My family was dear to me—not on the old hypocritical basis which would have pretended to a nearness that it did not feel. But dear through the only real basis, a basis which we had persistently baffled and inhibited all the while that we lived together: human understanding.
CHAPTER XVIII
I had planned to be back in the city by noon the next day. But there was something that I wanted to do before I left Katytown. I wanted to go into the little grove which, far more than the up-stairs place where I slept, had always seemed to me to be "my room." I went there after our early breakfast. The place was considerably thinned, but it was still sanctuary.
When I reached the fence by the road, I went over it in the old way. As I went, I was conscious that some one, somewhere, was singing. As I struck into the road, the low humming which I had heard was mounting. And then it lifted suddenly into the words of its song. The man who was singing it had just passed, and he had his face set from me. But I knew him, as I knew his song. Then the time and the hour swept over me, and I sang with him:
"Oh, Mother dear, Jerusalem, Thy joys when shall I see...."
He wheeled, and stood still in the road and let me come to him. And the song broke off, and he was saying:
"Cosma! Cosma Wakely! I've come to scold you!"
"It was such fun!" I pleaded.