"No matter," said Mrs. Grumble comfortably, "there's the baby; you can't get around that."

"Mrs. Grumble," said Mr. Jeminy earnestly, "I am going to Farmer Barly.

I am going to say to him, 'Let me have Anna's baby, and we'll say no more about it.' Yes, that is what I am going to do."

"Well," gasped Mrs. Grumble, throwing herself back in her chair, "well, I never . . . so that's it . . . I can tell you this: the day that baby comes into this house, I go out of it. Why, who ever heard of such a thing? No, indeed."

"There," she thought to herself, "that's what comes of people like Mrs.

Wicket."

"Mrs. Grumble," said Mr. Jeminy.

"I've no more to say," said Mrs. Grumble.

"Mrs. Grumble," pleaded Mr. Jeminy, "I am an old man. There is nothing left for me to do in the world any more. I am sure you would be pleased with Anna's baby. Let us do this much for youth; for the new world."

"I declare," cried Mrs. Grumble, "you'll drive me clean out of my wits.

The new world . . . you mean Sodom and Gomorrah, more like. The new world . . . sakes alive."

"Mrs. Grumble," said Mr. Jeminy, "the old world is dead and gone. Let the young be free to build a new world. It will be happier than ours.

It will be a world of love, and candor. Perhaps it will be also a world of poverty. That would not do any harm, Mrs. Grumble."

"A fine world," said Mrs. Grumble. "At least, I won't live to see much of it, I've that to be thankful for."

"Finer than what it is," retorted Mr. Jeminy, losing his temper, "finer than what it is. Not the same, sad pattern."

"The old pattern is good enough for me," replied Mrs. Grumble.

"You're a fossil," said Mr. Jeminy.

Then Mrs. Grumble raised her voice in prayer. "Lord," she prayed, "don't let me forget myself. Because if I do . . ."

"Yes, that's it," cried Mr. Jeminy, "stop up your ears . . ." And out he went in a rage. Mrs. Grumble, left alone, looked after him with flashing eyes and a heaving bosom. "Oh," she breathed, "if I could only lay my hands on him."

But when she did, at last, lay hands on him, it was not in the way she looked for, as she sat rocking up and down, waiting for him to come home again.

IX

THE SCHOOLMASTER LEAVES HILLSBORO, HIS WORK THERE SEEMINGLY AT AN END

Mr. Jeminy came slowly out of the post-office, and turned up the road leading to his house. In one hand, crumpled in his pocket, he held his dismissal from Hillsboro school: "On account of age," it said. Next morning, at nine o'clock, the new teacher was coming to take over the little schoolhouse, with its splintered desks, the dusty blackboard, and the colored maps.

As he walked, the sun sank in the west, and evening crept up the road after him. The air was damp; he could see his breath pa.s.s out in fog before his face. The wind, blowing above his head, showered down the last dried, yellow leaves upon his path; before him he saw the chilly sky with its faint, lonely star, and over him the half moon, like a slice; and he heard the autumn wind, steady and cold. "You fields," he said, "you trees, you meadows and little paths, I do not believe you wanted to dismiss me. You must have enjoyed the daisy chains my pupils used to weave for you in the spring. Now they will learn the use of figures and percents, and the names of cities I have forgot. I will never hear again the voices of children at the playhour come tumbling in through the school windows. For at my age one does not begin to teach again. But it is ridiculous to say that I am an old man."

It grew darker and darker, the trees creaked and popped in the cold, or groaned like ba.s.s viols; and all along the roadside Mr. Jeminy could see the feeble glimmer of fireflies, fallen among the leaves. He said to them, "Little creatures, my flame is also spent. But I do not intend, like you, to lie by the roadside in the wind, and keep myself warm with memories. Now I am going where I can be of use to others.

For I am brisk and tough, and do not hope to gain by my efforts more than I deserve."

Thus, following his thoughts, Mr. Jeminy pa.s.sed, without knowing it, the house where Mrs. Grumble, sitting by the stove, awaited his return.

The moon, riding out the wind above his head, peered down at him between the branches, as he stepped from shadow into moonlight, and again into shadow. Under the trees the dry, fallen leaves stirred about his feet, and other leaves, which he could not see, fell near him in the dark. As he pa.s.sed the little orchard belonging to Mrs. Wicket, he heard the ripe apples dropping in the night.

In the gray of dawn, he found himself approaching a farmhouse somewhere south of Milford, whose lighted lamp, pale yellow in the early twilight, drew him from the road, across the fields. As he turned through the tumbled gate, a woman came to the door, her dress billowing back from her in the breeze.

"Come in, old man," she said.

X

BUT HE IS SOUGHT AFTER ALL

In Mrs. Tomkin's garden the hydrangeas were already pink with frost, and the leaves of the maples, fallen upon the ground, covered the earth with patches of yellow and red. By the side of the road, piles of leaves, raked together by Mr. Tomkins, were set on fire; they burned with a crackle and a roar, and gave off an odor at once pungent and regretful, which mingled in the fresh autumn air with the fragrance of grapes and cider, as the last apples of the season, too old and ripe to keep, went to the press back of the barn.

Juliet liked to play in Mrs. Tomkins' garden, where the hens, each anxious to be not the first, but the second, ran after each other as though to say, "You go and see, and I'll come and look."

Now she sat on the steps of Mrs. Tomkins' porch with her doll Sara, while her mother, Mrs. Wicket, watched at the bedside of Mrs. Grumble, who was very ill. Juliet did not realize how ill she was; she thought Mrs. Grumble might have croup. But Mrs. Ploughman, who sat on the porch with Mrs. Tomkins, knew that Mrs. Grumble had pneumonia. "Got,"

she explained, "by setting up that night, when Mr. Jeminy never came home."

"No," said Mrs. Tomkins, "he never came home. If it had been me, in Mrs. Grumble's place, I'd have gone to bed, instead of parading around with a lantern all night, catching my death."

"Mr. Jeminy," said Mrs. Ploughman, "was a queer man, and no mistake. I remember the day he stepped in to pay me a call. Mrs. Crabbe was with me. 'Mrs. Ploughman,' he said, 'and you, Mrs. Crabbe, we're leaving a lot of trouble behind us.' Fancy that, Mrs. Tomkins--as though I'd up and go any minute. 'Mr. Jeminy,' I said, 'I'm not afraid to die. When my time comes, I'll go joyfully.'"

"No doubt you will," said Mrs. Tomkins comfortably.

"Well," said Mrs. Ploughman, "it's a good thing, in my opinion, he was made to give up teaching school. It's a wonder the children know anything at all, Mrs. Tomkins. I declare, it used to mix me up something terrible, just to listen to him."

Mrs. Tomkins gazed at her sewing with thoughtful pleasure. "It was a hard blow to him," she said. "He did his best. Maybe he was a little queer. But he harmed no one. He used to tell the children stories.

"How is Mrs. Grumble," she asked, "to-day?"

"Weak," said Mrs. Ploughman; "very weak, out of her mind part of the time with the fever."

"Do you calculate she'll die, Mrs. Ploughman?"

"I don't know. But I don't calculate she'll live, Mrs. Tomkins.

Still, we must hope for the best. This is the way it was; first the influenza, and then the pneumony. Double pneumony, the doctor says.

There's a lot of it around again, like last year. It takes the young and the hardy. It won't get me. No.

"There's nothing to do for it," she added, "nothing, that is, beyond nursing."

"If it wasn't for Mrs. Wicket," said Mrs. Tomkins, "I expect she'd have been dead before this. Mrs. Wicket's a capable woman in things like that. Capabler than Miss Beal. There was no one else ever made me so comfortable. I have to say that about her; Mrs. Grumble's getting the best of care. And I'm looking after Juliet. Not that she's any trouble; she's as quiet as a mouse, playing all day long with her dolls."

But Mrs. Ploughman could not find it in her heart to forgive Mrs.

Wicket for having been the cause of her grandson Noel's death. "Yes,"

she said, "I expect Mrs. Grumble's getting good care. But when a body's dying, 'tisn't so much care you want, as salvation. I wouldn't want any Jezebel hanging over my deathbed, Mrs. Tomkins, thank you."

Mrs. Tomkins, who attended each Sunday the little Baptist church at Adams' Forge, did not believe that she and Mrs. Ploughman would meet in heaven. However, she did not choose this moment to mention it. "It may be as you say, Mrs. Ploughman," she remarked, "or it may be that we've been too hard oh Mrs. Wicket. Mind you, I don't speak for her life with that bad egg of Eben Wicket's. But we ought to forgive others as we would have others forgive us."