"'When my mother comes to know,'"
hummed Callie. Her face was pale. She hardly knew that she was singing.
"Stop that song!" her father shouted. "Go and see what's the matter with your sister."
"Sister?" repeated Callie. "Meta is no sister of mine."
"She's your tent-mate, then. Ye grew nest-ripe under the same mother's wing."
"Meta can use her own wings now, you will find. She grew nest-ripe very young."
Father Meadows knew that there was trouble inside of that closed door, as there was trouble inside the white lips and shut heart of his frank and joyous Callie, but it was "the women's business." He went out to attend to his own.
Irrigation on the scale of a small cottage garden is tedious work. It has intervals of silence and leaning on a hoe while one little channel fills or trickles into the next one; and the water must be stopped out here, and floated longer there, like the bath over the surface of an etcher's plate. Water was scarce and the rates were high that summer, and there was a good deal of "dry-point" work with a hoe in Father Meadows's garden.
He had come to one of the discouraging places where the ground was higher than the water could be made to reach without a deal of propping and damming with shovelfuls of earth. This spot was close to the window of the kitchen chamber, which was "mother's room." She was in there talking to Meta. Her voice was deep with the maternal note of remonstrance; Meta's was sharp and high with excitement and resistance. Her faintness had passed, but Mother Meadows had been inquiring into causes.
"I am married to him, mother! He is my husband as much as he can be."