In the dim regions beyond Mrs. Allison was in bed with a “sick headache.” The balls of the carpet-rags had been sadly put away, all finished and ready for the loom, but farther away from that desired goal than ever. It seemed to Nance that that carpet was the last straw, the ridiculous small pressure that had all but snapped the thread of her control. Whenever she thought of Kate Cathrew she thought not of her Pappy, not of Bud with his sagging shoulder, not of her burned stacks and her field of growing corn, but of the bare floors of her poor home.
There was a frown between her golden brows these days, a grim set to her lips, and she spent many hours on her knees beside her bed praying for guidance, for strength to keep to her narrow way. But the “stirrings” that she felt inside her in the spring had become a seething turmoil of passion, hard to hold.
“I’m like the patriarchs of old,” she thought to herself, “filled with righteous wrath. If it wasn’t that I have the light of the New Testament I’m afraid I’d go forth and slay my enemies, or try to.”
“What you whimpering about, Nance? Tell me, too,” said the child hugging her knees and looking adoringly up with his soft brown eyes.
“My gracious! Was I whimpering, Sonny?” she asked aghast, “I must be getting pretty far gone, as Brand says. Nance was thinking, that’s all—thinking about bad things that make her heart ache.”
“Our enemies?” he asked quaintly.
She nodded.
“Yes—they’re ours, all right. Yours and Brand’s and mine.”
There was a vague comfort in this association, in the common cause that seemed to bind her and hers to Brand and Sonny Fair.
Brand and Sonny Fair—her thoughts went off on the tangent which those two names always started.