself listening to their talk. It was no longer of trivialities beyond or beneath her scope and her interest; it was of things become vital. They had been vague, dull, toiling creatures without imagination, without grace, uninteresting. Now they emerged into separate entities, personalities with feelings and impulses which she recognized, more skilled and experienced than herself in things of first importance. There was so much that they knew and that she did not, and things they achieved daily, as a matter of course, simply and neatly, that staggered her efforts and ingenuity to perform and left her worn with fatigue after trying.

“The working classes”--she remembered that she used to think of the working classes, in the old days, with something akin to disgust. She had never been able to understand Nicky’s interest in them, nor how she had been able to endure daily contact with them. Either they toiled with an impenetrable, ineffectual, stolid indifference, or they disagreeably or violently protested against their lot, deviously trying to better it at the cost of the comfort of people who were more fortunate than themselves. They were unreasonably envious, and their morals were as sordid as their way of living. She had always felt injured and angry when one of her maids had asked for extra time off. She remembered her amused scorn when they spent their earnings for some foolish finery to be worn on one or two afternoons of the week.

These women who dropped in to see Willy were toilers in a labor unending. She knew about that, now. As far as she could perceive, theirs was a labor without result or reward, just a grind, day after day, year after year. Now she knew that they were not sunk in a dull state of mental and spiritual stagnation. They were not clamorously trying to better their lot at the expense of others. Apparently they shattered no more of the Ten Commandments than anyone else did. Sometimes she wondered what secret revolts of the soul might be theirs, or whether they had souls at all in the sense of possessing a well-spring of feeling and thought and aspiration. They concerned themselves with things she had never supposed required thought or were bound up with feeling or led to aspiration, but indubitably aspiration and feeling and thought played a part in their lives.

At first they had been shy with her. One or two had told her hesitatingly how fine it was for Miss Willy to have her there. They thought of her as the niece from the city who went about always dressed up and sat around while Miss Willy waited on her. Now they found her aproned, busy, and there was always the child to talk about. Anne found herself listening with absorbed interest to tales of other children’s illnesses. She was not bored when Mrs. Ware told how her Julia had broken her collar-bone, nor when Mrs. Beaman told how her twins in one winter had measles and chicken pox and whooping cough, alternately, “so’s we were no sooner gettin’ out o’ one thing with Elizabeth than we come down with the same thing with Florence; and by the time Florence was better, Elizabeth had started on something else.” Those things were not trivial. They were not disgusting. They were not unpleasant diseases that troublesome children persisted in having, so that one wondered how mothers endured them. They were dangers that lurked for Wanny. Those women were mothers. So was she.

She took Wanny to the Christmas tree at the church. His round-eyed wonder was a revelation, something that pierced to her heart. Mrs. Beaman gave him an orange. When he held it in both hands, stared at it, it was not an orange, but a symbol, a mystery. He had seen it taken from a box under the tree. Therefore it was endued with beauties and wonders beyond all other oranges. Anne, looking up, met Mrs. Beaman’s glance, her tolerant, understanding smile.

A few days thereafter Mrs. Wells ran down the road bearing a plate wrapped up in a napkin. Hot rolls. “I thought maybe they’d go good for supper,” said she.

“Land! I should think so,” old Willy said. “We ain’t had any home-made bread since I don’t know when.”

The visitor looked at Anne. “Why, you don’t buy all your bread, do you?”

“I can’t make it,” Anne said.

“But it costs so much at the store.”

The next day Anne bundled up Wanny and walked up the road to the Bassetts’s. The children of that house had long ago gone away, the old couple were alone, and Mrs. Bassett was known as the best housekeeper in Heathville, eternally busy.

“Will you teach me how to make bread?” Anne asked, and could see the flattered look in the old woman’s eyes.

Her first loaves were an achievement that gave her a satisfaction scarcely less than her conquest of the garden.

“What’s that I smell?” old Willy called out, from the bedroom. “You ain’t ever trying to make bread, child! You’ll just waste the flour.”

“Not I,” Anne declared, coming in with a freshly baked loaf turned out on a towel. “Look at that! Willy, when I think of the money we’ve spent at that store for bread----!”

Old Willy’s lips quivered. “I got to get out o’ this bed,” said she. “You can’t do all the work yourself, and takin’ on more all the time.”

Anne put the loaf down, came and stood near the bed. “Willy,” she said, “it’s the strangest thing. No matter how much more I find to do, I always seem to find time to do it in. And stranger still, I rather like doing it. It makes me feel so important.”

Gradually the women who had been coming to see Miss Willy lingered to chat with Anne. Recipes were given, that had to be explained. Flower seeds were brought in small bits of brown paper, and about their flowers odd sentiments lingered, odd to Anne because at first they seemed so trivial.

“That’s ‘Impatience,’” said one, presenting a slim sprig of green planted in a can from which the label had been removed. “‘Impatience,’ though some folks call it ‘Patience’. Either way it’s the truth, for it’s always in a hurry to bloom, and it blooms all the time.”

There were slips of geranium, too, and a small, prickly cactus. Anne thought of Alice’s masses of flowers, of those she herself had always managed to buy for the dining-room, and of lilacs and orchids, and tulips; Tulips that fell. But these little struggling things in pots and cans had personality, identity. They were a nuisance at first, because she was forever forgetting to water them; but when she discovered them drooping, and watched for them to revive, they assumed an importance beyond reason. They were gifts. She could not let them die. Then they bloomed.

By the time spring came again Miss Willy was hobbling about with a crutch and a cane. The crutch Anne had to buy. That month she began to do their washing. The cane was brought out of a chest in the attic.

“My poor grandfather’s cane,” said Miss Willy. “You can see his name on the silver band. Poor man. I’m afraid he drank a good deal. My grandmother married again. But after all, I’m sure there’s nothing like young love, my dear. I’ve been thinking. When Wanny grows up----”

So Willy was almost herself once more, though she was never again able to do active work. She could sit in the window behind the flowers and sew, and knit stockings for Warren. It lifted a good deal from Anne to have her watch the boy, whose capacity for mischief increased every day.

“What that child does think up,” said Willy. He had climbed on a chair when no one was looking and dropped soap into a stew Anne was making for dinner. They discovered it when he danced up and down, clapping his hands and shouting:

“Oh, ’ook at the bubbles! ’ook at the bubbles on the stove! Pretty bubbles! Wanny makes ooooh pretty bubbles!”

Then, from the chair where his mother had forcefully deposited him, he howled miserably. “Don’t like Wanny’s bubbles! Bad Mums don’t like Wanny’s bubbles!”

Anne looked dolefully at Willy. “Stew enough for two days. Oh dear! All that good meat!”

Miss Willy’s placidity was not ruffled. “He was only just doing what you do yourself, and what most folks do,” said she.

“I never put soap in the stew,” Anne protested, laughing ruefully.

“I ain’t so sure about that. But what I meant was he only sees things from where he stands. You got to make allowances for that.”

In the course of the months Anne had achieved some measure of orderliness. Work did not crowd as much as before. She found herself looking forward with unsuspected eagerness to the time when the garden could be planted. It was good to see the snows melting, good to see the brown earth emerging and drying, good to bring in pussy-willows and to wander with Warren through the moist woods to find hepaticas, even good to hear the hylas again. One night when the others were asleep she stood at her window and looked out. The moon was high. Earth and sky were inherent parts of the same beauty, hesitant, translucent. In the moonlight even the familiar garden and roads and fields wore an effect of luminous unreality. The world slept, yet it was breathing and dreaming. It called her to go forth into its hesitant loveliness, to penetrate and become a part of its dream. The boy was sleeping with his face buried in his pillow, the red curls on his neck damp and sweet. He could be trusted not to wake. She crept down the stairs. The doors were never locked.

It was strange to be walking along the road in this strange light. Even the shadows were softer, melting and merging into the earth. On and on she walked, slowly, through a world creating itself anew, through sweet woods, between fields fragrant with the moist breath of night, past a marsh where the hylas piped, little Pans, plaintive, luring, singing of joys that might be or joys to come.

Abruptly, where the road wound through a stretch of woods, she stopped. Something moved there. Once fear would have held her, but she had come to know how needless fear was in that far-away countryside.

“I hope I have not frightened you?” a voice asked.

Strange, to hear again a voice of cultivation, words enunciated with careless precision. Suddenly she remembered. Not far beyond was the house of the man who had come out to the doctor’s car on the day it had stalled, the man the doctor termed “old fool.”

“Not exactly,” she said, quietly. “I’m afraid I have walked rather farther than I meant to.”

He had come nearer. He was hatless, and she remembered how white his hair had looked that day, and realized that its whiteness gave him that strange appearance now in the dim light.

“Yes. One has to come out on a night like this,” he said. “I’ve an idea that the real purpose of the moon is to keep the balance even. The sun works. The moon calms and blesses. We need both work and calm, to keep the balance true.”

Anne smiled faintly. How odd he was, to speak like that, without preface, to a stranger.

“There are various other things one needs, are there not?” she suggested, falling into his mood.

“Yes. Oh, yes. But they all come into the two categories. Work, not necessarily what one does not love or enjoy, but work, occupation. And calm. ‘Ease and alternate labor.’ What else is there?”

They had fallen into step. After a moment she said, “I think you are laughing at me.”

He grasped at a bough that projected across the road, its buds just beginning to open, snapped it off, the sound of its breaking distinct in the night’s stillness.

“Forgive me. Not at you. I should not have said that. Nor felt it. It’s only fair that life should give us the obvious things, make us go searching for the others.”

“So there is something else?”

She knew he turned to look at her. “You came out to find it, didn’t you? And I came out.”

They walked on a little. “Does one find, I wonder?” she murmured.

They had reached the edge of the woods. Before them a meadow lay flooded with moonlight, gleaming like a sea becalmed. They stood still, held by its beauty.

“I don’t know,” he said presently. “But if one may still search, still come out, into this!”

“It’s beautiful,” she said softly. “But there’s no answer there.”

“I’m not so sure. Not that it matters, the answer. It’s the search, the fact that one can come out, that one wants to.”

“Is that enough?” Unconsciously they spoke almost in whispers, as though to speak aloud would be to break the spell of the night.

“Not enough, no. But there’s always the belief or the hope that there’s something to be found. Else one would not come out.”

“I wonder,” she said.

“Oh, we all wonder. But we all know it’s there.”

“What?”

He waited. “Rhythm, I think. Or call it God.”

They were silent a moment. Then, without seeming to know she was there, he walked away.

6

The first day she permitted Miss Willy to go as far as the garden Anne proudly pointed. “There!” she exclaimed. “Look at that, all ready for the seeds. I did it myself, too. Dorilliam did nothing but the plowing.”

“Wanny helped,” the youngster boasted.

“Not the hoeing and raking! You never did, Anne Warren!” old Willy cried.

Anne laughed, brushed a hand upward across her damp forehead. “But I did. I’m so proud of it. I call that a good job well done.”

A letter received from Alice about that time amused her. Alice and George were taking the children to Europe for the summer. Would not Anne use their house while they were gone? The servants would be there, the house going on as usual. There would be the car, and Warren would like the children’s playthings, the sand-pile and swing in the yard. There was plenty of room for Miss Willy, too. Anne’s first thought was, “Why, I couldn’t leave the garden!” Then she laughed aloud. But it was quite true. That garden had been conquered the year before. Now it was hers, and she could not tolerate the thought of leaving it. That summer there were no such mistakes as had baffled her last year, for old Willy looked on and advised. Anne was bending over the wash-tubs every week, rejoicing in the flapping white things on the line. She was making their bread, and under Willy’s direction canning fruits and young tender vegetables in glass jars for winter. Warren, with his increased capacity for getting out of sight and into mischief, was even more care than before. Yet she had an elated consciousness of living.

One July day when the heat was so intense that Willy had not ventured out of doors, Anne was hanging out clothes, grateful that the weekly washing was done. The old woman came to the kitchen door.

“Wanny with you?” she called.

Anne put the last clothes-pin in place, took up her basket. “That monkey! Has he slipped off again? I’ll have to go look for him.”

She went, calling, and presently Warren came running towards her, his face mottled with crimson, torn with briers, and both his closed fists dripping red. But he was smiling angelically.

“I brought you some, too, Mums,” said he, opening his hands and holding them up to her. He had been tightly grasping the raspberries.

“He ought to be spanked,” said Miss Willy.

Anne looked over the child’s head, and smiled. He was standing in one of the tubs getting scoured, his dimpled body rising from the suds in which he was infinitely more interested than in cleanliness.

“Will you do the spanking?” she asked.

Miss Willy looked at her over her spectacles, said not a word more.

That afternoon the child was sleepy. His forehead was hot. “Don’t want to go out in the garden. Want to stay here,” he said later, and Anne, who was starting the fire for supper, absently agreed.

“All right, old man. But don’t get in mother’s way.”

Then she heard a cry from Miss Willy. Another moment and she was kneeling on the floor, lifting the child to her breast, shrieking.

“Stop that! Leave him there! Don’t take him up! It’s a spasm,” she heard Willy say.

“He’s dying! My baby’s dying!”

“He ain’t, either! You leave him right there, and run for the doctor. I’ll get the kettle on. Give me a spoon to put in his mouth. Now run----!”

The little body was stiff, the child’s eyes rolled upward.

“If the doctor ain’t there, get Mis’ Beaman,” Willy called after her.

She stumbled on the steps, caught herself, raced on. The doctor was not there. Mrs. Beaman turned from the stove, the twins and the other children staring open-mouthed at the frantic woman who had burst in upon them.

“My baby! Convulsions--he’s dying,” Anne panted.

Instantly Mrs. Beaman grasped a steaming tea-kettle from the stove and held it towards Anne. “Take that and run,” said she. “Here you, Johnny, you carry this pot. Never mind the potatoes in it, they won’t do any harm. Now I’ll get the mustard----”

Ten minutes, half an hour, and Wanny was wrapped in a blanket, relaxed, his eyes closed. Mrs. Beaman laughed.

“I used to think you used a good many things to bathe him with, when he was a baby,” she said, “but I guess it’s the first time he ever had a hot bath with potatoes floating around in the water.”

Anne was still trembling. “If you hadn’t come! You saved my boy.”

Late in August Nicky came for a week. She watched Anne at first curiously, making no comment on her varied activities. Human work in the garden was over until time for harvesting. There were hours in the long afternoons when the two could sit in the shade or walk through the woods.

“Anne,” Veronica asked one day, “do you ever have time to think?”

Anne laughed. “Yes, with my hands.”

“I’ve never seen you look so happy, so satisfied.”

“Why shouldn’t I be?”

“That, from Nance Denison! But you aren’t Nance Denison.”

Anne leaned forward, her hands dropped beyond her knees. “Oh, yes I am. Don’t you think I am not, Nicky old girl. I always wanted to do things, my own things, have my own way. Now I’m doing them, reveling in having my own way. Of course I’m happy!”

“And satisfied?”

“Oh, well, that! There always has to be something beyond. Of course I’m not going to stay here forever.”

“That’s really what I came about, Nance.” Anne looked at her questioningly. “There’s a new home for working girls. A sort of hotel, really, but they want to provide something more for the girls than other homes do. They want a hostess, a woman who has been used to things. I can get you the job if you want it.”

“There’s Wanny.”

“You could have Wanny with you. The pay isn’t bad.”

Anne stood up, her hands behind her back. There was the garden, the house, the hen-house, the hills and ripening fields.

“Nicky, I can’t,” she said. “Not while old Willy lives.”

Nicky lay back, stretched her arms over her head, yawned. “You’re growing up, Anne,” said she.

Afterwards, Anne wondered at herself a little. It was true that a few years before she would have taken the chance without thinking of anyone who stood in the way. If she had heard of some other woman making such a choice she would have scorned her for it, set her down in the same category into which she had dismissed people like those who were now her neighbors, as being of no account, bound by their own dullness and stupidity and lack of initiative, without intention, without aspiration. Her mind was still groping. She could not have told why she had permitted herself to be held by allegiance to old Willy. But, however vaguely, she was beginning to feel that there was something beyond initiative and aspiration, some established necessary sequence, perhaps even some purpose.

Several times she had encountered the man Kent on the road or in the store. Once he had said to Warren:

“You come to see me, and I’ll show you something!”

She thought of him as of one who could speak her old language, remembered his odd way of coming abruptly to things that were commonly left unspoken or only touched upon after a preface of intimacy, as though they were common enough to be taken for granted, so much a part of one’s habitual thought as to come naturally to any man’s lips. Her harvesting work was done for the year. The little place was neat for winter, the pantry shelves were filled. She smiled when she looked at those rows of bright jars. She, Anne Denison, “forehanded!” On a day in late September she took her son by the hand and set forth. Not that Warren permitted himself to be held in leash for long. His legs were sturdy. How she loved them, their curves and dimples and bruises. He would trot ahead of her to kick up the leaves, go foraging into the woods, spring out upon her at the next turn. He howled when he investigated a chestnut burr, a moment later joyously presented her with a spray of asters. Walks with Wanny had their variety. Before they came in sight of the cottage her ears caught the sound of music. A piano, played rather superbly, she thought. In spite of her restraining call Warren flew to the door, hammered upon it.

“I want to see what that noise is. Let me in. I want to see.”

As she reached the door it opened, and Kent stood there, laughing. He took the child’s hand, closed the door behind them, and came down the walk towards Anne.

“We’ve interrupted you,” she said, with an air of apology.

But he shook his head. “No. I was playing to my wife. But she’s asleep now. It always quiets her.”

“I am sorry. I did not know Mrs. Kent was ill.”

His face bore a worn look, as of one who had not slept. “Always ill. I am very glad you came to see me.”

“I have been thinking so much, Mr. Kent, of some of the things you said to me that night when I was so wild as to walk in the moonlight.” He looked at her questioningly, yet she did not find it difficult to speak simply of what had seemed so simple to him.

He nodded. “Ah--yes.” Then his manner changed. He looked down at Warren. “How would you like to come into my garden? I could show you something there.”

“There isn’t any garden any more. We’ve dug the potatoes,” said Warren.

“There is always a garden,” the man said, laughing. “Come along!”

He led the way with the boy, talking and answering, for there had to be a good deal of answering, with Warren.

“This is a funny garden,” said Warren.

“You just wait,” laughed Kent. “And don’t stumble.”

The path led down sharply. Anne drew a quick breath when it ended abruptly in a cleared space at the base of the hill, a space perhaps a full hundred yards across, leveled and smooth, the woods closing it in, sunlight drenching it. Only a few bronzed leaves clung to the low-growing oaks against its forested wall. For the rest, it was raked clean, like a house swept and garnished. And that, thought Anne, was what it must be, a house here in the woods, with the sky for its roof. There were borders where even now a late rose or two braved the cold nights. At one side a long shallow pool, its banks strengthened with field stones, caught a bit of the sky’s blue. Just beyond was an arbor, white, grape-trellised, and at other places two long low benches of gleaming white. On one of these lay a doll, large as a baby and as daintily dressed, its legs hanging limply over the side. On the floor of the arbor, in a spot of sunlight, a dog lay. It got up when it saw Kent, hobbled joyously towards him on three legs. He stooped and patted it. Warren drew back towards his mother.

“I never saw a dog like that,” he said. “Where’s all of him?”

“The rest of him, you mean?” Kent laughed aloud. “Well, once he was caught in a trap. The trap bit off his paw. But there are no other dogs here, you see, so he doesn’t realize how different he is. We don’t remind him of it.”

Anne remembered, something the doctor had said that first time. “A lot of lame ducks.” This, apparently, was one of them. Then she became aware of a face in the depths of the arbor, a form there.

“Jenny,” Kent called. “You Jenny there! Come out here and say ‘how do’ to the lady and the young man I’ve brought to call on you.”

It was a child; or, surely, the laugh came from a girl who was not quite past childhood. A girl of thirteen or so, Anne thought, when she haltingly emerged. As she came she seemed to help herself by the side of the arbor where shade lay deepest. Her face wore that curious agedness of the city child who has long been ill.

“A-a-ah! No you don’t,” Kent called out, laughing. “Don’t you touch that crutch, Jenny!”

“I ain’t, honest I ain’t, Mr. Kent. It’s on the bench!”

“Then you’re cheating. You’re holding on to the wall.”

The girl giggled delightedly, as at some huge joke. “But I got to.”

“Now hear that! I told you to come here. Now then, come along. Come along.”

She came to the opening of the arbor, bracing herself by a hand on its side. Anne saw that her body was twisted, restricted by some muscular impediment, perhaps a form of paralysis. Jenny was smiling, and Kent shook his head.

“Won’t do, Jenny. You let go of that door, and come out here.”

“But I can’t, Mr. Kent. Honest I can’t.”

“Come!”

She took a step or two forward, wavered. Anne would have jumped to her side, but Kent’s raised hand warned her back.

“Now you see that you can. Come along!”

A step or two more, and suddenly the girl fell awkwardly, sprawling, laughing. “Gee, ain’t he funny!” she cried.

Kent helped her up, took her arm and led her to one of the benches. “Now next time, young woman, you’ll walk. Tumbling has gone out of fashion. Do you hear?” he warned her.

“It’s a heavenly place,” Anne said, “a sort of magic garden, as though the fairies had lived here a while and then forgotten it.”

Kent nodded. “I made it for my wife. We just about live down here, in the summer. You see, she’s afraid of the woods, and as they shut in the garden she’s safe here. She’s afraid to run away, except by the path, and we can watch that.”

In spite of herself Anne stared.

“Yes, she is like that,” Kent said, quietly. “As I said, it’s the reason for our living here. Where we lived before she was forever running away, slipping past all our vigilance. It wasn’t good for her to be constantly watched and she needed the air. Now she is happier. She has some freedom, but she is safe.”

Before the strange revelation Anne knew nothing to say. Kent went on, as though musing: “That doll over there. It is hers. I shall have to take it back to the house before she wakes up, or she’ll cry for it. She calls it her baby, yet at times, you see, she forgets it. When she is very bad. Yes, she is like that.”

Presently Anne said, “The little girl there----”

Kent smiled. “Oh, Jenny. Yes. We have them here. First one, then another. Jenny will soon be all right. She went on two crutches a few months ago.”

He had indeed shown her something in his garden. Anne was certain of that. His wife “like that,” the lame dog, the child Jenny. She thought of their meeting in the moonlight, and his words, “Not that it matters, the answer. It’s the search.” Now, in the light of what he had shown her, those words did not ring true. For what was his search, how much was he seeking? Obviously, the man was not impoverished. He was not held to Heathville by that dumb and stupid allegiance to the soil that she read in the simpler people. Yet there he stayed with a mad wife and a lame dog and children like Jenny. “We have them here. First one, then another.” He was not searching, not seeking. He was submitting, letting himself be held. By what?

She had been held by old Willy, as Kent was held by his wife.

Throughout the winter the old woman seemed as mentally brisk as ever. “My land,” she said, one cold Sunday morning, “I do wish I could get up the hill to church. Makes me feel downright wicked, to be so mad about it. Not that I s’ppose it’s any worse to get mad because you can’t go to church than because you can’t dance or something, nor any better, either.”

Anne laughed. “I don’t believe it will be held up against you because you can’t go to church,” said she.

Miss Willy sniffed. “I was talking about getting mad, not about going to church,” she said.

Anne laughed. “Well, I’m sorry you can’t get to church, then.”

“So am I. I do want something awful to see that new bonnet the minister’s wife got in the missionary box.”

“Willy! You wicked old woman! You’ve fooled me for years. I thought you went to church to say your prayers. I didn’t dream your mind was so set on worldly things.”

Miss Willy sniffed. “I do go to church to say my prayers, when I can get there. And if a body’s mind wasn’t mixed up with worldly things, what would there be to pray about?” she demanded.

There came a day in April when the sun shone and from Anne’s window all the world wore a fresh morning face after rain. Dressing, she looked out upon the familiar scene, now as unconsciously cherished as the features of a beloved. Then she turned to the bed where Warren, now in his fourth year, lay asleep. He had long since refused to submit to a day-time nap, though after his day’s intensive play he was willing enough to go to bed with the chickens. But no birds could wake him early in the morning. He lay now with his arms and legs outstretched, strong and plump, his firm flesh tanned by sun and weather. He was her life, her blessing. Whenever she saw him like that a surge of love all but choked her. She bent over him before she left the room. He would sleep for hours longer.

She went down quietly, started the kitchen fire as noiselessly as she could, went out to the hens. The morning air was sweet. Good to breathe it in. She raised her face in the sunshine. When she went in again she set the simple breakfast to cooking. There was no sound from Miss Willy’s room. Strange, for the old woman had not lost her life-long habit of waking with the dawn. She would wait patiently until Anne could find time to help her dress, but always she called out a morning greeting. Anne softly turned the knob of the bedroom door. The little figure was lying on its side, one hand under a withered cheek. Anne’s heart leaped. That stillness, and the posture like a child asleep, secure in a mothering presence near by. She bent over the bed.

Miss Willy was, indeed, asleep. Past waking.

Presently Anne went across the road for the doctor. He made his brief examination, and stood up, looking at Anne who was unaware of the tears on her cheeks.

“Yes,” he told her, gently, “yes, she’s gone. Worn out. That’s the best way to go. Finished her work.”

“Sleep at the end of the day,” Anne murmured.

The doctor nodded. “Like David. You remember? ‘Who after he had served his own generation by the will of God, fell on sleep, and was laid with his fathers.’ What’s better than to serve one’s own generation?”

“She did that.”

The doctor turned away. “I’ll send women to you,” he said, from the door.

They came, those women. Quietly, reverently they came, not reluctantly to that task from which Anne shrank, but taking it as one of the things to be done, by its very inevitableness removed from horror. She heard them moving about the room, speaking in low voices behind the closed door. They asked her to heat water, and when she had it ready one of them said:

“Now don’t you feel so bad. Her time had come.”

Dorilliam’s mother came out to the kitchen. “I didn’t like to open the bureau without you said so. But I know where the things are. She’s had ’em laid away a long time. She told me about ’em.”

Anne helped them find the poor, decent clothes, so plain, so clean. So Willy had thought of her burial, even while she thought so much of living. Death--Anne remembered the day her father died. Willy had been alone with him. She and Brice had hurried, but arrived too late. She had been a little in awe of that silent presence, even afraid. She had cried out to Brice when strange men with black bags passed the parlor door on the way upstairs, and Brice had closed the door and put his arms about her, closed the door against her dread. Now there was no Brice.

Hurriedly she put that memory from her. There was nothing of fear connected with Willy’s lying there. Why remember that shielding from that other fear? She had felt no grief for her father; they had never been close together. After he died she had been sorry that they had never been closer. This was different. Not grief, but something gentler, something more poignant. Or was grief like this? Death like this quiet passing seemed scarcely mysterious, but only a part of the inevitable round of things. Now she knew something about that round of things. There was winter, a going to sleep, and spring following winter. She thought of Miss Willy’s springtime, of the little toiling creature who had wanted her freedom. Had she found freedom now? Or what? For there was spring.

“You’d better let me take Wanny home with me,” said Mrs. Beaman. “The twins’ll just love looking after him. It ain’t good for children to be in the house when there’s death.”

Anne kissed her. “If you’ll take him for a few hours, later,” she said. “For a day or two I can tell him Miss Willy’s asleep in there.”

So the child played about as usual, whispering when he came into the kitchen, tiptoeing past the closed door. Willy was asleep. He understood that, and Anne dwelt on the thought of it.

Mrs. Bassett came over the first day, a slender, thin-lipped woman, with some sprays of geranium in her hand. “Seems like I never get much time to grow flowers,” she said, “but there’s these.”

Another brought heliotrope, another a basket of crocuses. One came with nasturtiums. “Seems real nice to see ’em this time o’ year, don’t it?” she asked, with pride. “They do real well in my south windows. They come from some seeds she gave me once.”

At night another came, a great white bloom in her hand and on her face the look of a votary. “My night-bloomin’ cereus. ’Twon’t last, but she always come over to see it, the night ’twas due to come out. I want she should have it.”

On the day when Anne sent Warren to play with the Beaman children the neighbors gathered solemnly in the parlor, presently to follow Miss Willy, who never had led before. Anne stood by the grave lined with evergreen boughs. There was greenery, too, over the mound of fresh earth.

“Who did that?” she asked, as they came away.

“Why, we all did. We always do that, for a neighbor.”

Those women, unimaginative, she had thought them, their lives but one long labor, too barren for sentiment; yet when the time for sentiment came they had done that tender service.

On the day after the funeral Warren went into the bedroom, stood looking at the bed. “Where’s auntie?” he asked. “When did she wake up?”

“She’s gone away, Wanny. Where she won’t have to go to sleep any more.”

The child stared at her. “Where’s that?”

“Ever so far away. Where the spring lives before it comes. Where the baby birds come from, and baby boys and girls, before they are born.” She had no sooner spoken the words than she was conscious of the fatuity of them. Why should she cheat the child with sentimentality? Why not try to tell him the truth? Why deck it out in inanities? But Warren’s eyes were alight and wide-opened.

“Where the fairies live?” he asked.

“Perhaps,” she said. “I don’t know.”

“Oh, well,” said Wanny, “she won’t like it much there. Not without me. I guess she’ll come back soon.”

But a day or two afterwards he came to his mother with quivering lip. “I want auntie. Why don’t she come back? Will you tell her to hurry?”

Anne turned her face away. “I want her, too, my lamb. But she can’t come.”

“Why can’t she come? Has she lost her crutch?”

“Yes. She’s lost it.”

“Why don’t you take it to her, then?”

“I can’t, Wanny. I can’t go where she is.”

“Well, where is she? That’s what I want to know.”

How much theology did one give a child? There had to be something. What could one say? She took him in her arms. “Auntie is with her Heavenly Father, my dear. He loves her, and needs her.”

“How do you know he does?”

Theology had its difficulties. “I do know. He’s my Heavenly Father, too. So I know. Just the way you know mother loves you.”

Wanny thought about that. “Have I got one, too?” he asked.

She kissed his curls. “Of course. We all have. Now run along and play. Maybe you’d like to help feed the chickens?”

But a few nights thereafter, while she was making him ready for bed, taking off his stockings and reveling in the fragrance of his hair against her face, he propounded another question.

“Mums,” he asked, “when am I going to my father?”

7

Under old Willy’s handkerchiefs in the top drawer of a bureau they found a folded sheet of paper. “I am in my right mind and senses. I give my body to the grave and my soul to the Lord. Everything else is to go to my friend, Anne Warren Denison.” There was Willy’s cramped signature, and the signature of witnesses.

“It was no more than right,” said Mrs. Wells, who was one of the witnesses, “seeing you come here to take care of her in her old age.”

Anne said nothing. The date stood out like a pointing finger. Willy had written it more than five years before she had come to Heathville, at a time when she thought of the old woman once a year, when the purchase of some gift for Christmas was one of those burdensome trivialities that she got through with as hurriedly as she could. The house was hers, the garden, the few hundreds in the savings bank, because old Willy had loved her, in her own mind built up about her a little tradition that later expressed itself in the kindly falsehood with which she quieted the curiosity of the neighbors. “Come to take care of her in her old age.” Perhaps Willy had dreamed of that during the years she had lived alone. Perhaps she had longed to have someone in her old age. It was a new thing to Anne to have that feeling of dull self-reproach, that consciousness of failure, unmixed with anger. Anger had obliterated any consciousness of failure towards Brice. Now old Willy’s bequest and the inescapable thoughts it brought with it held a mirror of self-analysis up to her. She could not look around it, nor walk away from it, but must stare and stare at the reflection of herself. And there was another thing that she had to think about. Warren’s questions, his reference to his father.

Willy was dead, Brice had gone out of her life, but the boy remained. Not four years in the world, already he was asking questions she could not answer. He would grow, would question further. Was she going to fail her son as she had failed those others? Oh yes, Willy had, indeed, had someone to take care of her in her old age; her longings and her poor little pride had been justified at the end. But Anne could take to herself no credit for that. Willy dead, she could admit her own failure. If things had fallen out differently, she would have said, when word came of the old woman’s death, “The poor old soul!” When word came of the bequest, she would have said, “How funny! What on earth shall I do with it?” It was only by chance, and because of her own need, not Willy’s, that she had stood by at the end.

So, now that the time had come when she was free to leave, she had to pause for a while, try to read her compass, to take her bearings, for there were strange seas ahead. She had been drifting. Where was she now? What was her position, what worth had this place she had thought she had won to, this security she thought her own toil had achieved for her spirit, this freedom from the bond of obligation? There was Brice. She had never believed that Brice was dead. Gradually she found herself thinking more and more about Brice, without anger, without bitterness.

If all life lead on to something, what was waiting for her? What was she going to meet? Above all, what was Warren going to meet, and how was she going to help him meet it? Could she escape that slow, onsweeping purpose pervading everything, that warp that ran through the whole fabric of life? To some natures life is a decomposing thing, to some a stimulus, to others a slow melting-pot, terrible in its persistency, yet all the while in its crucible melting away the baser elements that the purer may emerge. In some natures a gold of the spirit is the residuum, made a thing of itself only after the fires of life have had their way with it, worked it and fused and refined it. Anne’s physical freedom had come at last only to thrust her into the core of the crucible, but even yet she was not undergoing its intensest heat.

It was too early to begin work in the garden. The fields were drying slowly that year, the season pausing, farmers waiting with impatient acceptance of the inevitable. Many hours during the winter she had passed with Kent before his fireside or in Miss Willy’s parlor or tramping over the rutted roads. He had played to her and loaned her books. On a day when the sun was as warm as in June she and Warren started for Kent’s house, the boy running here and there to peep into the buckets hanging to roadside maple trees.

“Sap’s running good,” Deacon Bassett told her as they passed his place. “Cold nights and hot suns--that’s what brings the sap up.”

She had never encountered Mrs. Kent. Her presence pervaded the house, Kent spoke of her frequently, but Anne had dreaded to see her, hoped that she never would--that woman who played with a doll, who was afraid of the woods and had to be watched lest she run away. In her mind she had visualized something repulsive. Insanity, she supposed, was a thing of wild impulses, a thing of terror. Pitiful, yes, but dreadful, better kept behind bars or in one of those places where “they” had good care. But on that day she was sitting in a deep chair before a fire of embers, and Kent was playing. The children, Warren and Jenny, were in a window-seat busy about their own affairs. The door opened. Anne could see, without moving, the slim form that stood there, hesitant. There was nothing startling, nothing repulsive, about that woman. Forty, perhaps, she was obviously fragile, and could never have been beautiful; but there remained about her a delicacy, a grace, a gentle desire to please that must once have meant charm. She was smiling.

Kent looked over his shoulder, his fingers still touching the keys. “Come in, Paula,” he said, quietly.

Mrs. Kent came in, step by step, still looking at Anne, until she was standing in front of her, hands loosely clasped. She waited until the music had stopped.

“Pretty lady,” she said, under her breath.

Kent came towards them. “It’s Mrs. Denison, Paula. Aren’t you glad to see her?”

She held out her hand, and Anne, standing, took it. Paula still looked at her searchingly. “I don’t know her. But she’s pretty. I’m glad she came to see us. Are we going to have tea, Rufus? Are there any cakes?”

Kent went out of the room, and his wife took Anne’s hand, led her to a sofa, sat down by her. She was still smiling, still friendly, like a child in her gentleness. Anne could find nothing to say. Before Kent returned Wanny slipped from the window-seat, came and stood in front of the pair, his small legs apart, hands clasped behind his back, a posture copied from his firm friend Dorilliam.

Paula’s lips parted. She withdrew her hand from Anne’s. “Oh! It’s a child!”

“My son Warren,” said Anne. Her maternal instinct at work, she added, “Wanny, say ‘How do you do, Mrs. Kent.’”

But Mrs. Kent had slipped to her knees before the boy. She was touching him, first his bright hair, then his cheek, then his hand. To his mother’s amazement the youngster submitted. Then, quite suddenly, he laughed.

“I like you,” said he. “You’re so funny.”

Paula sat back on the floor, laughed too. “And I like you, boy.” She looked up at Anne, leaned closer, whispered. “I have a baby, too. She doesn’t grow. It worries me. And she never talks. She’s asleep now, or I couldn’t have come down. I’ll show her to you, some day. But her hair--I like the color of your boy’s hair--like fire-light. What is your name, boy?”

Wanny told her. Again she fingered the ruddy softness of his hair, and he laughed aloud. She said, “I like it. I think I will change the color of my baby’s hair to that. Rufus will do it for me.”

“Will do what, Paula?” Kent asked. He came into the room, the Japanese boy following with a tea-tray whose richness reminded Anne of old days. When she had told him, he said, quite naturally, as though it were the most usual thing in the world to change hair:

“Yes, of course, I will. I will send to the city today for some hair the color of Wanny’s. In four days from now your baby shall have red hair like his, Paula.”

And Paula, jumping up, clapped her hands. But then she spied the cakes on the tea-tray, grabbed two of them, ate.

“Rufus,” Anne asked, a week or so later when they were walking along through the muddy road, “Rufus, why do you keep her there? Why do you have her live with you?” For one could ask any question, directly, of Kent.

He frowned, looked puzzled. “I don’t know that I can make it plain to you, Anne, or to myself. But there’s this: one does not discard responsibility, or care, or what not, by putting it out of sight. One sees a thing through, anyway. Life jolly well sees to it that we do that.”

Afterwards, thinking it over, Anne wondered. Was that true? Did one never escape? Was escape cut off? A thing out of sight--did that follow one, haunt, overtake? Or was it always inevitably present? There was her marriage. Brice. She had believed they had escaped each other, and misunderstandings, and the enormous, minute daily rubs. Yet here was she, here was Warren, with his developing intelligence and his questions and demands and rights, and there, somewhere, was Brice. Did he, too, have his demands, his rights? Were they still her concern, again to become her problem? Was the whole thing still there, for them both? Was there still that bond, still, still to be reckoned with whether she would or not? “One sees it through, anyway. Life sees to it that we do that.” Life--what was it? The wheel of the squirrel-cage old Willy had once spoken about, the wheel that one spins and spins, believing one’s self the force that drives the world; the cage that one cannot leave, but must return to and return to, because all outside the cage is wilderness?

For days she weighed that question; then came the great crisis of her life, out of the blue, suddenly, without warning, as crises come. It came, that flame of Fate which was to burn away slowly, with agony, the dross of her spirit.

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