"I 'm glad the old pasture is going with the house. Somehow the two seem to belong together. It was right in front across the road, an' all us children used to play there. There 's a clump of oak trees at th' end of it. Hope they have n't cut them down."
"Eighteen hundred dollars, was it?" asked Donaldson.
"Eighteen hundred dollars," she repeated slowly. "My, thet 's a lot of money!"
"That depends," he said, "on many things. Should you like to go back there?"
The answer came before her lips could utter the words, in the awakening of every dormant hope in her nature—in every suppressed dream. Some younger creature was freed in the hardening eyes. The strain of the lips was loosened. Even the passive worn hands became alert.
"I 'd sell my soul a'most to get back there—to get the children back there," she answered.
"It 's the place for them."
"Thet's the way I 've felt," she ran on. "Mine don't belong here. It's not 'cause they 're any better, but because they've got the country in their blood. They was meant to grow up in thet very pasture just like I did. I 've ben oneasy ever since the boys was born, and so was Jim. Both of us hankered after the old sights and sounds—the garden with its mixed up colors an' the smell of lilac an' the tinkle of the cow bells. Funny how you miss sech little things as those."
"Little things?" Donaldson returned. "Little things? They are the really big things; they are the things you remember, the things that hang by you and sweeten your life to the end!"
"Then it ain't just my own notions? But I have wanted the children to grow up in the garden instead of the gutters. If Jim had lived it would have be'n. We 'd planned to save a little every year until we had enough ahead to take a mortgage. But you can't do it with nothin'. There ain't no way, is there?"