And I—love you in the same o-o-old way."
It seemed to her that she was caroling aloud poetry so exquisite that all its meaning escaped the dull ears about her. She walked among them, alone, wrapped in a glory they could not perceive.
Even her mother's tight-lipped anxiety did not quite break through her happy absorption. Her mother worked silently, stepping heavily about the kitchen, now and then glancing through the window toward the barn. When her husband came clumping up the path and stopped at the back steps to scrape the mud from his boots, she went to the door and opened it, saying almost harshly, "Well?"
He said nothing, continuing for a moment to knock a boot heel against the edge of the step. Then he came slowly in, and began to dip water from the water pail into the wash-basin. The slump of his body in the sweat-stained overalls expressed nothing but weariness.
"I guess last night settled it," he said. "We won't get enough of a crop to pay to pick it. Outa twenty buds I cut on the south slope only four of 'em wasn't black."
His wife went back to the stove and turned the salt pork, holding her head back from the spatters. "What're we going to do about the mortgage?" The question filled a long silence. Helen's song was hushed, though the echoes of it still went on in some secret place within her, safe there even from this calamity.
"Same as we've always done, I guess," her father answered at last, lifting a dripping face and reaching for the roller towel. "See if I can get young Mason to renew it."
"Well, he will. Surely he will," Helen said. Her tone of cheerfulness was like a slender shaft splintering against a stone wall. "And there must be some fruit left. If there isn't much of a crop what we do get ought to bring pretty good prices, too."
"You're right it ought to," her father replied bitterly. "A good crop never brings 'em."
"Well, anyway, I'm through school now, and I'll be doing something," Helen said. She had no clear idea what it would be, but suddenly she felt in her youth and happiness a strength that her discouraged father and mother did not have. For the first time they seemed to her old and worn, exhausted by an unequal struggle, and she felt that she could take them up in her arms and carry them triumphantly to comfort and peace.