“I don’t know,” she answered, “Did you notice that the one in the kitchen, on the south side above the stove, hadn’t been washed, either? I noticed it when I went over to look at the firebox when you spoke.”
“Yes, that’s so,” said Mrs. Prentis, standing in the kitchen door and glancing at the south windows of one room and then at the other.
“See here, do you ’spose—that is—I mean both of these windows on the south side are toward the graveyard—do you ’spose that Mamie left ’em that way on purpose?”
“Well, there’s a good deal to do on a farm, and mebbe she got as far as the south side washin’ windows some day, and then had to quit for some reason.”
“Yes, but these ain’t been washed for months. Poor little Mamie! Mebbe she just couldn’t stand to be everlastingly seein’ them gravestones.”
“I wish, oh how I wish, I’d ’a ’come over here oftener! We don’t live so far away; but seems like I never get time to get all my work done, and when I do there’s not time to walk, or I’m too tired, an’ o’ course the horses are always busy.
“What with fruit cannin’, and hayin’ hands, an’ threshin’, an’ little chickens, the summer’s gone ’fore you know it, an’ then the winter’s too cold and snowy, or too wet an’ muddy to get out, an’ the first thing you know another year’s slipped by.”
Motherly Mrs. Collins nodded her head in sympathy. An older and a heavier woman, all that Mrs. Prentis had said applied better than equally well to her.
“No wonder Mamie loved the baby so,” she said, “though she ain’t been overly strong since it was born. Jes’ think of the years and years she was here all alone, for Jed used to work out a good deal an’ she done all the work here. Years an’ years of stillness—an’ then the baby she’d never give up wantin’ and hopin’ for.”
“Yes, when I think what a woman’s got to go through here on a farm, I don’t never want Selina should get married. Seems like it’s enough sometimes to make a mother wish her girl baby could die when it’s little—”