s 325
XXII. A Summons of the Night 341
XXIII. Lest I Forget 359

The Bondboy

CHAPTER I

DELIVERED INTO BONDAGE

Sarah Newbolt enjoyed in her saturnine, brooding way the warmth of April
sunshine and the stirring greenery of awakening life now beginning to
soften the brown austerity of the dead winter earth. Beside her kitchen
wall the pink cones of rhubarb were showing, and the fat buds of the
lilacs, which clustered coppicelike in her dooryard, were ready to
unlock and flare forth leaves. On the porch with its southern exposure
she sat in her low, splint-bottomed rocker, leaning forward, her elbows
on her knees.

The sun tickled her shoulders through her linsey dress, and pictured
her, grotesquely foreshortened, upon the nail-drawn, warped, and beaten
floor. Her hands, nursing her cheeks, chin pivoted in their palms, were
large and toil-distorted, great-jointed like a man's, and all the
feminine softness with which nature had endowed her seemed to have been
overcome by the masculine cast of frame and face which the hardships of
her life had developed.

She did not seem, crouched there like an old cat warming herself in the
first keen fires of spring, conscious of anything about her; of the low
house, with its battered eaves, the sprawling rail-fence in front of it,
out of which the gate was gone, like a tooth; of the wild bramble of
roses, or the generations of honeysuckle which had grown, layer upon
layer--the under stratum all dead and brown--over the decaying arbor
which led up to the cracked front door. She did not seem conscious that
time and poverty had wasted the beauties of that place; that shingles
were gone from the outreaching eaves, torn away by March winds; that
stones had fallen from the chimney, squatting broad-shouldered at the
weathered gable; that panes were missing from the windows, their places
supplied by boards and tacked-on cloth, or that pillows crowded into
them, making it seem a house that stopped its ears against the
unfriendly things which passengers upon the highway might speak of it.

Time and poverty were pressing upon Sarah Newbolt also, relaxing there
that bright hour in the sun, straying away from her troubles and her
vexations like an autumn butterfly among the golden leaves, unmindful of
the frost which soon must cut short its day. For, poor as she was in all
that governm