then it was her own mother, dead thirty
years ago. Once she started violently and sat up. Someone had been
singing--the echo of it was still in the room:

Over my grave keep the green willers growing.

The yellow harvest moon flooded the room with its soft light. She could
see through the window how it lay like a mantle on the silent fields.
It was one of those glorious, cloudless nights, with a hint of frost in
the air that come just as the grain is ripening. From some place down
the creek a dog barked; once in a while a cow-bell tinkled: a horse
stamped in the stable and then all was still. Numberless stars shone
through the window. The mystery of life and death and growing things
was around her. As for man his days are as grass; as a flower of the
field so he flourisheth--for it is soon cut off and we fly away--fly
away where?--where?--her head throbbed with the question.

The eastern sky flushed red with morning; a little ripple came over the
grain. She watched it listlessly. Polly had died at daybreak--didn't
the letter say? Just like that, the light rising redder and redder, the
stars disappearing, she wondered dully to herself how often she would
see the light coming, like this, and yet, and yet, some time would be
the last, and then what?

We shall be where suns are not,
A far serener clime.

came to her memory she knew not from whence. But she shuddered at it.
Polly's eyes, dazed, pleading like the lamb's, rose before her; or was
it that Other Face, tender, thorn-crowned, that had been looking upon
her in love all these long years!

She spoke so kindly to Pearl when she went into the kitchen that the
little girl looked up apprehensively.

"Are ye not well, ma'am?" she asked quickly.

Mrs. Motherwell hesitated.

"I did not sleep very well," she said, at last.

"That's the mortgage," Pearl thought to herself.

"And when I did sleep, I had such dreadful dreams," Mrs. Motherwell
went on, strangely communicative.

"That looks more like the cancer," Pearl thought as she stirred the
porridge.

"We got bad news," Mrs. Motherwell said. "Polly is dead."

Pearl stopped stirring the porridge.

"When did she die," she asked eagerly.

"The morning before yesterday morning, about daylight."

Pearl made a rapid calculation. "Oh good!" she cried,
"goody--goody--goody! They were in time."

She saw her mistake in a moment, and hastily put her hand over her
mouth as if to prevent the unruly memb