The minister sighed, flapping his worn coat-tails as a signal of distress. Mrs. Barrows was gazing at the house next door. There the lilac bush which had showed its first blossoms on that morning of Ambrose's runaway had grown to full estate. Its season having passed, however, it was no longer in bloom, but instead, the climbing rose, known in the South as the "Seven Sisters," was spreading itself above the front door, bestowing its flowers against the background of the once rose-coloured cottage.
Susan's black curls moved reminiscently, eight years having wrought no changes in her beyond the deepening of the original plan. "Yes, eight years since Ambrose Thompson brought that orphan child home, and two since she passed away. Seems that Ambrose wouldn't never have got off even one year to the war if she hadn't gone on before, seein' as she wasn't never willing to let him out of her sight a minute longer'n she could help."
"A deeply affectionate nature," remarked the minister.
"A powerful clinger," retorted Susan, "but men is forgivin' to regular features with a high colour." She turned at this instant to look down the street. "I call it chokin' myself to hang on to a man the way Sarah done to Ambrose plumb up to the hour she died. What's always needin' proppin' ain't to my mind worth the prop. Howsomever, the child is dead, and I'm hopeful death does change us right considerable, though I can't see as it changes nothin' of what we were nor what we done in this world—and more's the pity!"
Assuredly Brother Bibbs was growing restless, and Mrs. Barrows talking to cover time. For five minutes before had she not seen him attempting to sneak past her gate to gain refuge in the Thompson cottage unobserved before its owner could possibly have returned from work?
Then, too, the minister's face was uncommonly harassed, and these were disjointed days in the Pennyroyal as well as throughout the entire country. True, the Civil War was over, which Susan called "the uncivilest ever fit on God's earth," but while its wounds and differences were patched up they were by no means healed. And Pennyroyal's disposition to regard herself as one family had made her dissensions peculiarly bitter. There were times in this past year since the close of the war when the minister had wondered if it had not been the bitterest year of all, for notwithstanding that Kentucky did not suffer from reconstruction as the states further south, remember that she was, during and after the war, a state divided within herself.
There was trouble in the Pennyroyal air this afternoon.
"Farewell, Susan," Brother Bibbs suggested, as getting out his pocket handkerchief he removed a slight moisture from his eyes. "Ambrose and Sarah loved one another, that was the main thing. Theirs was a spring mating, and, like the birds whose season they chose, brief, too brief in passing." Attempting now to move, Brother Bibbs found it impossible, since in his moment of sentiment Mrs. Barrows, leaning over her fence, had linked her arm through his.
"Well, thank the Lord the little love bird didn't leave a young one in the nest for me and the male to look after," she argued more leniently. "Come right on in, Brother, and rest yourself, as I kin see Ambrose and his two shadders advancin' toward us up the street, and a peskier pair of shadders than Miner Hobbs and that dog, Moses, I ain't never seen, but it's true the two of 'em ain't left Ambrose to himself a minute since his wife died."
With her free hand Susan now waved a friendly greeting, even releasing at the same time the vigour of her clutch with the other, for Brother Bibbs was a fragile gentleman, an elderly widower, and, excepting in matters pertaining to heaven or hell, greatly subject to the sisters in his congregation.