“Jerusalem! That was a near one! Ain’t it a-rainin’!”
As the lightning fell the woman threw up her arms where she knelt and staggered to her feet. “Come along,” she cried; and, as she moved swiftly before him in a mighty downfall of rain, she said, over and over, “‘Of such are the kingdom of heaven’; ’of such are the kingdom of heaven!’”
When they reached home, she sat down by the fire, as if unconscious of her soaked garments, until Joe, coming in from the cow-house, said:
“You’d best be gettin’ on dry clothes, Susie. You’ll take your death of cold.”
“I’d like them Lyndsays to miss that stone, Joe.”
“I hope they won’t,” he returned. “They ain’t never been nothin’ but good to folks hereabouts. I’d not of took it happen there was another; and I wouldn’t have done it for no other woman.”
“It was a brave job, Joe, and I’ll never forget it. I wish them other things had been set on it—when they was born and died. It’s only them rich people has things complete. Maybe you done the best you could.”
“That’s so,” he returned.
CHAPTER XXV
