"Where's the little red tin mug?" she asked her husband, as she pored over his ragged daybook. "I don't see it in the van, and I don't see it marked in the sales."
Her husband shifted uneasily.
"I give it to Myron Holder's young one. He was playing about the wagon at Deans'."
"You did!" said his wife. "You did! What for?"
"I knowed Jed," began her husband, apologetically; but he was cut short by a contemptuous snub from his wife.
This was the chronicling of a little incident that gladdened Myron's heart inexpressibly.
In Myron's mind there was slowly forming an idea at this time—an idea of change. It was but dimly shadowed forth yet; but when the time came for it to take definite shape, it did so at once, and was so well established that it seemed the settled and legitimate conclusion of long reasoning. In the mean time the thought only came to her hazily—sometimes in the pauses of her work when she heard Mrs. Deans speaking of the town; sometimes when, in the early morning, she saw far away across the lake the smoke of a steamer; sometimes when, at noontide, the whistle of far-off trains smote through the air, or when, returning to the village at night, she noted the telegraph-poles, with their single wire. They seemed to incline from the village—away from its self-righteous roof-trees and censorious chimneys; away and above its babbling doorsteps and carping streets—and to point out into a wider, freer, unknown world.
Often she turned to look along the way they pointed. They took her eyes eastward, and at night the eastern prospect is dull and gray. From this forbidding outlook she would turn her eyes, with a shudder, and they would fall upon the trees of Deans' woodland, illumined by the sun which set behind them.
But if the eastern gray made her despond, the western glow behind those trees made her despair. She withdrew her gaze and hastened to the blank twilight of the village.
It was summer, and Homer Wilson, walking through his fields, was thinking of Myron Holder. He had gone early to town that morning, and as he passed the cottage she issued, with little My, from the door.