She went back to her digging and the agent clicked the gate back of his retreat.  Suddenly she stood up without remembering to ease her back.  She heard the first shot from the enemy who was to advance so rapidly upon her thereafter.  “Wait a minute,” she called to the agent.  As he paused, she made a swift calculation.  “I don’t believe I want a dozen,” she said, much surprised.  “I can’t think of that many little ones.”  The agent took his notebook.  “How many?” he asked.

The ponderous old woman stared at him absently, while she made a mental canvass of the town.  She spoke with a gasp.  “We don’t need any!” she cried.  “There ain’t a child in school under eleven.”

“Take some now and have them handy,” urged the agent.

Miss Abigail’s gaze again narrowed in silent calculation.  When she spoke her exclamation was not for her listener.  She had forgotten him.  “Good Lord of Love!” she cried.  “There ain’t a single one comin’ up to sit on those chairs if I should buy ’em!”

The agent was utterly blotted from her mind.  She did not know when he left her garden.  She only knew that there were no children in Greenford.  There were no children in her town!  “Why, what’s comin’ to Greenford!” she cried.

And yet, even as she cried out, she was aware that she had had a warning, definite, ominous, a few days before, from the lips of Molly Leonard.  At that time she had put away her startled uneasiness with a masterful hand, burying it resolutely where she had laid away all the other emotions of her life, under the brown loam of her garden.  But it all came back to her now.

Her thin, fluttering, little old friend had begun with tragic emphasis, “The roof to the library leaks!”

Miss Abigail had laughed as usual at Molly’s habit of taking small events with bated breath.  “What of it?” she asked.  “That roof never was good, even back in the days when ’twas a private house and my great-uncle lived in it.”

Miss Molly fluttered still more before the awfulness of her next announcement.

“Well, the talk is that the town won’t vote a cent toward repairs.”

“They’ll have to!  You can’t get along without a library!”

“No, they won’t.  The talk is that the men won’t vote to have the town give a bit of money for shingles.  No, nor to pay somebody to take the place of Ellen Monroe as librarian.  She’s got work in the print mill at Johnsonville and is going to move down there to be near her mother’s family.”

“Oh, talk!” said Miss Abigail with the easy contempt she had for things outside her garden hedge.  “Haven’t you heard men talk before?”

“But they say really they won’t! They say nobody ever goes into it any more when the summer folks go away in the autumn.”

Miss Abigail’s gesture indicated that the thing was unthinkable.  “What’s the matter with young folks nowadays, anyhow?  They always used to run there and chatter till you couldn’t hear yourself think.”