to a chair.

"O Lord!" she moaned. "My Lord!" This was the worst of all the days since
he had died. She understood it now. The flowers were gone. They had
formed a link between the present and that day when they made the
sitting-room so sweet. Even the fragrance of that last sad hour had
fled. Suddenly she laughed, a bitter note. She spoke aloud:--

"If the Lord'll send me some flowers afore to-morrer night, I'll believe
in Him. If He'll send me one flower or a sprig o' green, I'll believe in
Him, an' hold up my head rejoicin', like Still Lucy."

She repeated the words, as if to One who heard. Thereafter a quickened
energy possessed her. She got her dinner alertly, and with some vestige
of the interest she had been used to feel when she cooked for two. All
the afternoon it was the same. Her mind dwelt passionately upon the
compact she had offered the Unseen. Over and over she repeated the terms
of it, sometimes with eager commentary.

"It can't hurt nobody," she reasoned, in piteous argument. Her gnarled
hands trembled as she worked, and now, with nobody to note her weakness,
tears fell unregarded down her face. "There's things I wouldn't ask for,
whether or no. Mebbe they'd have to be took away from somebody else; an'
I never was one to plead up poverty. But there's plenty o' flowers in
the world. 'Twouldn't upset nothin' for me to have jest one afore
to-morrer night. If I can have one flower afore to-morrer night, I shall
know there's a God in heaven."

The day began with a sense of newness and exaltation at which she
wondered. Until this hour, death had briefly ruled the house and chilled
the air in it. Her son's overthrow had struck at the heart of her
vitality and presaged her own swift doom. All lesser interests had
dwindled and grown poor; her life seemed flickering out like a taper in
the breeze. Now grief had something to leaven it. Something had set up
a screen between her and the wind of unmerciful events. There was a
possibility, not of reprieve, but of a message from the unseen good, and
for a moment the candle of her life burned steadily. Since the dead
could not return, stricken mortality had one shadowy hope: that it
should go, in its course, to them, and find them living. Again she vowed
her belief to the God who would send one sign of his well-wishing toward
her.

"I'll set till twelve o'clock this night," she said grimly, laying her
morning fire. "That's eighteen hours. If He can't do suthin' in