soiled, the whole time. And I do try so hard...."

Now with all these bewilderments she was to have to do. She wondered if
she would know how to dress him. Once she had watched Mis' Winslow dress
a child, and she remembered what unexpected places Mis' Winslow had
buttoned--buttonholes that went _up and down_ in the skirt bands, and so
on. Armholes might be too small and garters too tight, and how was one
ever to know? If it were a little girl now ... but a little boy.... What
would she talk to him about while they ate together?

[Illustration: "HE STOOD LOOKING AT IT FROM PART WAY ACROSS THE ROAD"]

She lay in the dark and planned--with no pleasure, but merely because
she always planned everything, her dress, her baking, what she would say
to this one and that. She would put up a stove in the back parlour, and
give him the room "off." She was glad that the parlour was empty and
clean--"no knick-knacks for a boy to knock around," she found herself
thinking. And a child would like the bedroom wallpaper, with the owl
border. When Summer came he could have the room over the dining room,
with the kitchen roof sloping away from it where he could dry his
hazelnuts--she had thought of the pasture hazelnuts, first thing. There
were a good many things a boy would like about the place: the bird house
where the martins always built, the hens, the big hollow tree, the
pasture ant hill.... She would have to find out the things he liked to
eat. She would have to help him with his lessons--she could do that for
only a little while, until he would be too old to need her. Then maybe
there would come the time when he would ask her things that she would
not know....

She fell asleep wondering how he would look. Already, not from any
impatience to have this done, but because that was the way in which she
worked, she had his room in order; and her picture of his father was by
the mirror, the young face of his father. Something faded had been
written below the picture, and this she had painstakingly rubbed away
before she set the picture in its place. Next day, while she was working
on Mis' Jane Moran's bead basque that was to be cut over and turned, she
laid it aside and cut out a jacket pattern, and a plaited waist
pattern--just to see if she could. These she rolled up impatiently and
stuffed away in her pattern bookcase.

"I knew how to do them all the while, and I never knew I knew," she
thought with annoyed surprise. "I s'pose I'll w