"Naw one could sleep a night like this," she croaked.
"Sleep?" gasped the Pretty Lady. Scorn infinite was in her tone.
But comfortably and serenely from the end of the hall came the heavy, regular breathing of the Partridge Hunter, and from beyond that, Alrik's blissful, oblivious snore. Yet Alrik was the only one among us who claimed an agonizing, personal sorrow.
I began to laugh a bit hysterically. "Men are funny people," I volunteered.
Alrik's Old Mother caught my hand with a chuckle, then sobered suddenly, and shook her wadded head.
"Men ain't exactly—people," she confided. "Men ain't exactly people—at all!"
The conviction evidently burned dull, steady, comforting as a night-light, in the old crone's eighty years' experience, but the Pretty Lady's face grabbed the new idea desperately, as though she were trying to rekindle happiness with a wet match. Yet every time her fretted lips straightened out in some semblance of Peace, her whole head would suddenly explode in one gigantic sneeze. There was no other sound, I remember, for hours and hours, except the steady, monotonous, slobbery swash of a bursting roof-gutter somewhere close in the eaves.
Certainly Dawn itself was not more chilled and gray than we when we crept back at last to our beds, thick-eyed with drowsy exhaustion, limp-bodied, muffle-minded.
But when we woke again, the late, hot noonday sun was like a scorching fire in our faces, and the drenched dooryard steamed like a dye-house in the sudden burst of unseasonable heat.
After breakfast, the Pretty Lady, in her hundred-dollar ruffles, went out to the barn with shabby Alrik to help him mend a musty old plow harness. The Pretty Lady's brains were almost entirely in her fingers. So were Alrik's. The exclusiveness of their task seemed therefore to thrust the Partridge Hunter and me off by ourselves into a sort of amateur sorrow class, and we started forth as cheerfully as we could to investigate the autumn woods.