Sarah Brown, who worked a great deal more industriously than any one else in sight, soon overtook them, and while conscious of that touch of interested scorn always felt by the One towards the Herd, found relief in watching their vagaries, and presently in speaking to them.

For she needed relief, poor Sarah Brown, her disabilities were catching her up; a hoarse contralto cough was reminding her of many doctors’ warnings against manual work.  She could feel, so to speak, the distant approaching tramp of that pain in her side under whose threat she had lived all her life.  But there were seventy-five beans yet.

The note of her hoe, a high note not quite true pitched, clamoured monotonously upon her brain.  Three blisters and a half were persecuting her hands.

“Let them blist,” she said defiantly.  “This row of beans was given me to hoe, and Death itself shall not take it from me.”

She could almost imagine she saw Death, waiting for her tactfully beyond the last bean.  She had no sense of proportion.  She was so very weary of having her life interrupted by her weakness that anything that she had begun to do always seemed to her worth finishing, even under torture.  To finish every task, in spite of all hindrance, was her only ambition, but it was almost always frustrated.

Seventy more beans.  “Three score and ten,” thought Sarah Brown.  “What’s that?  Only a lifetime.”  She bent to her work.

A great clump of buttercups bestrode her bean row, and as after a struggle she dragged its protesting roots from the earth, something fell from it.

“Oh, a nest,” she gasped.  “Look, I have hoed up a nest.”

“Good gracious,” exclaimed a fairy.  “Look what she’s done.  It’s Clement’s nest, poor chap, he only married in February.  Say, girls, here’s Clement’s semi-detached gone up.”

Cries of consternation were heard from every bean-row.

Clement’s nest was really almost more than semi-detached.  It had been but lightly wedged between two buttercup stalks.  The two eggs in it were at once unseated, and one was broken.  Sarah Brown was deeply distressed.

“What a blind fool I am,” she said, trying helplessly to replace the nest.  “Won’t Clement ever come back?”

“Mrs. Clement won’t,” said the nearest fairy.  “She is almost hysterical about the sanctity of the home, and all that.  She’ll probably get a divorce now.”

“Oh, poor Clement, poor Clement,” said Sarah Brown.  “Will he be terribly cut up?”

“There he is,” replied the fairy, pointing upward.  “He’s watching you.  That’s Clement’s voice you hear.”

“Clement’s voice,” exclaimed Sarah Brown.  “Singing like that?  Why, he sounds perfectly happy.”

“Perfectly happy,” mocked the fairy.  “His family only sings like that when it’s upset.  Perfectly happy indeed!  Can’t you understand tragedy when you hear it?”

Sarah Brown with despairing care tucked the nest up under a bean, and replaced the unbroken egg.