"Have you heard anything?" asked Mrs. Trupp.
The other shook her head.
"We'd be the last to hear," she said. "That's sure. But I knaw there's been something. It's seven month since she's been anigh us. That's not our maid—our Ruth: so good and kind and considerate for her dad and me as she's always been."
"There has been something," answered Mrs. Trupp, and told her tale....
The mother listened in silence, the tears streaming down her face, her hands upon her lap.
When the story was finished, she rose.
"Thank you kindly, 'm," she said. "If you'll excuse me I'll tell dad. He's in the back."
She went out, a big unwieldy woman, walking with the unconscious majesty of grief, and was absent some time.
Mrs. Trupp sat in the kitchen with a somnolent rust-coloured cat, and listened to the willows rustling by the stream and the voices of children playing by the bridge.
Once she went to the window and looked across the cattle-dotted Brooks to the long low foothill that raises a back like a bow, green now with young corn, against the bleak shaven flanks of old Wind-hover.