Pearl shook her head.
James continued: "We're waiting here until I get bigger and mother gets enough money—and then we're going back. It's lovely to be going back. This isn't the real Purple Springs—we just called it that for fun, and because we love the name. It makes us happier when we say it. It reminds us. Mother will tell you if you live with us."
"At night we light the fire and watch it crackling, and I sit on mother's knee. Ain't I a big boy to sit on a lady's knee?—and she tells me. At Purple Springs there's pansies as big as plates—mother will draw them for you—and the rocks are always warm, and the streams are boiling hot, and nobody is ever sick there or tired. Daddy wouldn't have died if we'd stayed there. But there's things in life no one understands. We'll never leave when we go back."
The boy rambled on, his eyes shining with a great excitement. Pearl thought she was listening to the fanciful tales with which a lonely woman beguiled the weary hours for her little son It was a weirdly extravagant fairy story, and yet it fascinated Pearl in spite of it's unlikeness to truth. It had all the phantasy of a midsummer night's dream.
The boy seemed to answer her thoughts.
"Ain't it great to have something lovely to dream over, teacher? I bet you've got sweet dreams, too. Mother says that what kills people's souls is when they have no purple springs in their lives. She says she's sorry for lots of people They live and walk around, but their souls are dead, because their springs have dried up."
Pearl drew him closer to her. He was so young—and yet so old—so happy, and yet so lonely. She wanted to give him back a careless, happy, irresponsible childhood, full of frolicking fun and mischief, without care or serious thought. She longed to see him grubby-fisted bare-footed, tousle-haired, shouting and wrestling with her young tykes of brothers. It was not natural or happy to see a child so elfin, so remote, so conscious of the world's sorrows.
"Will you come with me now, teacher?" he asked eagerly.
Pearl could not resist the appeal. The sun hung low in an amber haze as they left the school and took the unfrequented road to the brown house on the hill—the house of mystery.
The air was full of the drowsy sounds of evening; cattle returning after their day's freedom in the fields, cow-bells tinkling contentedly. Somewhere in the distance a dog barked; and on the gentle breeze came the song of a hermit thrush, with an undertone of cooing pigeons. The acrid smell of burning leaves was in the air.