At this statement Elly could feel her thoughts getting bigger and longer and higher, like something being opened out.  “And the heaven was removed as a scroll when it is rolled up.”  That sentence she’d heard in church and never understood, and always wondered what was behind, what they had seen when the scroll was rolled up. . . .  Something inside her now seemed to roll up as though she were going to see what was behind it.  How much longer time was than you thought!  Mother had sat there as a little girl . . . a little girl like her.  Mother who was now grown-up and finished, knowing everything, never changing, never making any mistakes.  Why, how could she have been a little girl!  And such a short time ago that Aunt Hetty remembered her sitting there, right there, maybe come in from walking across that very meadow, and down those very rocks. What had she been thinking about, that other little girl who had been Mother? “Why” . . .  Elly stopped eating, stopped breathing for a moment.  “Why, she herself would stop being a little girl, and would grow up and be a Mother!” She had always known that, of course, but she had never felt it till that moment.  It made her feel very sober; more than sober, rather holy.  Yes, that was the word,—­holy,—­like the hymn.  Perhaps some day another little girl would sit there, and be just as surprised to know that her mother had been really and truly a little girl too, and would feel queer and shy at the idea, and all the time her mother had been only Elly.  But would she be Elly any more, when she was grown up?  What would have happened to Elly?  And after that little girl, another; and one before Mother; and back as far as you could see, and forwards as far as you could see.  It was like a procession, all half in the dark, marching forward, one after another, little girls, mothers, mothers and little girls, and then more . . . what for . . . oh, what for?

She was a little scared.  She wished she could get right up and go home to Mother.  But the procession wouldn’t stop . . . wouldn’t stop. . . .

Aunt Hetty hung up the last bag.  “There,” she said, “that’s all we can do here today.  Elly, you’d better run along home.  The sun’ll be down behind the mountain now before you get there.”

Elly snatched at the voice, at the words, at Aunt Hetty’s wrinkled, shaking old hand.  She jumped up from the trunk.  Something in her face made Aunt Hetty say, “Well, you look as though you’d most dropped to sleep there in the sun.  It does make a person feel lazy this first warm March sun.  I declare this morning I didn’t want to go to work house-cleaning.  I wanted to go and spend the day with the hens, singing over that little dozy ca-a-a-a they do, in the sun, and stretch one leg and one wing till they most broke off, and ruffle up all my feathers and let ’em settle back very slow, and then just set.”

They had started downstairs before Aunt Hetty had finished this, the little girl holding tightly to the wrinkled old hand.  How peaceful Aunt Hetty was!  Even the smell of her black woolen dresses always had a quiet smell.  And she must see all those hunks of mud on the white stairs, but she never said a word.  Elly squeezed her hand a little tighter.