His eyes were fixed on the chancel with a wistful reminiscent gaze, and Polly read something in the careworn face that touched her sympathy. "Grandfather," she said, at the close of the service, "let's be neighbourly and ask Mr. Maxwell home to dinner with us. He looks lonesome."
She was glad afterward that she had suggested it, when she recalled his evident pleasure in the old man's company. There were chairs out under the great oak-trees in the yard, and the two sat talking all afternoon of old times, until the evening shadows began to grow long across the grass. Then Polly joined them again, and sat with them till the tinkle of home-going cowbells broke on the restful stillness of the country Sabbath.
"All the orchestras in all the operas in the world can't make music that sounds as sweet to me as that does," said Mr. Maxwell, raising his head from the big armchair to listen. Then he dropped it again with a sigh.
"It rests me so after the racket of the city. If Julia would only consent, I'd sell out and come back to-morrow. But she's lost all interest in the old place. I'm country to the core, but she never was. She took to city ways like a duck to water, just as soon as she got away from the farm, and she laughs at me for preferring katydids to the whirr of electric cars."
A vision rose before the old miller of a little country girl in a pink cotton gown, who long ago used to wait, bright-eyed and blushing, at the pasture bars, for Billy to drive home the cows. Many a time he had passed them at their trysting-place. Then he recalled the superficial, ambitious woman he had met years afterward when he visited his son. He shook his head when he thought of her renouncing her social position for the simple pastoral life her husband longed to find the way back to. Presently he broke the silence of their several reveries by turning to Polly.
"What's that piece you recited to me the other night, little girl, about old times? Say it for Mr. Maxwell." And Polly, clasping her hands in her lap, and looking away across the August meadows, purple with the royal pennons of the ironweed, began the musical old poem:
"'Ko-ling, ko-lang, ko-linglelingle,
Way down the darkening dingle
The cows come slowly home.
(And old-time friends and twilight plays
And starry nights and sunny days
Come trooping up the misty ways,
When the cows come home.)
"'And over there on Merlin Hill
Hear the plaintive cry of the whippoorwill.
And the dewdrops lie on the tangled vines,
And over the poplars Venus shines,
And over the silent mill.
"'Ko-ling, ko-lang, ko-linglelingle,
With ting-aling and jingle
The cows come slowly home.
(Let down the bars, let in the train
Of long-gone songs and flowers and rain,
For dear old times come back again,
When the cows come home.)'"
Once as Polly went on, she saw the tears spring to his eyes at the line "and mother-songs of long-gone years," and she knew that the
"same sweet sound of wordless psalm,
The same sweet smell of buds and balm,"
that had been his delight in the past, were his again as he listened. But, much to her surprise, as she finished, he rose abruptly, and began a hurried leave-taking. She understood his manner, however, when his mood was revealed to her a little later.