“To think that would be worth all the loneliness,” answered Rose Mary gently.  “Things were very hard for me the first year I had to come back from college.  I used to sit here by the hour and watch Providence Road wind away over the Ridge and nothing ever seemed to come or go for me.  But that was only for a little while, and now I never get the time to breathe between the things that happen along Providence Road for me to attend to.  I came back to Sweetbriar like an empty crock, with just dregs of disappointment at the bottom, and now I’m all ready every morning to have five gallons of lovely folks-happenings poured into a two-and-a-half-gallon capacity.  I wish I were twins or twice as much me.”

“Why, you have never told me before, Rose Mary, that you belong to the new-woman persuasion, with a college hall-mark and suffragist leanings.  I have made the mistake of putting you in the home-guard brigade and classing you fifty years behind your times.  Don’t tell me you have an M.A.  I can’t stand it to-night.”

“No, I haven’t got one,” answered Rose Mary with both a smile and a longing in her voice.  “I came home in the winter of my junior year.  My father was one of the Harpeth Valley boys who went out into the world, and he came back to die under the roof where his fathers had fought off the Indians, and he brought poor little motherless me to leave with the aunts and Uncle Tucker.  They loved me and cared for me just as they did Uncle Tucker’s son, who was motherless, too, and a few years after he went out into the world to seek the fortune he felt so sure of, I was given my chance at college.  In my senior year his tragedy came and I hurried back to find Uncle Tucker broken and old with the horror of it, and with the place practically sold to avoid open disgrace.  His son died that year and left—­left—­some day I will tell you the rest of it.  I might have gone back into the world and made a success of things and helped them in that way, from a distance—­but what they needed was—­was me.  And so I sat here many sunset hours of loneliness and looked along Providence Road until—­until I think the Master must have passed this way and left me His peace, though my mortal eyes didn’t see Him.  And now there lies my home nest swung in a bower of blossoms full of the old sweetie birds, the boy, the calf, puppy babies, pester chickens and—­and I’m going to take a large, gray, prowling night-bird back and tuck him away for fear his cheeks will look hollow in the morning.  I’m the mother bird, and while I know He watches with me all through the night, sometimes I sing in the dark because I and my nesties are close to Him and I’m not the least bit afraid.”

[Illustration:  “I hope you feel easy in your mind now”]

CHAPTER IV

MOONLIGHT AND APPLE-BLOW

“I hope you feel easy in your mind, child, now you’ve put this whole garden to bed and tucked ’em under cover, heads and all,” said Uncle Tucker, as he spread the last bit of old sacking down over the end of the row of little sprouting bean vines.  “When I look at the garden I’m half skeered to go in the house to bed for fear I haven’t got a quilt to my joints.”