at ten tomorrow. I can come over early; can you?"
"Yes, I'll be here. I'm goin' to stay an' set up tonight. Mr. and Mrs. Shinkle said they'd come over. Selina can get supper for her pa an' th' boys."
"We'd better change them cloths."
The women tiptoed into the little lean-to, with that expectant hush that the presence of death always causes.
On an improvised table, a little form lay covered with a sheet, above a box of slowly melting ice. The country ministrations of neighborly service were completed, and the women left the room and returned to their task of cleaning in the front of the little farmhouse.
"My land, but it's quiet here! Bein' so far off the main road, seems like a person never sees nor hears nobody. It's enough to drive a person crazy."
THE older woman had been standing for several minutes, with her mind preoccupied by struggling thought. At last she spoke:
"See here, Mis' Prentis, if this pillow'd been standing up like this, it could've fell over on the baby. See?"
Both women bent over the carefully-folded bedclothing, placed upon the floor for the sake of a slightly cooler strata of air and also to obviate the possibility of the baby rolling off, while the mother was busy in some of the many tasks of the unaided farmer's wife.
Little by little, the bedroom was straightened and the two rooms swept and dusted. Then Mrs. Prentis paused as she gave a final look around the rooms, walked to one of the windows on the south and ran a speculative finger over the glass. It was so heavily coated with dust as to be practically opaque. Then she stepped to the two windows on the east side of the room and looked at them. The panes of glass in both were clean and carefully polished.
"Now why do you suppose that is?" she asked.
"Now why do you suppose that is?
Mrs. Collins, who had been following her moves, shook her head.
"I don't know," she answered, "Did you notice that the one in the kitchen, on the south side above the stove, hadn't been washed, either? I noticed it when I went over to look at the firebox when you spoke."
"Yes, that's so," said Mrs. Prentis, standing in the kitchen door and glancing at the south windows of one room and then at the other.
"See here, do you 'spose—that is—I mean both of these windows on the south side are toward the graveyard—do you 'spose that Mamie left 'em that way on purpose?"
"Well, there's a good deal to do on a farm, and mebbe she got as far as the south side washin' windows some day, and then had to quit for some reason."
"Yes, but these ain't been washed for months. Poor little Mamie! Mebbe she just couldn't stand to be everlastingly seein' them gravestones."
"I wish, oh how I wish, I'd 'a 'come over here oftener! We don't live so far away; but seems like I never get time to get all my work done, and when I do there's not time to walk, or I'm too tired, an' o' course the horses are always busy.
"What with fruit cannin', and hayin' hands, an' threshin', an' little chickens, the summer's gone 'fore you know it, an' then the winter's too cold and snowy, or too wet an' muddy to get out, an' the first thing you know another year's slipped by."
Motherly Mrs. Collins nodded her head in sympathy. An older and a heavier woman, all that Mrs. Prentis had said applied better than equally well to her.
"No wonder Mamie loved the baby,"—she said, "though she ain't been overly strong since it was born. Jes' think of the years and years she was here all alone, for Jed used to work out a good deal an' she done all the work here. Years an' years of stillness—an' then the baby she'd never give up wantin' and hopin' for."
"Yes, when I think what a woman's got to go through here on a farm, I don't never want Selina should get married. Seems like it's enough sometimes to make a mother wish her girl baby could die when it's little—"
