And then, the picture. The male quartet, having apparently recovered from the sad effects of the setting sun, launched forth into a spirited presentation of: “When Kate and I Were Coming Through the Rye.” A field of grain was plainly visible on the cloth, and, incredulous as it seemed, it waved and jerked and twitched. Kate came into sight, and, unbelievable as it was, Kate also waved and jerked and twitched. A young man close behind her, with every indication of St. Vitus’ Dance, also waved and jerked and twitched. But they moved. The advertisement had not lied. Across the sheet the people moved. “Dear, dear,” Abbie said on the way home. “What next can they do? There’s just nothing now left to be invented, Grace.”

Late that fall, Abbie helped organize a Woman’s Club. “I don’t know that we will do a great deal of good, but we won’t do any harm, and much of life is an experiment, anyway.”

Christine was disgusted when Abbie told her. “A club! Ach! for what? To hit mit?”

On the very day in which Abbie drove home with the office of second vice president of the Cedartown Woman’s Club upon her shoulders, a touch of the old raw prairie days presented itself like a bit of the past. She met Oscar Lutz with a wild deer which he had shot and killed in the timber a mile east of Stove Creek,—a young buck that, quivering and at bay, seemed the last survivor of his comrades that had once roamed the east-Nebraska country.

Grace graduated from High School when Abbie was fifty-eight. She gave the valedictory for her class, an earnest if youthful dissertation on “Heaven Is Not Reached by a Single Bound.”

The Sunday after the exercises, all of the children, but Isabelle, were home for dinner. At the table Mack said: “Mother, you ought to offer the place for sale right away to get a buyer by fall. It will make some farmer who wants to retire, a mighty good place,—a nice little five-acre tract with the orchard and a pasture and all.”

“I would have before this,” Abbie admitted, “but I haven’t been real sure in my mind that I’d leave at all.”

They all voiced the same sentiment, “Oh, yes, Mother, you ought to move to Lincoln with Grace.”

“There’s no real use for your staying.”

“With Grace gone, just think how lonesome you’ll be.”

Dr. Baker and Margaret were willing to have Grace and her mother live with them just as Isabelle had done for those two years. The Bakers had been married fifteen years now. Dr. Baker’s firm was a leading one, Dr. Baker himself prominent in his profession. They had a nice comfortable home. Lincoln was a city.

“Oh, no, I wouldn’t want to do that,” Abbie said. “Not both of us. That would be one too many, anyway. If I go, Grace and I will have a little place of our own.”

That set them off on another tangent. There were nice cottages going up everywhere, several attractive ones of the new type called bungalows.