“Let me take your bag, Mother.”

“Take the package, Mack, but I want to carry this myself.” And they all laughed that Mother would trust no one with the pearls. She got slowly out of the car, her limbs a little numb. For a few moments she could not walk steadily, so that Mack put his arm around her and helped her up the wide steps.

In the house, Abbie asked at once for Katherine. The moment had come. It had been sixty-two years coming and now it was here. The winds had blown it by . . . the winds she could not stop. The clock hands had ticked it off . . . the time she could not stay.

Old Abbie Deal, with her snow-white hair, and her eighty years beginning to sit heavily upon her, climbed the mahogany-railed stairway with its imported carpet. A ladder with sapling cross-pieces . . . bare pine steps . . . a mahogany-railed stairway with thick imported carpet.

Katherine was in her room. Abbie knocked and went in, the little bag tightly clutched in her hand.

“Well . . . Granny?” Katherine did not seem flippant to-day. She was gentle, a little tender. She kissed her grandmother with genuine affection and sat down beside her.

“Here they are, dear.” Abbie laid the pearls in Katherine’s lap, her blue-veined hands trembling.

It was as though they had brought everything to Katherine,—had heaped their all into her lap,—the fruits of their labor, the results of their pioneering. The price of the prairie had been paid. The debt was canceled. For Katherine they had fought the prairie fires, split open the prairie furrows, and planted the corn. For Katherine they had set out the trees and made the roads and built the bridges.

Katherine took the pearls out of the little velvet box.

“Thanks, Granny, dear. They’re darling.”

There was no great surprise. She had spoken in a matter-of-fact way. “Thanks, Granny, dear. They’re darling.”

Well, she could not sense it. She was young and had never wanted for a thing in her life. She could not realize all the hardships which had been undergone since Abbie Deal’s wedding night,—all the privations which had been endured while the pearls lay in the box for sixty-two years waiting for the time to come when a Mackenzie bride could wear them.

“I want to tell you about them. Could you . . . for just a few minutes, Kathie? I don’t want to take your time . . .”

“Sure . . . Granny . . . tell me about them.”

“They were Isabelle Anders-Mackenzie’s, Kathie. After her death they became my mother’s and then she gave them to me in the old log-cabin on my wedding night. They always seemed to me a sort of symbol . . . standing for everything that was fine and artistic and lovely. You probably don’t understand, but the work on the land in our early days was so hard that it took all of our time and strength to keep body and soul together. There was neither time nor opportunity for the things that many of us wanted, with all our hearts, to do. But we kept our eyes on a sort of gleam ahead, a hope that our boys and girls could have all the things we could not have. And so the pearls became a symbol to me of those things. I said Margaret could wear them at her wedding, thinking we would have everything to go with them. But you can’t always do with life as you wish. Sometimes life does things to you. And so we didn’t have much to do with, and Margaret was married without them. Isabelle was married suddenly on the eve of war, and Grace never married . . . and now they’re yours, the first granddaughter to marry. They’ve gone in a sort of circle, from wealth, through hard times, back to prosperity.”