"I have a fancy," she said, "that Nannette and her children are going to minister to a mind diseased, and help pluck a rooted sorrow from the brain. The world was getting too healthy. Has it ever struck you that we have neither of us been sick for a day this year? I have had to mother the chickens, but there has been no suffering. I'm not glad to have pain come into the world, but it is good to be able to alleviate it. We will put Nannette in a sling till her leg has a chance to set, and by the time it is well she won't want to leave us. As for the kids, I expect they will be like the plague of frogs, and we shall find them in our beds and our ovens and our kneading troughs. Oh, Adam, there is the house! Doesn't it look dear and homey?"
She put the kid back on the sled, and ran on, pointing out this and that, the growth of the corn, the afternoon radiance, till they reached their doorway. Then there were a thousand things to do. First Nannette was made comfortable in the stable; then the chickens were summoned to a meal of yellow corn, and when Lassie drove the cows into the barnyard, each was congratulated in turn upon her calf, and those interesting, if wobbly, bovine infants were carefully inspected. After supper they sat down before the fire, very tired, but the nearest happy they had been in a year. The dogs were lying about them, and the thump, thump of first one tail and then another told the story of canine content, while the kittens walked over them impartially.
"What a strange thing human nature is!" Adam said. "The only thing needed to make our life perfect is that it shall not last. The moment, if that moment ever comes, when it is real no more, it will become ideal."
"I know," she said dreamily. "Things in the world used to be too good to be true. This must cease to be, to be good at all."
XI
Yet if Hope has flown away
In a night, or in a day,
In a vision, or in none.
Is it therefore the less gone?
All that we see or seem
Is but a dream within a dream.
Poe.
"It is the first of May," said Adam. "It is a year ago to-day. Shall we pass the gateway?"
"Not now," answered Robin. "Wait till afternoon. I am so busy this morning."
She was sitting at the table teaching half a dozen little chickens to appreciate hard-boiled egg. The wounded kid was lying in her lap, one arm was about it, and an adventurous kitten looked over her shoulder. As she tapped on the board with one slender forefinger, the chickens, hearing their mother's bill, began picking up the fragments of egg. She had rounded out wonderfully in a year, and Adam realized for the first time that she was a very beautiful woman.
"Suppose," she went on, "you begin your book to-day. Write your description of a year ago. It will never be so plain again. There is plenty of time before we go. Besides, if it is a dream, we shall want the written record to show what dreams may come."