He smiled a little. “There’s a man up in Winterport,” he said. “He planted some apple trees twenty years ago, and more and more since, and he’s got ten thousand trees, now. I went up there two years ago on the orchard tour the Farm Bureau runs. He cleared over twenty thousand dollars, that year, on his apples. Ten thousand trees. I’ve only got four hundred; but I’m putting in two hundred more next spring, and more when I can, and my land is better than his, and there’s more around me I can buy. It’s clean work. You can learn a lot from an apple tree, and eating apples never did anybody much harm. And you’ve time for thinking, while you work on the trees....”
She slipped her hand through his arm in understanding, as they tramped along.
In December his mother, who had suffered for half a dozen years from a mysterious weakness of the heart, was taken sick with what at first seemed a slight cold. In early January, she died. Walter Moore and his wife and Lucy were among those who followed the little cortege to the receiving tomb where—because the frost had fortified the earth against the digging of a grave—his mother’s body would lie till spring. Lucy was mysteriously moved by the pity of this; that a woman should die, and yet be kept waiting for her final sweet repose in the bosom of earth. After supper that evening, she drew on coat and heavy overshoes and muffled her head against the bitter wind that blew. “I’m going down to cheer up Johnny, mama,” she said.
Moore and his wife, when the door had closed behind her, looked at each other with deep understanding. “Well,” he said, “I guess Lucy’s gone.”
But his wife smiled through misty eyes. “She’s come back to us these last two years,” she said. “No matter what happens, she can’t really go away again.”
V
Down at Johnny’s house, Lucy knocked at the kitchen door and Johnny let her in. He was washing dishes and putting them away. “I’ve finished supper, just finished supper,” he said awkwardly.
“I wanted to comfort you, Johnny,” Lucy told him.
He looked at her, rubbing his plate in his hands with the cloth. “That’s—mighty nice,” he said.
“You mustn’t be unhappy. I don’t want you to be unhappy,” she explained, still standing just within the door. She was plucking away her wraps, laid her coat aside.