it would give him—­not to be able to help—­to save her.  No, he must not know until too late—­and never understand!  Desperately thus wave after wave swept over her, crushing, grinding, mocking her womanhood, until, helpless and breathless, she was tossed, well nigh unconscious, upon the shore of exhaustion.  The fight of the instinctive woman for its own was over and the sacrifice was prepared.  She was bound to the wheel and ready for the first turn, though out under the skies, “stretched as a tent to dwell in,” the cycle was moving on its course turned by the same force from the same source that numbers the sparrows.

“Rose Mary, child,” came in a gentle voice, and Uncle Tucker’s trembling old hand was laid with a caress on the bowed head before she had even heard him come into the milk-house, “now you’ve got to look up and get the kite to going again.  I’ve been under the waters, too, but I’ve pulled myself ashore with a-thinking that nothing’s a-going to take you away from me and them.  What does it matter if we were to have to take the bed covers and make a tent for ourselves to camp along Providence Road just so we all can crawl under the flap together?  I need nothing in the world but to be sure your smile is not a-going to die out.”

“Oh, honey-sweet, it isn’t—­it isn’t,” answered Rose Mary, looking up at him quickly with the tenderness breaking through the agony in a perfect radiance.  “It’s all right, Uncle Tucker, I know it will be!”

“Course it’s all right because it is right,” answered Uncle Tucker bravely, with a real smile breaking through the exhaustion on his face that showed so plainly the fight he had been having out in his fields, now no longer his as he realized.  “Gid has got the right of it, and it wasn’t honest of us to hold on at this losing rate as long as we did.  There is just a little more value to the land than the mortgage, I take it, and we can pay the behind interest with that, and when we do move offen the place we won’t leave debt to nobody on it, even if we do leave—­the graves.”

“Did he say—­when—­when he expected you to—­give up the Briars?” asked Rose Mary in a guarded tone of voice, as if she wanted to be sure of all the facts before she told of the climax she saw had not been even suggested to Uncle Tucker.

“Oh, no; Gid handled the talk mighty kind-like.  I think it’s better to let folks always chaw their own hard tack instead of trying to grind it up friendly for them, cause the swalloring of the trouble has to come in the end; but Gid minced facts faithful for me, according to his lights.  I didn’t rightly make out just what he did expect, only we couldn’t go on as we were—­and that I’ve been knowing for some time.”

“Yes, we’ve both known that,” said Rose Mary, still suspending her announcement, she scarcely knew why.

“He talked like he was a-going to turn the Briars into a kinder orphan asylum for us old folks and spread-eagled around about something he didn’t seem to be able to spit out with good sense.  But I reckon I was kinder confused by the shock and wasn’t right peart myself to take in his language.”  And Uncle Tucker sank into a chair, and Rose Mary could see that he was trembling from the strain.  His big eyes were sunk far back into his head and his shoulders stooped more than she had ever seen them.