"Yes, we couldn't both leave 'em the same day. Is Uncle Josh hitching up?"
"He's coming round right now," said Mrs. Oakley, wafting a pungent, odour of camphor before her as she appeared. "I'm glad you came over, Almira. There's plenty of room in the wagon since we've put in the back seat. Ain't you coming to church with us, Josiah?"
"No, I ain't," Josiah replied, stubbornly. "When I get a day's rest, I'm goin' to take it. It don't rest me to be preached to."
"Well, it ought to," rejoined his mother, with an air of exhausted piety. "If going to church ain't a rest, I don't know what you call one."
But Josiah was in a stubborn and rebellious mood. He was suffering with toothache, and though he was of the breed, he was not of the temper of which martyrs are made. "I don't see that yo' religion has done so much for you," he added irascibly, "or for Pa either."
In her Sunday clothes, with her buckram-lined skirt spreading about her, Mrs. Oakley stopped, as she was descending the steps of the porch, and looked back at her son. "It is the only thing that has kept me going, Josiah," she answered, and her lip trembled as she repeated the solitary formula with which experience had provided her.
"Poor Ma," Dorinda thought while she watched her. "He might a least leave her the comfort of her religion."
"There's Uncle Josh now!" exclaimed Almira, who was by instinct a peacemaker. "Have you got yo' hymn book, Aunt Eudora? I forgot to bring mine along."
"It's in my reticule," Mrs. Oakley replied, producing a bag of beaded black silk, which she had used every Sunday for twenty years. "You'll get all muddied up, Dorinda, so I brought this old bedquilt for you to spread over your lap. It's chilly enough, anyway, for your ulster, and you can leave it with the quilt in the wagon. I can see you shivering now in that thin nun's veiling."
"I'm not cold," Dorinda answered valiantly; but she slipped her arms into the sleeves of the ulster, and accepted obediently the bedquilt her mother held out. Something, either Josiah's surliness or the slight chill in the early April air, had dampened her spirits, and she was realizing that the possession of a new dress does not confer happiness. Going down the steps, she glanced up doubtfully at the changeable blue of the sky. "I do hope it is going to stay clear," she murmured.