Moving suddenly, as if in response to a joyous impulse, he drew away from the tree, and lifting his axe swung it out into the sunlight.  For an instant there was silence.  Then a shiver shook the pine from its roots upward, the boughs rocked in the blue sky, and a bird flying out of them sailed slowly into the west.

CHAPTER XIV

SHOWS THE WEAKNESS IN STRENGTH

When Abel had gone, Sarah folded her grey woollen shawl over her bosom, and ordered the boy with the wheelbarrow to return to the barnyard.  Left alone her eyes followed her son’s figure as it divided the broomsedge in the meadow, but from the indifference of her look she might have gazed on the pine tree toward which he was moving.  A little later, when her glance passed to the roof of the mill there was no perceptible change in her expression; and she observed dispassionately that the shingles which caught the drippings from the sycamore were beginning to rot.  While she stood there she was in the throes of one of the bitterest sorrows of her life; yet there was no hint of it either in her quiet face or in the rigid spareness of her figure.  Her sons had resisted her at times, but until to-day not one of them had rebelled openly against her authority in the matter of marriage.  Years ago, in the period of Abner’s reaction from a blighted romance, she had chosen, without compunction, a mild-mannered, tame-spirited maiden for his wife.  Without compunction, when the wedding was over, she had proceeded, from the best possible motives, to torment the tame-spirited maiden into her grave.

“He’s layin’ up misery for himself and for all concerned,” she said aloud, after a moment, “a girl like that with no name and precious little religion—­an idle, vain, silly hussy, with a cropped head!”

A small coloured servant, in a girl’s pinafore and a boy’s breeches, came to the door, and whispered that the old people were demanding a snack of bread and molasses.

“Tell ’em it ain’t the day for sweets an’ they ain’t goin’ to have meat an’ molasses the same day,” she remarked as she entered the kitchen.  “If I didn’t watch you every minute, you’d make yo’selves sick with overeatin’.”

“I reckon you’re right, Sary,” piped grandfather in angry tones, “but I ain’t so sure I wouldn’t rather have the sickness than the watchin’.  It’s hard on a man of my years an’ experience that he shouldn’t be allowed to project with his own stomach.”

“You’d have been dead long ago but for me, an’ you ought to be ashamed of yo’self for talkin’ such foolishness.  As if I hadn’t wo’ myself out with waitin’ on you, an’ no blood relation.”

“No blood relation!” chimed in grandmother maliciously, “no blood relation!”

“Well, you hurry up an’ get ready for dinner, for I’m goin’ out afterwards.”

“Whar on earth are you goin’, Sary?  It ain’t Sunday.”