For the next few days she went slowly about her household duties with the same little sense of pleasure she always experienced after she had been to one of the children’s homes. How could old women bear to sit around with folded hands? What mattered it that the children all had such nice houses, there would never be any real home for her but the old wing-and-upright set in the cedars and poplars.

By Friday night she had accomplished a lot of extra small tasks, setting an old hen that was foolishly wanting to raise a family out of season, gathering some early poppy-seeds and putting fresh papers on her pantry shelves. At five-thirty she started her supper. As she worked she tried to hum an old tune she had known when she was young, an old song she had not thought of for years and years, until Isabelle had sung it over the radio in the winter:

“Oh . . . the La . . . dy of . . . the Lea,

Fair and . . . young and . . . gay was . . . she”

She had to make long pauses between the syllables to get her breath.

“Beau . . . tiful . . . exceed . . . ingly

The La . . . dy of . . . the Lea.”

Her voice cracked and went up or down without her volition, so that even though her mind heard the song, her ear scarcely recognized the melody.

“Many . . . a woo . . . er sought her . . . hand

For she . . . had gold . . . and she . . . had land,

Every . . . thing . . . la la . . . la la”

She had forgotten what the words were right there.

“The La . . . dy of . . . the Lea.”

She was completely out of breath, so that she had to sit down a few minutes before starting to put her dishes on the kitchen table. As she sat looking at the old table, she suddenly wished that she could pull it out, put in all the leaves, set the places for the children and then call them in from play,—not the prosperous grown people she had been with so recently in Omaha, but just as they were when they were little. Queer how plainly she could see them in her mind: Mack’s merry round face with its sprinkling of freckles, Margaret’s long dark pig-tail, her gray eyes and her laughter, Isabelle’s reddish-brown curls and her big brown eyes, Grace’s square little body with her apron-strings always untied, John’s serious face,—a sort of little old man who did not want to be hugged. How real they seemed to her. One could almost imagine that it was they who were playing, “Run, Sheep Run” out there now instead of the neighbor children.

Abbie Deal had never forbidden the north-end children access to her yard, and their high-pitched voices calling “Going-east . . . going west . . .” came to her now from the region of the cottonwood windbreak. Yes, it sounded for all the world like her own children out there.