She came suddenly to a pause, and, putting out a clenched fist, struck it against the mantelpiece.
“I can’t bear it!” she said in a loud tone. “I can’t bear it, and I won’t! There’s my children waiting for me Over There, and I’ll get to them, if I have to walk. It’s my life that I ought to have had, and that I’ve been cheated out of, and I mean to have it.” Her voice rose higher. “What is it goes wrong with things when folks get cheated out of their lives?”
Her tone lowered itself then as suddenly as it had risen, and became passionate and pleading. “I take back everything I said just now,” she told him gently. “I want to go....” Turning unsteadily, she came to him, holding out her hands. “You’ll not think any more about what I said? You’ll let us go?”
“We’ll go, Mattie. Don’t you fret.”
“It’ll be just as it was, this morning?” she pursued, unsatisfied. “The same as it was, last night?”
“Just as it was, Mattie.”
A smile touched for a moment her tear-wet face, and for the first time he felt the tears spring to his own eyes. She looked at him kindly.
“You mustn’t be wild with me for chopping and changing like this. I can’t help it. I’ve got to see ’em all again, and the grandchildren and the houses. I’ve got to see them. You can’t plan and work for a thing all your life, and not get it in the end. It’d kill you, if you didn’t get it,—leastways, it would me.... But I shan’t chop and change again. I’ll get the letter written first thing in the morning, and the one for the passage as well. We must begin thinking about the sale, too, as soon as may be. I did a lot of planning, this afternoon, along with Mrs. Machell. I don’t know that I’m best pleased to think of her living in this house, though she’s pleased enough, to be sure! I near told her to think on it was my home and not hers, and would she kindly remember it? There was the jam an’ all,—I’d nigh forgotten the jam....” Her voice wavered as she spoke, and she looked away from him. “And the privet hedge,—I don’t know how I’ll abide her having the privet hedge.... Len, too, swaggering about the spot, and thinking he’s as good a man as you.... I reckon they’re thinking already we’re as good as overseas——”
She stopped then, and into her eyes came the fixed stare of one who regards a great and imminent danger. The cry which came out of her throat was no longer the cry of one beating against walls, but the cry of one who drowns....
“Nay, but we can’t! We can’t! I’m cheating myself again. Just cheating myself, that’s all.... I’ll never get to Canada, not this side o’ the Judgment!”