"Hurry on ahead," I bade him, "and Miggy and Little Child and I will come in your house to call."
He looked at me gratefully, and waited for good night to my neighbour, and went swiftly away down the road toward the sunset.
"Oh, goody grand, goody grand," Little Child went on softly, in an invocation of her own to some secret divinity of her pleasure. "Oh, that little child we put there, it's talkin' to the sky, an' I guess that makes sunset be!"
My neighbour was looking back across the tranquil meadow which might have been deep with summer hay instead of mounded to its sad harvest.
"I wish," she said, "I could have had his little grave in my garden, same as you would a bird. Still I s'pose a cemet'ry is a cemet'ry and had ought to be buried in. But oh, I can't tell you how glad I am to have him here in Friendship Village. It's better to think about, ain't it?"
But the thing that gripped my heart was to see her, beside her husband, go down the road and not hurry. All that bustling impermanence was fallen from her. I think that now I am becoming thankful for every one who goes busily quickening the day with a multitude, yes, even with a confusion, of homely, cheerful tasks.
Miggy slipped her hand within my arm.
"Did you think of it?" she said. "I've been, all the time. It's most the same with her as it would be to me if I'd lost her. You know ... that little Margaret. I mean, if she should never be."
As when one hears the note of an oriole ringing from the innermost air, so now it seems to me that after these things the deeps of air can never again be wholly alien to me.