as she
sank down on the stone that still held a trace of the warmth from the
sun, and made room for Everett beside her with one of her ever-ready,
gracious little gestures. "And it's lovely to have you here to look at
it with me," she added. "So many times I have sat here alone with the
miracle, and my heart has ached for the whole world to get the vision
of it at least. I've tried sending my love of it out in little locust
prayers to folks over the Ridge. Did you ever happen to get one any
spring?"

"Last April I turned down a commission for a false test for the
biggest squeeze-out copper people in the world, fifty thousand in it
to me. I thought it was moral courage, but I know now it was just on
account of the locusts blooming in Harpeth Valley at Sweetbriar. Do
you get any connection?" he demanded lightly, if a bit unevenly.

"To think that would be worth all the loneliness," answered Rose Mary
gently. "Things were very hard for me the first year I had to come
back from college. I used to sit here by the hour and watch Providence
Road wind away over the Ridge and nothing ever seemed to come or go
for me. But that was only for a little while, and now I never get the
time to breathe between the things that happen along Providence Road
for me to attend to. I came back to Sweetbriar like an empty crock,
with just dregs of disappointment at the bottom, and now I'm all ready
every morning to have five gallons of lovely folks-happenings poured
into a two-and-a-half-gallon capacity. I wish I were twins or twice as
much me."

"Why, you have never told me before, Rose Mary, that you belong to the
new-woman persuasion, with a college hall-mark and suffragist
leanings. I have made the mistake of putting you in the home-guard
brigade and classing you fifty years behind your times. Don't tell me
you have an M.A. I can't stand it to-night."

"No, I haven't got one," answered Rose Mary with both a smile and a
longing in her voice. "I came home in the winter of my junior year.
My father was one of the Harpeth Valley boys who went out into the
world, and he came back to die under the roof where his fathers had
fought off the Indians, and he brought poor little motherless me to
leave with the aunts and Uncle Tucker. They loved me and cared for me
just as they did Uncle Tucker's son, who was motherless, too, and a
few years after he went out into the world to seek the fortune he felt
so sure of, I was given my chance at college.