It was four o'clock on that same day that Liza Hope passed Stoneledge on the way down to the store. Liza was always just getting over having a baby or just about to have one and her condition was now of the latter character. Poor, misshapen, down-trodden creature! She accepted her fate indifferently, not because she was hard or bitter, but because she had never had a vision of anything else.
She paused near the chicken house where old Lily Ivy was hovering over a belated brood whose erratic mother had mistaken the season of the year.
"Howdy, Ivy! You-all has a right smart lot of fowls—but ain't it a mighty bad time to hatch?"
"Dis yere hen allus was a fool hen," Ivy vouchsafed, "givin' trouble an' agony to us-all."
"Does you-all like her the best?"
This question brought Ivy to her feet with a stare.
"The little doctor she done say as how we-all loves best the baby-things what be right techersome. She be right, too, I reckon. Them babies o' mine what died, and po' lil' Sammy what ain't clear in his mind, is mighty nigh to me. I ain't never thought 'bout sich till she cum. She steps up to my cabin now an' again an' her and me talks. The Cup-o'-Cold-Water Lady I calls her, an' nights I lie an' think on her, an' she comes an' brings my daid babies to me in dreams-like, an' then I reach out for Sammy, an' I feel right comforted."
Ivy came close to her caller now and looked into the weary, sunken eyes compassionately. Her contempt of the po' white trash faded before the pathetic desolateness of Liza's glance.
"Liza Hope," she said, fixing the roving stare by her tone, "how be you going to face this winter? You be as fool-like as dis yere old hen-hussy. All your chillens was born during respectable times o' year. What you-all goin' to do wid no wood-pile, no nothin', an' a baby comin' long in the black time of winter?"
Liza faced her accuser blankly as if she had nothing whatever to do with the matter.