May 20th. Caro did not come back until yesterday, though she called the Peon up daily to ask how I was and to send her love. She did not allude to David, and the Peon volunteered no information. But yesterday she dashed in at the gate, driving like a young Jehu, flung the reins to Uncle Milton, who was at work among the roses at the other end of the house, and came flying across the lawn to my cot.

“Oh, Mammy Lil, are you all alone? Has David really gone—to stay, I mean?”

I told her his plans.

She sat on the edge of the cot, her head held high, her eyes sparkling.

“It’s a shame!” she exclaimed indignantly; “how could he have the heart to leave you so?”

I looked at her quizzically. I had been feeling rather forlorn; but suddenly the comical side of my woes presented itself, as it so kindly and so often does, and I wanted to laugh.

“Who ran first?” I inquired.

She flushed to the roots of her curly hair and slipped to the grass beside me, her pretty head on my shoulder.

“We’re pigs, both of us,” she averred contritely. “But, Mammy Lil, David is the worst pig. He really could have stayed: and I—couldn’t. Anyway, I’m glad he’s gone; it’s just about the decentest thing he’s done.”

“You are a consistent child,” I observed, stroking her hair; “but, Caro dear, I’m not accustomed to hearing David criticized from the standpoint of decency, and we won’t begin now. And I wanted him to go very much.”

“Well, anyway, I can come back. I’ll never leave you here by yourself. I’ll go back and pack up this evening, and come home first thing in the morning.”

I shook my head. I had been thinking about it all these long, lonesome days. They are both my children, but David has the first right to our home; and with Caro installed here he will not come back to it. Besides, it isn’t fair. And if they will fight at cross-purposes we must all take the consequences together. I know I am rather a dishevelled shuttle-cock to do duty between their clashing wills; but they will have to have it out, now that they have begun it. And if that hard-hearted little sinner came back here, she’d convince herself in no time that David is the sinner and she is the one and only saint. It never did take long for staying at Cousin Jane’s to pall on Caro; and she’ll probably see things from various points of view before she concludes her experiment.

Poor little soul, she cried dreadfully. She even tried to work on my sympathies by telling me how Cousin Jane serves up Bob White’s perfections morning, noon, and night. This was welcome news to me, and helped me to disguise the very fluid condition of my supposedly hard heart. I must confess we both cried before she went back: but Caro owned it was fair.

I feel like a yellow dog, of course. One always does when one stands for a painful justice—it’s part of the job. I felt the same shame when she was a little thing and I let her bite the red pepper she snatched in the garden the minute I told her not to touch it. It burns my own mouth to this day. But Caro never snatched against orders again.

And there’s no sense in listening to Grumpy’s prophecies. Where is the pleasure of growing old if one can’t learn to distil from one’s experiences the essential oil of hope? When the Peon and I fell out, hopelessly, desperately, eternally, about six months before we were married, I was just a young thing, and quite pardonable in my belief that my life was ruined forever by the cataclysm. But from the vantage-ground of twenty-odd years of additional living I should be able to detect the flimsiness of the average impenetrable barrier. I don’t think Caro cares for any one else, at least; and if they’re not meddled with they’ll work it out their own way, which must be the best way for the Peon and me. And if he and I can’t enjoy ourselves very much just now, why, we don’t want to when the children are miserable; so that’s all right, of course.

As to their misery, I have at least come far enough in life myself to know that it has—or will have—its mitigations. I never yet have been in a hole—and heaven knows life has been a procession of holes these last years—that I didn’t get out of it with some added capacity of living that made being in holes worth while. Why should I begrudge the children their own hole-adventures and discoveries, their own enrichment of life?

May 22nd. The Peon comes home early these days and takes me out for a ride. I can sit in my chair or lie down at will; and he wheels me over the soft grass to all the places I’ve been longing to see and have only beheld in Make-Believe. We go down to the brook nearly every day about sunset and watch the birds quenching their thirst before bedtime. There are many song sparrows down there; and the killdeers haunt the banks at all time, whirring up when startled with wild cries, their breasts and lifted wings flashing snow-white beneath, and the rich salmon of the lower back gleaming as they rise from the valley into the level sunlight along the brow of the hill. The Peon flattens my chair to a couch, and throws himself on the grass or sits on the roots of a sycamore, while we talk of all the years that the children have been growing up with us, and of what the future is to bring. We are both very strenuously cheerful. And indeed, in our hearts, we do hope honestly to have them both at home again some day. Only it seems rather a long way off sometimes; and the house is so very quiet when we go back.

Sometimes we go back to the spot we picked out years ago as the one where we thought David might like to build his home some day; for though we always hoped to have him with us, we never wanted to rob him of a home of his own. We had never said to one another that we hoped for Caro to make the home for him—to put it into words seemed to infringe on their right to settle that great matter, each to their own heart’s wish: but we had hoped it without words. We go there now, and hope for it openly, bridging our separation with happy dreams, and comforting one another with assurances it is not always easy to feel.

David has not been long enough at his journey’s end for a letter mailed there to reach us; but it seems as if he had been gone for months. And poor little Caro looks so wistful when she starts back to Cousin Jane’s that I feel as though I have been turning her out of doors for the most of my life. It is really not to be borne very much longer. The Peon’s sister wants us to go to her next month, at her summer home in the mountains of Pennsylvania; and Caro will have to come home in time to get me ready. We can spend the summer together, at least.

But before I go I want to see plainer sailing for Milly and Bobolink, as Caro disrespectfully styles Mr. Lincoln. Grace was here for a little while today to tell me good-bye. She is off to stay with George’s mother while the old lady’s daughter takes a trip. Milly was with her, and promised to come back soon. She said she wanted to talk to me, and from the anxious air with which she said it, I’m hoping she is seriously thinking of turning on that jay-bird uncle of hers and teaching him a few of the things he needs to learn.

May 25th. A golden day, after a night of drenching rain. The sky is like October, and under it the winds are at play. And why, when sunshine fills the world, should one suffer one’s eyes to be blinded to it by any mote of pain or trouble held close enough to shut out all the light? I will keep mine at arm’s length, if I die for it, and see around it and over it, yes, and through it, into this beautiful, wonderful world! If one’s feet can’t travel, aren’t one’s eyes an open road of escape?

May 27th. Three sleepless nights, a dead weight of weariness, loneliness to the heart’s core, and pain that wrings the flesh—these are among Grumpy’s stock-in-trade this morning, and he flaunts them and a dozen other things, wherever I turn my thoughts. He has heaped up, mountain high, the things I want and can’t have; and there he sits, grinning at the void they leave in my idle, useless life. I must fill that hole, or go under. What have I left?

First, the Peon’s love, and the children’s, and that of my friends. Love: and the Love from which love came. By the time all that is stowed away in the void, it has rather a “gone” look about it—for a void. And Grumpy’s grin has a tuck in it.

Then a sense of humor—the most blessed thing, save love itself, ever given to human kind. It keeps one sane and balanced where without it one would go mad. A source of justice it is, a bond of sympathy, a destroyer of egotism, a solace in suffering, a staff to courage, an open door of escape from all that is unbearable in life.

Next, the power to hold my tongue when things hurt, and to keep the whine out of my voice when I’m nothing but whine inside.

There are love, laughter, and silence; and as void-fillers they go a long way. But there are other things for the chinks. For I can read a little and write a little, and think a little, as against the black idleness of those three years. And beauty—wind in the tree-tops, the arching blue, the flicker of light and shade—beauty everywhere, in fact; and back of beauty the Thought that designed both it and the eyes to see it. Oh, it is a beautiful world! And though one’s body lies idle, one’s thoughts may go everywhere, and are everywhere at home. And may not endurance itself, however passive, yet rise to the point of achievement, if only one endure in the right way? And if liberty be measured by one’s capacity to do without—oh, how can any walls of suffering shut one in when the way up is always open—up, to the presence of God?

May 28th. Whenever I think I’ve overcome a temptation, and can afford to rest, something else comes pouncing and catches me napping. This time it was Cousin Jane. I’m not a bit sorry I sent her home—it was high time for her to go. But I needn’t have been so blazing mad when I did it.

She hasn’t been near me for ages, but she came at last, exactly when she very specially should have kept away. So as I lay there on the porch sofa—for I couldn’t get out in the yard this week—I heard the familiar pile-driver tread, and opened my eyes to behold her at the corner of the porch, personified virtue, somewhat overheated by the afternoon sun, and looking rather limp about the collar. But there was nothing limp about her stolid mouth, nor in her hard black eyes. She had come for a purpose, and was not displeased to think I wouldn’t enjoy it.

I’ve been afraid of Cousin Jane all my life. I used to run at the sound of her voice when I was a child at Cedarhurst. More than once I have been gently, but firmly, extracted from a closet by Great-aunt Letitia, and led to her presence to perform the rites required by politeness to even the most unpleasant kin. Somehow it all came back to me—the childish, unreasoning fear. I was so weak, the pain so biting sharp; I could not bear unkindness, too. I turned my head toward the long windows with a wild thought of escape; but when my heart is like this, I can scarcely walk, and I could never have reached my room. Besides, she would come after me: so I made a virtue of necessity and lifted my hand. She saved me the trouble of speaking.

“Good land alive, Lyddy! Are you mopin’ around yet, makin’ out like you’re half dead? I wonder John Bird doesn’t go crazy! I heard you were rompin’ all over the place, throwin’ the birds enough biscuit to feed all the poor folks in town, if you only had religion enough to think about them instead of your own silly whims.”

She came close and settled herself heavily in the Peon’s chair, waving her fan vigorously. She reached across me to the stand on the other side, and rang my bell sharply. Josie appeared at once.

“Go draw me some fresh water, straight out of the well,” she commanded. It was one of her hobbies to ignore the Peon’s water system, and to assume that we depended on a well and a windlass, as she boasted that she still did herself.

“Wouldn’t you rather have a glass of lemonade?” I inquired. “And bring some wafers, Josie.”

Josie’s mother makes wonderful old-time wafers, as thin as paper and as crisp as frosty air. They are beautifully rolled, and melt in one’s mouth: no other cook in the county can achieve them. Cousin Jane ate the entire plateful, and her manner, as she turned to me once more, was a shade less like that of a regiment charging a redoubt.

“What did David go off for?” she demanded. “Have you and John Bird turned him loose? I can’t get a thing out of Caroline, and I know something’s wrong somewhere. What is it?”

“He went to look after some business,” I said.

“Oh, you can tell that to the neighbors that ain’t kin,” she said scornfully. “I want to know what’s wrong. He’s done somethin’, I know, an’ Caroline’s ashamed of it. I can’t get a thing out of her, but she’s a changed girl. An’ more than that, she’s standin’ in her own light. She’s that flighty an’ cross Bob White looks like he don’t know what to make of it. Men ain’t goin’ to stand too much foolishness, an’ first news you know, Caroline can’t get him if she wants him. I’m talkin’ plain, but it’s time.”

“Why don’t you talk to Caro?” I suggested.

“Good land, Lyddy, do you reckon I ain’t? But it’s like water on a duck’s back—in one ear and out the other. An’ besides”—with a sudden deep craft in her beady eyes—“you have to be careful with girls—at least, a person with tact does. I don’t come right out with things to Caroline, like you would. But I just thought I’d get together all the things David’s been doin’ an’ lay ’em before her. I don’t suppose you let her know the half of it, whatever it was. Was it somethin’ about money, or has he been getting into fast ways, drinkin’, or playin’ cards, or—worse? I always knew he would get into mischief sooner or later—he pretends to be so steady: I’ve just been waitin’ for it to come. Why, what’s the matter, Lyddy? What do you want?”

I sat straight up and rang the bell. Josie ran out.

“Get me my chair, Josie, quick,” I said. She whirled it to my side, and I stepped in unaided.

“Take me to my room,” I told her, “and leave me there while you tell Uncle Milton to get Mrs. Grackle’s buggy and to open the gate for her. She is going home at once. Then come back and help me to bed. Do not come back until I send for you, Cousin Jane: I am not well.”

She stared at me, speechless and apoplectic, and as Josie arranged my pillows I saw her driving between the cedars. And above all my anger about David and my consciousness that Great-aunt Letitia would be ashamed of me, above the weakness, and above the tearing, throbbing pain, is the exhilaration of knowing that for once in my life I wasn’t afraid of Cousin Jane. I never will be afraid of her again!

May 31st. Trying all one’s life to see things from other peoples’ point of view has this advantage in sickness: it helps one to stand apart from the suffering and to look at it from without, even when whelmed in it, and almost overwhelmed. One sees it as if it were someone else’s sickness, taking the long view of it, as a doctor does. He is sorry for the pain, of course; he knows it is bad. But he expects it. And he expects the backsets, and the blues, and the can-I-ever-get-wells, and all the rest of it. Those things are part of the process of recovery, and do not affect the final outcome. Once past a certain point, the road leads inevitably to one sure goal; the windings in and out don’t count, nor the ups and downs; one is advancing all the time. Now, if a doctor, who doesn’t need it, can get that comfort out of my aches and pains, why shouldn’t I get it, who need it so much?

June 1st. Out under the maple again today, and the stars in their courses fighting for me! And why, when a miracle like this happens for Milly and Bobolink, should I despair of David and Caro?

Milly came to see me to have that long talk she spoke about. She had been telephoning every day to know when she could come, so I had Josie call her the moment I found I could go out. And just suppose I had been well enough yesterday—what a misfortune that would have been!

She scattered the crumbs for me, and settled beside me to pour out what Caro calls “her uncle-ish woes;” and while she was doing it, the wood-thrush flew down, only to be shouldered away from the feast by a mannerless jay. Somehow it made me feel perfectly hopeless about Milly, poor little soft, sweet thing, and my eyes filled up with tears; but when I had winked them dry, the thrush went back. The jay pecked at him savagely, and he dashed half-way round the hydrangeas in terror. Milly saw him and caught her breath.

“Uncle Jason is like that,” she said, with a little catch in her voice; “and I can’t stand against him—I can’t! Don’t you see how helpless the thrush is, Cousin Lil?”

But the thrush had stopped in mid-flight. His breast was puffed out like a tiny balloon, the trembling of his legs plain to be seen; he quivered from head to foot. But he turned slowly, his legs shaking under him, and hopped deliberately toward his tormentor, his head high, his swollen breast making a ruff of feathers visible on either side of his back. He went close to the jay and pecked toward him in the air. The jay, startled, gave back an inch. The thrush, still trembling, hopped nearer and pecked, as steadily as if his legs were in their normal condition. The bully backed again. The thrush hopped and pecked.

Milly had leaned forward, her hand on mine. Her face was white and she was breathing quickly.

The jay continued to back. The wood-thrush followed him, inch by inch, unyielding, yet in mortal fear. At last the big coward could stand it no longer. He spread his wings and vanished across the brook. The thrush stood trembling a moment, his feathers slowly flattening along his sides, and then returned quietly to his lunch. Milly rose, a new light in her soft eyes.

“If he can, I can,” she said steadily. “I don’t need to talk any more, Cousin Lil: I’m going home and do.”

June 2nd. I’m afraid I haven’t inherited the family grace of hospitality; for the further I get from Cousin Jane’s visit the more glad I am that I sent her home. And it isn’t all on David’s account either, though I could never have done it but for what she said of him. Yet since it is done I remember her life-time disregard of the small courtesies of life. I wonder if it were not more cowardice in me than kindness that for so long I meekly allowed it, and thereby encouraged her, so far as lay in my power, to ride rough-shod over all the rules of politeness.

I do believe that decent manners, even to one’s junior kinfolks, are an essential part of decent morals; one can commit as dastardly crimes with an ill-tempered tongue as with a lying one. And what right has she to plume herself on her frankness, as if that were a justification for such ill manners as cut the joy and fellowship of life at the root? I think our ideas of morals need standardizing, at least to the point where we can no longer, by bad temper and worse behavior, inflict misery at will on those about us, sowing on every side the seeds of anger or contempt, and yet remain a highly respected member of society and a shining light in the church.—Yet, after all, I’m making a deal of a pother about trifles. It is what we do ourselves that counts, not what is done to us. In the face of the void, at the land’s end, the hurts one has suffered will disappear; it is the hurts one has inflicted that will be lions in the way. And if I have really hurt Cousin Jane—well, when I’m a little stronger I’ll try my best to get straight with her. For the present, I am here in bed again, with the birds outside for company—and a visit from Caro to look forward to. She telephoned a while ago that she had been spending the night with Milly and would be over before lunch. So Cousin Jason hasn’t annihilated the child, at least.

June 3rd. Milly really did go home and begin. She went by for Caro yesterday afternoon on her way home, and they found Cousin Jason in a thunderous mood. Milly was quietly determined. He had left the breakfast table that morning in a temper, after his frequent fashion: and Milly, in her brand-new fashion, had refrained from running after him and imploring him to have pity on his poor head, and drink his coffee. He had fumed around on the porches for some time, waiting for her to take her cue, and had finally disappeared. He came back at eleven with a headache, slamming all the doors, notwithstanding, and demanded hot coffee at once. Milly, however, had forseen this contingency and prepared for it. The cook’s daughter was ill, and she had allowed her to go down there as soon as breakfast was over and stay until time to cook dinner. It was the housemaid’s regular day off, and she had already departed, not to return until the late afternoon. As Uncle Jason had ordered cold lunches for the summer, the girl had fixed everything for him, and left it in the refrigerator. Joe, the house man, would serve it. Milly herself, who was just leaving the house as her uncle came in, had an engagement in Chatterton for lunch and must hurry; but if he wanted coffee Joe could make a fire for him, though he could not brew any drinkable beverage. But Uncle Jason had always said he could make better coffee than her mother’s cooks, and it would take only a few minutes. It was too bad about the headache; he should have taken his coffee at breakfast. And Milly drove off, a vision of gentle serenity, and left him gasping in the hall.

Caro went back with her in time for dinner. Milly had passed the pale stage and was in unwonted and most becoming excitement. Caro, of course, was enraptured with the whole situation. She is the only soul alive who ever held Cousin Jason in check; and now she infuriated him with her innocent remarks, and made him laugh the next moment in spite of himself, which made him more furious still. After dinner they retired to Milly’s room and discussed Bobolink’s perfections—and David’s, I wonder?—until the latest of late bedtimes.

At breakfast Cousin Jason was more than crabbed; but he drank the last of his coffee, and made quite a hearty meal before pronouncing the very excellent waffles unfit for human consumption and slamming the dining-room door after him as he went out. Caro had then seen Milly off to the city, where she was to do a little shopping and “take a bobolink lunch,” and would go back to spend the night with her.

Caro will stay there all the time Grace is away. She is in the highest of spirits over the prospect, not only because a battle with Cousin Jason has been one of her life-long desires; but because she is more than weary of Cousin Jane, and her blunderbuss manner of forcing conversation anent Bob White. Caro won’t say much about it—for fear, I devoutly hope, that I may draw inferences in David’s favor; but she is unconcealably bored with Bob, and his money, and his pedigree and connections, clear back to Noah. I doubt if the boy ever had a chance with her; but if he had—or would have had without Cousin Jane’s disastrous approval of him—it is only a might-have-been henceforth. I feel a little sorry for him, but not much. He was crazy about Olive Wilson last year, and will be crazy about somebody else before long. He’s one of those fellows who find a pretty girl a necessary adjunct to life, and if one can’t be had, he will cheerfully and whole-heartedly look for another. When he gets her, he will settle down with her contentedly, and make a devoted and exemplary spouse.

Of course I keep David posted. And of course he wants me to. But he never alludes to Caro in his letters, which are long and interesting, and determinedly cheerful. The little sinner asks for them unblushingly every time she comes over, and is delighted that “dear David” is enjoying himself so, and is so in love with the West. She is ostentatiously fond of him, in a lofty, elder-sisterly manner, and makes frequent inquiries about his health, which appears to be unromantically robust. I cannot see the slightest change in her, except for a wistfulness in her pretty eyes, when she has to say good-bye and go away; and sometimes a fleeting quiver in her smile when she finds me back in bed, as she has done so often of late. I am glad we are to leave together soon, for I can scarcely bear this continual sending her away. I don’t think she can mind going, busy and active as she is, as I mind having her go. I really am a very old lady to be so upset with youthful love affairs: I’m positively decrepit. But if one will have the fun of having children, I suppose one must pay the piper sometimes.

June 6th. I think I am learning the art of living; and isn’t that worth a bit of pain? It is to discover the best in the present moment, though it be no larger than a needle in a haystack, and getting the good of it while one has it. One can relax one’s mind by force of will, and hold it open to small pleasures and tiny interests; and such little things may become one’s salvation in desperate straits! I think that is one of life’s greatest needs, especially as one grows older, or if one is ill—that one should guard and cherish the capacity for enjoyment of trifles. It is to the soul what elasticity of the arteries is to the body; for through it the currents of our thoughts and feelings run in swift and wholesome tides, to the upbuilding of the inner life.

And there’s always something. Though the children have run away, I have the birds.

June 7th. Milly has crossed her Rubicon, sure enough. I was propped up in bed yesterday evening, with my tray before me, and the Peon was eating his dinner from a flower-garnished table beside me, when there came a sudden gust of laughter in the hall, and a moment later she and Caro came in the room.

“Oh, Mammy Lil, won’t you please give us something to eat?” Caro besought. “Just a bite of your fried chicken, Daddy Jack, for two beautiful damsels in distress; and a pinch of oats or something for a poor little pin-feathered bird we’ve got in the hall that’s most mad enough to chew nails—or would be if he were not a saint.”

“Mr. Lincoln is in the parlor, Cousin John,” said Milly. “We don’t want any dinner, of course—he’s going back to town in a few minutes; he just drove us over from home. We want to stay all night—Caro and I.”

The Peon was already in the hall. Milly looked wonderfully pretty, with that light in her eyes, and a soft color in her cheeks, like fire behind a pearl.

“Indeed we do want dinner!” exclaimed Caro. “Come along and help me forage. There’s no use in Bobolink’s going back. He can stay at the hotel in Chatterton tonight, and get back in plenty of time for his business in the morning.—Poor Mammy Lil! We’re not telling you a thing; but I’ll come back in a minute with the whole tale, as soon as I get dinner started.”

She dropped a kiss on the end of my nose—her favorite spot for such attentions—and went out, drawing Milly after her. I heard them in the dining-room with the servants, and then Caro’s gay voice in the parlor a moment; and then she came back to me. She picked a drumstick from the Peon’s dish, and sat on my bed gnawing it, joyfully reminiscent of her recent adventures.

“Mammy Lil,” she began impressively, “jay-baiting is the grandest sport ever invented. Milly doesn’t appreciate the fun of it as much as she might, but she’s dead game; and I’ve been having the time of my life.”

“It’s too bad that Mr. Lincoln couldn’t have been kept free from it, dear. How did that happen?”

“Why, that wasn’t our fault at all. He often comes out in the afternoon and takes Milly out in his car. Then he goes to the hotel in Chatterton for supper, and comes back for the evening. He hardly ever sees Cousin Jay, and when he does, there’s never been any trouble since that time Milly told you about; she’s made him leave at half-past nine ever since.

“They came back early from their drive because I was to be there, and he stopped for a little visit before dinner. He doesn’t stop usually—they stay out till the last minute; and Cousin Jay just jumped to the conclusion Milly had asked him to dinner. We have been teaching Cousin Jay to eat all the breakfast he wants before he leaves the table, and one or two other things, too. If he’s too horrid at dinner we go to our room afterward, and leave him all the evening with nobody to quarrel at. And I suppose he just meant to get even. He came out and told Milly and me to go in the house and get ready for dinner, for he was tired of waiting for us. And then he turned around to Mr. Lincoln—he hadn’t spoken to him at all—and said, ‘It’s time for you to be going, young man, and you needn’t come back after supper. I’m tired of your hanging around here.’ And then he turned on his heel and walked to the house. Oh, I was so mad I could hear my hair crackle! Just feel how crisped-up and woolly it is.”

She bent forward on the bed and pushed her soft curls under my hand, burrowing her nose in the covers.

“What did Mr. Lincoln do?”

“Just behaved like an angel. He didn’t have a thought but for Milly. He forgot all about me, and spoke to her as if they were alone. Mammy Lil, that man’s sweet. He’ll do for Milly, and I told him so afterwards. But Milly was a perfect joy. She gave Bobolink one adoring look. It went to my very toes, so I don’t know what it did to him; and then she said, in the quietest way:

“Won’t you stay here for a few minutes and wait for me? I’m coming back.”

“And he said he’d wait till doomsday, of course! and she took my hand without a word, and into the house we went. It wasn’t nearly dinner time. We went by the back way, and she stopped in the kitchen long enough to tell Jule she wouldn’t be home for several days, and what to do for Cousin Jason. Then we went upstairs and packed a couple of suitcases, and I called Joe to take them down stairs. We all went down the front way, and there he was in the hall.”

“ ‘What the deuce are you doing?’ he snapped.

“ ‘I’m going out of this house,’ said Milly, as quietly as if she’d said she were going out on the porch; ‘and I’m not coming back till you learn your place in it.’

“ ‘I reckon you’ll learn some sense when your mother comes home,’ he sneered. ‘Go play the fool if you want to.’

“Milly didn’t seem to hear him; and somehow that still, deep anger of hers made me ashamed to sputter, so I never said a word. He slammed the door behind us, and we all got in Bobolink’s car and came over.

“Milly told him what she had said to Cousin Jay, and they fixed everything in two minutes. Milly won’t write a word to Cousin Grace, because she’s just obliged to stay with old Mrs. Wood till her daughter gets back, and there’s no use in worrying her. I know you’ll let Milly stay here; and when Cousin Grace comes back, if she’ll make Cousin Jay behave, or go away, Milly will go home and wait to be married till her mother wishes. But if Cousin Grace won’t stop him, Milly’s going to marry Bobolink right off, in church, with just the clothes she has. And I think she’s exactly right.”

“She’s right to come here and wait for Grace to settle it,” I said; “and Grace will settle it right, I know.”

But I was half afraid, even as I said it. Cousin Jason has bent Grace like a reed from her babyhood, and almost—perhaps not quite—broken her. Could she stand against him, even if she would?

June 9th. Could she indeed? As if love couldn’t set the gentlest face like a flint!

We were all in here this morning, Milly and Caro both busy with a lace-y frock for the bride-to-be—“just in case she has to be a bride next week”—when I saw Grace driving up. I did not tell them she was coming, and her arms were around Milly before the child knew she was there.

“You darling!” said Grace; “you’ll have to forgive me dear, as Robert has done. He’s coming out this afternoon to take dinner and spend the night.”

Milly gave a little gasp, and then dropped her head on her mother’s shoulder and began to cry. Caro snatched up the filmy stuff they were working on, threw it over Milly like a bridal veil, and pirouetted around the two, crooning the dolefulest tune imaginable, her eyes dancing with fun. Grace looked up.

“Don’t stop petting Milly a minute,” Caro exhorted; “she’s a perfect heroine, and Bobolink’s a dear. I’m just singing a requiem for my jay-bird kin.”

“But, Mother,” asked Milly, sitting up, “how ever did you hear about it? And how did you happen to come home so soon? And when did you see—Robert?” She blushed beautifully as she called his name.

“Your uncle telephoned me night before last. I knew he had everything wrong, of course; but I was sure that enough was the matter for me to come home and see about it. It was all right to leave Mother, for Annie promised to stay, and Mary is coming the last of the week. So I telephoned Robert to meet me in town yesterday at twelve o’clock. I stayed there last night because there were several things to do in taking business affairs into my own hands again; and before I saw Brother Jason I had to think out clearly what I wished to say.”

“Have you seen him?”

“Yes, I went there first this morning.” She hesitated, a troubled look in her eyes. Milly drew her closer.

“Poor mother!” she said.

“It is your uncle who needs sympathy, dear, though he will not have it. And I know it is partly my fault, and partly the whole family’s, as well as his. We have all given up to him all our lives, under color of being kind and patient and magnanimous, and all that, when at the bottom we were just afraid to oppose him; and he—suffers.”

“O, Mother, I’m sorry!” cried Milly. “I’ll give up!”

“Now, Cousin Grace, I call that a shame,” broke in Caro. “No matter what you and Milly do, you make a fault and a penance out of it to shield him and hurt yourselves. It isn’t fair. He knows he’s outrageous, and he doesn’t care; and I just think he ought to be hurt, to find out what he’s been doing to other people. If he’s gone, do let Milly enjoy herself, for once. But is he gone, really?”

“He’s going,” said Grace. “I wanted him to stay, as my guest, and not as the master of the house. But he—he was very angry. He is to leave this morning, while I am here. He’s going back to his own house and live there all alone.”

“And a mighty good thing for him,” declared Caro. “When I used to indulge in tantrums like his, Mammy Lil always made me go stay by myself till I was what she called a social creature. I think I’ll go over and see Cousin Jason and tell him about it. I could always come back the second I was willing to be polite, and so can he. Think of Cousin Jason’s emerging a social creature! Butterflies and caterpillars won’t be in it. But if Milly isn’t to be married next week, when do we begin on the trousseau?”

The talk passed into a discussion of clothes, and drifted about that interesting topic till time for them to go home. They found their house empty, except for the servants. Cousin Jason had gone, as he said, without eating again beneath his sister’s roof.

June 16th. I suppose the excitement of Cousin Jason’s deposition was a little too much for me: I’ve been curled up dead-’possum-fashion for a week. Now I’m uncurling again, and showing that, like the ’possum, I’m not so dead as I look. Caro came back, whether or no, and took charge of me. It is a great comfort to have her.

June 19th. A slow pull and a hard one. But I make it, inch by inch.

June 21st. Courage, patience and laughter—life would be impossible without them. Yet the first necessity, and the last, is love. If one only loves enough, one can fight anything, and fight always, while breath and consciousness last.

June 24th.

July 7th. I have seen the woods in summer time again! It was winter when I left home for those three years, and winter when I went back; and, though one does not think of the country passed in a winter journey as dead—for the winter’s story of life reserved is as vivid as the summer one of life out-poured—yet one longs to see, far out-spread in breeze and sunshine, the close-shut life of the winter buds.

As soon as the doctor would allow it, the Peon and Caro brought me here. We came through the mountains nearly all the way—one long splendor of rhododendrons, wild phlox, azaleas, laurel, and briar rose, all in glorious bloom; and above them the green billows of the trees, with great masses of chestnut blooms for foam. And everywhere the mountains themselves, green and dark near at hand, and blue and faint in the distance; and between them the valleys, heaped with beauty and over-flowing with life.

The Boss and the Madam met us in Baltimore, and brought us to this heavenly place. My room is downstairs, with windows on three sides, and wide doors opening on a quiet end of the wide piazza, which nearly encircles the house. I can be wheeled there, straight from the bed, to a couch-like hammock, where a cranky back may be as comfortable as its own bad temper will allow; and my bed is under a long row of windows, just as it is at home. I can look out across the small plateau, occupied by the cottage grounds, to mountains, near and far, and to the glory of the sunset skies. And again, from the porch, on mountains, and slopes where the summer cottagers have set their beautiful homes.

I was ashamed to come here in this battered condition; when the Madam wrote for us I expected to be walking all about by the time I came. But they would have me, and the Peon and Caro were of the same mind. For myself, I can scarcely imagine a lovelier place to get well in; the loving-kindness indoors is as fine a tonic as the mountain air outside.

I have not seen any of the Peon’s family in all these years of my invalidism, but I find them in spirit just where I left them—and in body, too, for that matter; for health and love and happiness are a combination to defy time, and the heads of the household are still a bridal pair. Their youthful names for one another, long since adopted by the rest of us, suit their sunny middle-age as well as ever; so the “Boss” and the “Madam” they remain.

One of the daughters is married, and will make but a brief visit this summer. The other, known as Hazel-eyes, is the light of the big house; a quiet little body, wonderfully pretty, her mother’s shadow and her father’s adorer.

The Peon stayed only a couple of days, and went back to our empty nest. He is to go West before long, and will come here on his return to tell me all about David.

Caro is restless and unusually silent, not doing herself justice among strangers. The child has been severely taxed in the last few weeks, and shows it plainly. The roses are all gone, and her eyes are tired and sad. She seems like a new Caro whom I must learn to know. I know I was ill for awhile, though not as ill as they thought; and she never saw me suffer that way before. But it isn’t that which clouds her bright eyes—it can’t be, no matter what she says, now that I am past the worst of it. I wonder will she ever open her heart to me about David. She used to tell me everything. I always said the test of my success in mothering her would come with her falling in love; if she came to me with that, I would know I had done my work aright. And now I see that I have failed. If I had been her real mother I would have known better how to reach her. It is a real motherhood to me, of course, but not to Caro—and perhaps not even to David. So I must lie here and wait, like any other outsider, till everybody knows how it turns out.

July 9th. Yesterday Caro wheeled me out to the line of locusts, which cuts this plateau in half and divides the Boss’s grounds from his neighbor’s. A song sparrow came to call at once, a dear little fellow, all streaks and music. They sing here all day long—they and the winter wrens.

A flicker has a clamorous brood in the tallest locust; they cry every moment, except when their wail is gagged by a worm. Their parents toil incessantly, but I should think their nerves would be on edge. The bluebird mothers, too, are hard at work, for there are dozens of bluebird babies to feed, and bluebird fathers never turn a wing or lend a bill to their upbringing. The babies are cunning, speckled things, their big round eyes ringed with white, giving them an expression of child-like wonder.

This afternoon I am out on my end of the porch, in the hammock. Caro has gone with Hazel-eyes and a party of young folks on an expedition to Bare Rock—a great shelf of granite which juts out near the top of the mountain to the north of us, and from which there is a wonderful view. The Madam is entertaining visitors on the other side of the porch, and I am finding the solitude I need a constant temptation to Grumpyish thoughts.

When one wants to bog down, there are always such unassailable reasons for doing it! I have faced Grumpy down and out about the pain. And I’ve done fairly well about the idleness; that isn’t a losing fight, at least. But I’m just bowled over about the children. And it isn’t altogether that they’re suffering, though that hurts. It’s because they’re suffering away from me, and I can’t do anything until they choose to take me into their confidence.

I’ve been lying here thinking how Grumpy must be enjoying my back-sliding till I’ve made up my mind to fight him to a finish on this also. They have a right to their secrets and to their own lives; it’s the right and natural way. I never repaid Great-aunt Letitia’s love to her, any more than she repaid her mother’s. You don’t pay love back; you pay it forward. The great-aunts paid their love-debt, not to their mother, but to me; and I’ve paid what I owed them to David and Caro; and Caro and David won’t pay to me—they can’t; they’ll pay it to children yet unborn. Why can’t I accept the law, and be glad? It’s trying to grab what isn’t one’s share that makes all the trouble in life, anyway. I’ve always said the most secure possession was the one carried in an open handle and free to fly at a breath: I’ll carry the children that way now. And for amusement, there are still the birds.

July 10th. As I lay on the porch this afternoon, facing the great mountain to the north, the long fingers of the westering light touched the foamy white tops of the chestnut trees, still crowned with their mist of bloom. The light slid across the hollows of the mountain-side, filling the long curves with dark green shadows, a soft, deep background for the maples of the nearer lawns, all golden green in the full sunlight, and for the silver of the wind-ruffled poplars. Locust trees are on every side, a survival of the native forests. Where the light is reflected from their leaves, they are a dark bluish green; but where the sun strikes through them, each leaflet is shining gold, and the long leaves sway at the end of every branch like giant fronds gleaming under some Midas touch.

But even the locusts are far away, across the many-acred lawn. The trees near the house are too young and small to shelter birds; and if I go out to the locusts their foliage is too light and too high to shade my eyes from the glare: so I have been missing the birds. If I could stay with the others it wouldn’t matter; but I must lie alone, and in silence, resting between lines when I write; and Grumpy is boring company. So I’ve been casting envious looks at a place across the road. A long hedge of blossoming privet hides everything but the tree-tops, but there are dozens of them; and wings flash in and out. It is a large place, larger than this; I know there’s a corner in it there I wouldn’t be in the way. The sense of something near and unknown, yet knowable, draws me daily. The Garden of Delight I call it, and listen for the songs which float from it, and long for its shade and sunshine.

When the Madam came to sit with me I confessed my daft condition to her, and she went across the road to the Garden’s owners—two ladies who are friends of hers—and returned presently with the freedom of the Garden for me and my chair. I am to go tomorrow.

I wonder sometimes if people dream of the pleasure they can give through little things. To these ladies I suppose their bit of hospitality is a trifle soon forgotten; but to me it is pure delight. It will hearten me for my fight a thousand times, and lift me clear above the pain a thousand more. It is hard to keep steady when one is so happy. The long, filmy curves of wind-swept silver in the evening sky grow suddenly dim; and when they wheel me back to bed I am “fair lifted,” as the Scotch say, and wait joyfully in the darkness for such sleep as night may bring.

July 11th. The Garden of Delight! A close-shaven sward from which the tiniest bird stands up distinctly; and trees, and trees, and trees! Shrubs and vines, rose-beds, azaleas, tall altheas, clumps of iris, masses of old-fashioned lilies, tangles of honeysuckles on the fences, beds of early phlox, ragged robins, larkspur, and ferns—all things cool and quiet and sweet. In the dense shade of tall shrubs they have left me, the feathery locusts waving overhead, and before me a hitherto unsuspected vista of beauty—the long, long valley which leads to Gettysburg, with the mountains guarding it on either side.

Beyond the greensward lies a beautiful bit of wilderness—ferns and wild flowers under thick-set trees; beyond that, close-shaven grass again, then a bit of clover, and a tangle out of the very heart of the woods. And everywhere are birds. And I, who have longed for the woods for years, and who have never dreamed of finding them outside of the land of Make-Believe, I am here, far off, a thousand miles from everywhere, alone with the sky and the winds and the wild mountains, in a silence of upper air! One can bear one’s body in a place like this: it doesn’t matter that it cannot run, nor walk. One’s mind can run, and fly, and rise so high that the pain lies far below, lost, vanished, like a pebble in the valley when one looks from a free mountain peak against the sky. For one glorious hour I have run away from it—this pain that wrenches and grips; I have been free, free! And so my hope grows bold, and I reach out to touch that happy future when I shall be free in body as well as in mind: it will come—some day!

And oh, foolish one, remember, and learn! For the Garden of Delight was close at hand all the time, only I hadn’t the wit to reach it till my body was carried thither. But there is always a Garden, if one can find it—a Garden of Delight, hidden behind the hedge!

July 15th. The birds are not kind today, even here in the Garden. It is a grey evening, for one thing, and the light is bad for spying out secrets among the leaves. The weather is misty and damp, promising the rain we need; but everything is dry from recent heat, and the insects may be less juicy than usual, and not very tempting eating. Anyway, the birds are not here.

The mist, with the dim light of the evening sun upon it, spreads a film of silver over the blues and greens of the mountains. Down in the valley it deepens till all the colors are faint and soft, from the pale stubble of the nearer wheatfields all up the long valley between the mountains, to where the dim blue of the great battlefield melts into the dim blue of the sky above it.

It was down this Valley, over the road at my feet, that the men of the Southern army tramped after the battle was lost. My own kinsmen were there, following their great leader with the rest, as he passed through the Valley of Defeat. How much seemed lost to them, who can say? But to us of a later generation how plain it is that nothing was lost at Gettysburg which it were well to keep. The really priceless thing they brought away unharmed—the courage which could accept defeat, and turn, without a murmur, in the wreck of the old order, to the upbuilding of a new world. That was a struggle which the world even now knows little of, though it was as wide as the South and as long as a generation’s life-time. It was fought singly, and in silence, in each individual life. Each soul bled inwardly, and only God saw the wounds. But I have sprung from men who fought that fight. Let me look at the Valley, and learn.

July 18th. The wind is at play in the mountains today, and sweeps up the Valley with a sound as of rushing waters, bending the trees before it. The long shadows under the swaying branches know not a moment’s rest; and the racing clouds shift the shafts of sunlight so rapidly from place to place that the very earth seems moving, like the lightest leaf. Few birds are abroad, save the robins, which battle against the unseen powers of the air, only to be blown like autumn leaves. A thrasher, dashed suddenly in front of me, began at once a philosophic hunt for worms—one place was as good as another, no doubt; but a young robin, the black of his crown still separated from the dark ear-coverts by bands of gray, crouches frightened where he falls. His half-drooped wings show a power which explains his venturing abroad; he is full grown, though not yet in full robin dress. He is learning the old lesson of the young: that there are things in life which not even grown-ups can do; and that his liberty is merely a liberty to adjust himself to forces which he cannot hope to control. No wonder he looks a bit dazed!

The Mistress of the Garden comes out presently to look after her flowers. Her face is good to see, and her voice to listen to. Her eyes have the look of one who dwells in that place of peace where happiness and sorrow are fused into one, and are known as equal essentials of the highest joy. She is a lover of Nature, too. One inevitably comes to be, I think, as one travels the long road to serenity of soul. One may observe Nature in youth, no doubt, and love it, too, somewhat; but the real sense of kinship with it is a matter of living, and of growth.

July 25th. Blessed be trees and sunshine, the open sky, and the free winds which fill it! And blessed be the freshness and promise of the new day, coming alike to the light-hearted and to those pain-weary and discouraged.

And the promise never fails. For, whether the new day brings escape or courage, relief or a growing power of patience, whether it means joy or peace, it brings good, and only good; and so through all the soul its sursum corda rings with sweetness and command.

July 28th. After wheeling me over to the Garden yesterday afternoon, Caro left me, to join in an expedition to Bare Rock. When she had gone, I discovered to my horror that I had been deposited beneath the branch of a poplar tree on which some hundreds of caterpillars had just been hatched out. They were so thick that heads, tails and sides touched everywhere, as they lay on leaves and stems; not one could move a hair’s breadth without knocking off the others or climbing over them. What they thought of my proximity I had no means of finding out; but for me it was not a joyful occasion. I could move neither my chair nor myself; so I lay there, gazing up at the wretched things till I began turning into a caterpillar myself, and felt fuzz and wriggles sprouting all over me. But before the transformation was too far advanced to be checked, I heard Caro’s voice behind me.

“Mammy Lil, I don’t want to go walking. May I stay and talk to you?”

I had been feeling specially lonesome of late. I kept telling myself I was getting morbid from long illness and solitude; but it seemed to me that Caro almost avoided me. She waited on me most thoughtfully; but her errands done, she disappeared. There was no more of that dear companionship, when she used to sit near me, reading, or embroidering, while she sang dreamily to herself, or cuddled her head against mine on the pillows in a fellowship which needed no words. Children can’t possibly understand how bereft one feels, shut out. I knew she loved me too well to hurt me; yet I had missed her, under the same roof with her, more than I had missed David far away: the boy had never shut me out like that.

But her voice was different as she asked her question now. I remembered how, years ago, she used to come out of her periods of seclusion in the parlor “nice and social,” as she would sweetly announce, and confess her little soul inside out, clear to her very toes. Before I saw her face I knew the barrier was gone, and I was to have her confidence at last.

But, first of all, I craved deliverance from the caterpillars. Some of them had hunched themselves up ominously, as if they were about to jump down and float across my nose on silken threads. I was very unhappy indeed.

Caro squealed in horror when she saw my plight, and snatched me back from my impending doom. She wheeled me across the shaven grass to the edge of the wood-tangle, and sat on a rock beside me, facing the long Valley once filled with marching men—men who marched from the disaster of outward defeat to the victory of inner conquest.

“Mammy Lil,” she inquired presently, “do you love me any more at all?”

I turned my face to her without speaking. Her eyes filled with sudden tears, and she laid her cheek against my hand.

“You’re the darlingest mother! If you weren’t, I’d be ashamed to tell you. Mammy Lil, I’ve wished sometimes I could murder myself, this last year; I’ve been so cross. It began last summer while I was home on vacation. Everybody in Chatterton made love to Milly or me last summer, except David. He was just as he always was—sweet to both of us, but specially careful of me because he was my brother. And I didn’t feel the same to him at all. I—Mammy Lil, I was as foolish about David as those boys were about us two girls: I was in love with him, over head and ears.” She paused while I stroked her hair.

“You can’t think how ashamed I was. And of course I treated him like a yellow dog. And he behaved perfectly. I was sure, though, that he didn’t suspect—he, nor any one else. And then, at the end of the summer, Cousin Jane told me that David and I were to marry. I didn’t believe you’d ever talked to her about it, of course; but I saw in a flash what it would mean to you—and that David might do it to please you. And I was afraid Cousin Jane suspected what a fool I was. And she went to David, too, and told me that, and told him she’d told me. I did want to wring Cousin Jane’s neck; and I think yet she deserved it!

“David and I had a talk. She just butted our heads together till we had to. He said he’d always cared; but he had made up his mind to wait till I was through school and you were at home again: it wasn’t fair not to. He was lovely. But he was so quiet—and so confident, it seemed to me. I tried to lay him out; I was mad. And he wouldn’t blame me a bit for being mad; but he said he hadn’t asked for any answer yet, and wouldn’t take one till he did ask for it; and that we mustn’t worry you with Cousin Jane’s nonsense, and all that.

“Things rocked along at Christmas, except that I cared more than ever. But when I came back last spring to stay, as soon as you were really better, David began to show me that he—you know, Mammy Lil, how much little things can be made to mean. And I began to see he did care just as I did. We were so happy in April! Only, I kept staving the end of it off. I didn’t want to be pinned down too soon. But David—he understood.

“Then Cousin Jane had to take a hand again. She’d found out Bob White wanted to marry me—or thought he did; and Bob is what she calls a ‘catch.’ She nabbed me that day, as I was coming home from Milly’s, and said the hatefullest things you ever heard in your life—that everybody said I was ‘setting my cap’ for David and pretending to be taking care of you when I was just running after him; and that David had given her to understand he felt very badly about it, because he knew you and I wanted it so much!

“I knew as well as I knew my name that was a lie out of whole cloth; but I was just as angry as if it were true. I never had been reconciled to caring about him before he spoke, anyway. So I went to Cousin Jane’s, as she told me to, and listened to Bob White’s praises till I was sick of everything under the sun. And when David and I went out that afternoon—Mammy Lil, can’t you understand?”

“Dear, I did it myself, once; I ought to understand. But I paid for it afterwards, as you have done. When you’re an old lady like me you’ll know better.”

“I know better now,” she said, with a sudden quiver in her voice. “I—I killed David’s respect for me that afternoon.”

“Nonsense, child,” I exclaimed, “he knows you—and loves you—too well for that.”

“He doesn’t love me at all; he can’t. I let him think—I pretended—I’d just been flirting with him; to lead Bob on.” Her voice died in a shamed silence.

This was serious news, considering David’s nature. If he believed she really cared for some one else, I knew it would take a long time for the notion to work out of his head; and while it was in there he wouldn’t stir. And I had promised not to interfere. I stroked her soft hair in silence for a minute.

“David will never change in his love for you, dear,” I said; “it’s too truly a part of him for that. And when people really love one another, they come together, somehow, soon or late; your Daddy Jack and I were hopelessly separated for weeks.”

“We’ve been separated nearly three months,” said Caro, dolefully; “eleven weeks and four days today. But I’m not going to talk about David any more. What hurts me most of all is the way I’ve treated you. You ought to hate me if you don’t. I—”

I laid my hand over her mouth.

“What’s the use of being older than you if I can’t understand, child? And I’ve travelled every step of the way before. Everything that isn’t right will come right between you and David; but with you and me everything is right already. Just drop your troubles under the trees, dearie, as I do, and open your heart to the hills and the sky. Isn’t today worth yesterday’s storm?”

She sat up and looked across the Valley. The mountains stood out in the afternoon sunlight all the clearer for the long shadows already gathering in the hollows; each leaf and grass blade was shining fresh after the rain, and everywhere was a flutter and stir of wings. A nuthatch crept down a locust trunk before us, a yellow-billed cuckoo slipped by overhead; and all down the hillside the swallows swept in long, beautiful curves, their bright breasts shining against the sun.

“Dear,” I said presently, “don’t you see, out of doors here, how wise it is to take the long look at life? The mountains make me ashamed of my fretting. And life is working toward this beauty all the time; the winters in the way don’t matter; they pass. And yet before they pass they teach us to love life better when it re-appears. When your happiness is safe in your hands once more, you won’t hurt it again for a child’s anger or a fool’s speech. I know; for I learned it, too.”

She laid her cheek against my hand in silence, and we watched together while the sun went down. The blue shadows overflowed the hollows of the mountains and met across the green ridges on their sides. Against that shadowed background the poplars of the Garden, smitten by the last rays of sunlight, shone like silver, and the locusts like fronds of gold.

Far below, in the Valley, lay the peace of the coming twilight, and all about us were the soft murmuring of birdlings settling down to rest, and of mothers crooning over them as they slept. And at last the gardener came over from the Madam’s, and wheeled me back, with Caro by my side.

August 2nd. The Peon is with David now, and I shall soon be having news. He did not start as early as he hoped, and was detained on the way; but being there at last, he will soon be able to tell me something definite about David’s coming home. I haven’t meddled a meddle: not that I’ve earned any frill to my halo thereby; it’s just that I know by my own past Caro would catch up with me if I tried it, even if I hadn’t promised David. So I’m pinning my hopes to the Peon: he has been so very non-committal that he must have something on his mind. But I can’t share these hopes with Caro, and they wouldn’t help her if I could: she is in that stage of penitence where it is against her principles for her to accept consolation, so far as David is concerned. Her misery, poor little soul, is the only comfort she can allow herself; and if her happiness is to have a thorough recovery, the process cannot be hurried.

August 5th. I woke at half-past four this morning to find a fat white cloud sitting on the lawn outside, as if he owned the premises. Not a mountain visible; and beneath the locusts’ misty arches the trees on the neighboring lawn gleam pale and uncertain, mere grey-green ghosts of living things.

The cloud isn’t altogether outside. My books on the stand beside me are arching their covers with the dampness, and my field-glasses are moist to the touch; the room feels dank and uncanny, and the heavy air is hard to breathe. One needs a mental rain-coat on a day like this—especially when no letters come from a sky-larking Peon!

August 8th. Days of rain on the parched earth. Gray days, with soft mists heaped against the mountains, blending earth and sky in one. Days when one’s horizon is lost—not gone, but withdrawn from sight; days when the mountains have vanished and the valleys melted away, and nothing is very clear to consciousness but this small bed and the pain which lies upon it. If mists crept as close about one’s inner vision, doubt would seem normal on days like this, and despair the quintessence of common sense. Yet under the veiling vapors the brown grass is growing green again, the hard earth soft, instinct with power, and prodigal of gifts once more.

Now comes a distant roll of thunder, a wind that sweeps the vapors from the grass as tears are wiped from sodden eyes, a flash of blinding light, a bending and tossing of leaf-laden boughs; and over the mountain the storm-cloud rises, black against the pale gray of the sky. Then up the valley comes the wall of water; and behind it the world is new.

A special delivery letter from the Peon! Caro stood by while I opened it, asking nothing, but her color coming and going. It was only a few lines; but it said he would be here on the tenth. He has written not a word since he has been out there about the things nearest to all our hearts; but at least we shall know something in two days more.