“Guess he’ll have a hard life enough, without any signs—­most of us do.  He won’t have to make shirts, anyhow,” rejoined her daughter, who had worn out her youth with fine stitching of linen shirts for a Jew peddler.  Then she settled back over her needle-work with a heavy sigh, indicative of a return from the troubles of others to her own.

Jerome fed the old horse, and rubbed him down carefully.  “Sha’n’t be sold whilst I’m alive,” he assured him, with a stern nod, as he combed out his forelock, and the animal looked at him again, with that strange attention which is so much like the attention of understanding.

After his tasks in the barn were done Jerome went out to the sloping garden and finished planting the beans.  He could see Elmira’s smooth dark head passing to and fro before the house windows, and knew that she was fulfilling his instructions.

He kept a sharp watch upon the road for other female friends of his mother’s, who, he was resolved, should not enter.

“Them women will only get her all stirred up again.  She’s got to get used to it, and they’ll just hinder her,” he said, quite aloud to himself, having in some strange fashion discovered the truth that the human mind must adjust itself to its true balance after the upheaval of sorrow.

After the beans were planted it was only nine o’clock.  Jerome went soberly down the garden-slope, stepping carefully between the planted ridges, then into the house, with a noiseless lift of the latch and glide over the threshold; for Elmira signalled him from the window to be still.

His mother sat in her high-backed rocker, fast asleep, her sharp eyes closed, her thin mouth gaping, an expression of vacuous peace over her whole face, and all her wiry little body relaxed.  Jerome motioned to Elmira, and the two tiptoed out across the little front entry to the parlor.

“How long has she been asleep?” whispered Jerome.

“‘Most an hour.  You don’t s’pose mother’s goin’ to die too, do you, Jerome?”

“Course she ain’t.”

“I never saw her go to sleep in the daytime before.  Mother don’t act a mite like herself.  She ’ain’t spoke out to me once this mornin’,” poor little Elmira whimpered; but her brother hushed her, angrily.

“Don’t you know enough to keep still—­a great big girl like you?” he said.

“Jerome, I have.  I ’ain’t cried a mite before her, and she couldn’t hear that,” whispered Elmira, chokingly.

“Mother’s got awful sharp ears, you know she has,” insisted Jerome.  “Now I’m goin’ away, and don’t you let anybody come in here while I’m gone and bother mother.”

“I’ll have to let Cousin Paulina Maria and Aunt Belinda in, if they come,” said Elmira, staring at him wonderingly.  Neither she nor her mother knew that Paulina Maria had already been there and been turned away.

“You just lock the house up, and not go to the door,” said Jerome, decisively.