“Afraid!” said Thomas, with a kind of gasp, his face going white. “Afraid! No. Why?” But Mrs. Murray turned from him to hide the tears that she could not keep out of her eyes, for she knew what was before Thomas and them all.
Meantime Hughie was busy putting into his little carpet-bag what he considered the necessary equipment for his visit.
“You must wear your shoes, Hughie.”
“Oh, mother, shoes are such an awful bother planting potatoes. They get full of ground and everything.”
“Well, put them in your bag, at any rate, and your stockings, too. You may need them.”
By degrees Hughie's very moderate necessities were satisfied, and with a hurried farewell to his mother he went off with Thomas. At the gate they picked up Fusie and Davie Scotch, and went off to the Cameron's for the seed potatoes, Hughie's heart lighter than it had been for many a day. And all through the afternoon, and as he drove home with Thomas on the loaded bags, his heart kept singing back to the birds in the trees overhead.
It was late in the afternoon when they drove into the yard, for the roads were still bad in the swamp, where the corduroy had been broken up by the spring floods.
Thomas hurried through unhitching, and without waiting to unharness he stood the horses in their stalls, saying, “We may need them this afternoon again,” and took Hughie off to the house straight-way.
The usual beautiful order pervaded the house and its surroundings. The back yard, through which the boys came from the barn, was free of litter; the chips were raked into neat little piles close to the wood-pile, for summer use. On a bench beside the “stoop” door was a row of milk-pans, lapping each other like scales on a fish, glittering in the sun. The large summer kitchen, with its spotless floor and white-washed walls, stood with both its doors open to the sweet air that came in from the fields above, and was as pleasant a room to look in upon as one could desire. On the sill of the open window stood a sweet-scented geranium and a tall fuschia with white and crimson blossoms hanging in clusters. Bunches of wild flowers stood on the table, on the dresser, and up beside the clock, and the whole room breathed of sweet scents of fields and flowers, and “the name of the chamber was peace.”
Beside the open window sat the little mother in an arm-chair, the embodiment of all the peaceful beauty and sweet fragrance of the room.