What could you do? You could not fight them. You could not kill them. They were an army with an uncanny and unnatural power. Abbie looked out upon the devastation of the fields and the garden upon which they both had worked so hard. The hot wind blew over the ruins with Mephistophelean laughter. She looked up at the cloudless blue,—huge, cruel, sardonic.

“God, . . . you ought to help,” she cried aloud. “We can’t do it alone. You ought to help!”

All through August, Abbie went about in a dull, stupid way, depressed by the last hard luck that had descended upon them and the knowledge that her fourth child was coming. She was nervous,—cross to Will and to the children. Sometimes, in a temper, she jerked one of her little tots by the arm or spanked one angrily,—figuratively standing off and looking at her own actions in contempt. She seemed doing things she did not want to do, seeing a nervous, cross woman, who was not herself, allow her love for husband and babies to begin slipping. The song in Abbie’s throat was stilled that summer and not even an echo of the melody lingered on. For the first time she was sorry about her condition, sorry and bitter. One more mouth to feed, she said to herself acridly,—she, who was a born mother. And then, in a sudden revulsion of feeling at her disloyalty to motherhood, she thought, “Oh, I don’t want to feel that way about a child. I ought not to say that . . . I won’t . . . I never will again.”

In the letter which came in time from her sister Mary, was the comforting word, “Well, Abbie, you ought to have married Dr. Ed Matthews. His wife was here visiting this summer and she had fine clothes,—a purple silk dress and a little lavender velvet bonnet with pansies on and the widest satin strings, and lavender silk mitts. She has a Paisley shawl, too, and a big cameo breast-pin.”

Abbie let the letter fall into her lap and sat thinking of Ed Matthews in New York. Occasionally some one had written an item about him. “Ed Matthews and his bride came to visit. She is an eastern girl, and tremendous stylish.” And later: “They say Ed is in a New York hospital where they have as many as fifty beds.”

And now sitting there with the hot wind blowing over the stripped fields, Abbie’s thoughts went back to the knoll near the Big Woods. “You’re wonderful, Abbie! You’re gorgeous! You coquette! I’ll take you with me. You can study all you want . . . with the best teachers. . . .”

If she had known—if she could have foreseen—the drouth and the grasshoppers,—the blizzards and the winds that were never still—the hard work,—and the privations,—the song that might never be sung,—the four babies in eight years. “No. . . . No!” She pulled herself out of the dream. “No. . . . No! Don’t let me think it. Don’t let me think of thinking it. It’s wicked. There’s nobody but Will. It’s just the crop failures and the terrible hard luck that made me think it. Those things have nothing to do with love.” But even as she said it, Abbie knew that it was not true. Abbie knew that unless you are very strong, those things have something to do with love.