e, and as she stood in the center of the room she seemed to gather
all of the light to her, like the saints in the old pictures. She was so
perfectly lovely that I almost wanted to cry. I can't explain it, but
there was something pathetic about her beauty.

She set the candle down and opened an old brass-bound chest. She took
out a roll of cloth and brought it over and laid it on the table beside
the candle.

"I bought it with some of the money that your Billy got for my Sheffield
tray," she said. Then she turned to me with a quick motion and laid her
hands on my shoulders. "Oh, you very dear--when I saw you making those
little things--I knew that--that the good Lord had led me. Will
you--will you--show me--how?"

I told Billy about it on the way home.

"She doesn't know anything about sewing, and she hasn't any patterns,
and I am to go up every day, and William Watters will come for me with
his mule--"

Then I cried about her a little, because it seemed so dreadful that she
should be there all alone, without any one to sustain her and cherish
her as Billy did me.

"Oh, Billy, Billy," I said to him, "I'd rather live over a grocery store
with you than live in a palace with anybody else--"

And Billy said, "Don't cry, lady love, you are not going to live with
anybody else."

And he put his arm around me, and as we walked along together in the
April night it was like the days when we had been young lovers, only our
joy in each other was deeper and finer, for then we had only guessed at
happiness, and now we knew--

Well, I went up every day. William Watters came for me, and I carried my
patterns and we sat in the big west room, and right under the window a
pair of robins were building a nest.

We watched them as they worked, and it seemed to us that no matter how
hard we toiled those two birds kept ahead. "I never dreamed," Lady
Crusoe remarked one morning, "that they were at it all the time like
this."

"You wait until they begin to feed their young," I told her. "People
talk about being as free as a bird. But I can tell you that they slave
from dawn until dark. I have seen a mother bird at dusk giving a last
bite to one squalling baby while the father fed another."

Lady Crusoe laid down her work and looked out over the hills. "The
father," she said, and that was all for a long time, and we stitched and
stitched, but at last she spoke straight from her thoughts: "How dear
your husband is to you!"

"That