“Well, Sarah . . . you’ve been to London. And what did you do there?”

“Abbie, I frightened a little mouse under the chair.” Sarah kissed Abbie, held her close for a moment. What good old friends they were! And how they understood each other.

“Abbie Deal, whatever are you doing?”

“Sarah Lutz, I do hate to start anything I can’t finish, but if old Asy Drumm was alive I’d have him here on the dog trot.”

“But what is it?”

“It’s a seat.”

“For what?”

“To sit on. I suppose you’ve grown so high-faluting in your travel, Sarah, that you think a seat ought to be a Louis-something objet d’art, as the magazines say. Well, it isn’t. It’s to sit on. I’ve been on the go for sixty-six years and now I’m going to sit down a little, and I can’t think of a place I’d rather sit than here where I can look off to the fertile fields that have come out of the old rolling prairie.”

“It is pleasant, Abbie. There’s something about it, . . . after all my trip . . . the wide stretches of view . . . the way the rolling land meets the blue sky. . . . Well, it calls you back . . . the prairie does, just as the sea calls the fisher folk.”

And then Christine Reinmueller turned into the driveway, trudging along in the inevitable blue calico, gathered full at the waist, her little greasy braids of hair plaited flat from ear to ear. Because she had looked so old when she was still young, Christine seemed to have changed less than the others. There was something ageless about her. As she had had no youth, she now had no age.

“Well, girls, here we all are.”

For a long time the three “girls” sat under the trees and visited,—Abbie Deal and Sarah Lutz and Christine Reinmueller,—Abbie, the motherly home woman,—Sarah, who loved dress and travel,—Christine, with no thought but the accumulation of the land. Three varying personalities they were,—held together by a strange tie of memory,—friends, because on a long-ago hot summer day, three covered wagons in a long straggling line lurched, over the prairie together.

When John’s and Eloise’s son Wentworth was nine, they welcomed a daughter, whom they named Laura, and whom Eloise proceeded to bring up by the ritual of a blue book, child training fads having changed, and the old red book of Wentworth’s baby days having become a back number.

Abbie had six grandchildren now. Mack’s sons, Stanley and Donald, were twenty and fourteen. Stanley, having graduated from an Omaha High School, was East, at Dartmouth, and Mack and Emma were talking of sending Donald to a select school for boys. “He needs culture and poise,” Emma explained to Abbie.

“Dear, dear,” said Abbie, “culture and poise! At his age, his father needed clothing and provender.”

Emma laughed. That was one thing about Emma,—she was like Sarah, her mother, good-natured, ready to laugh at herself as readily as at another. Abbie felt as close to her as to her own girls.