“Why—” The boy started to speak but stopped. He saw the frightened grayness return to his mother’s face. His father, too, seemed restless. He crossed and recrossed his knees nervously.
“Well, Frank,” he continued, “it’s this way. Your Ma ain’t been feelin’ well for quite a while and we rode over to the doctor’s this morning to see what was the matter.”
His mother had gone back of his chair. He could feel her hand on his shoulders. He turned half-round, his hands grasping the chair tightly.
“You mustn’t be scared, Frank—the doctor said it wasn’t so very bad.”
He could feel her twining his hair about her fingers.
He turned, faced his mother silently, half afraid, as though some grim barrier stood between them. He saw fine lines about her gray eyes, and their color seemed heavy and faded. The boy sat staring at his mother with an intensity that made a color come to her cheeks, but he was not looking at her any more. Instead, he was wondering fiercely why he had never noticed the gray in her hair or the lines in her face, or the cough. The cough—surely he might have noticed that. His body lay limp against the back of the chair.
“The doctor said that Ma was pretty sick,” his father was speaking on, his voice devoid of life or feeling. “But he said that she ’ud be all right if she went some place where the air was drier.”
“What did he say it was?” he asked in a strained voice.
“It’s her lungs, he says.”
They were silent after this. He was looking out of the window at a far-away straw-stack which lay a mass of dull gold in the sombre setting of plowed land.