ruised your
heart. Your mouth trembled and you hid your face in my lap and cried."

"And then you took me in your lap and petted me and told me about the
three little pigs and washed me and got me into another dress without
Mammy's knowing!"

"You can't remember, Tom!"

"Yes, I can."

"I don't believe you were as old as three."

"Well," meditatively, "if I don't remember that time I remembers heaps
of others like it. You never went back on me."

"Probably Ellen is right," Hertha remarked later, "she usually is,
though I don't think it was worth while my spending that last year in
school, I was so homesick."

"You can never tell about an education," Tom said, wise in another's
case.

Behind them came the sound of conversation, broken occasionally by a
boisterous laugh. Some one was thrumming on a banjo and now and then
singing a few lines from a popular song.

"What do you reckon it'll be like at school?" Tom asked.

"Oh, doing things. First one thing and then another until you're so
tired at night you fall at once to sleep and wake up and start to do
more things."

"That ain't much different from home."

Hertha did not answer. She never disputed but she thought Tom would find
a difference.

They looked out into the starlight. "I was thinking," the boy said,
"you're like that star up there." He pointed to a planet, bright in the
heavens. "That's like you, beautiful and alone."

"Well!" She gave his arm a little squeeze. "But I'm not alone and
neither is the star. See the little stars about."

"They don't count."

They sat for two hours looking into the starlight, talking a little and
dreaming a good deal more until, growing sleepy, they rose and went
home.

"What do you two find to say to one another?" Ellen asked, not unkindly,
as she met them on their return. But part of their pleasure in one
another's company was that they did not need to talk.

The days before a long parting are always difficult. We see the
inevitable before us, we try to adjust ourselves, we wait impatient and
yet anxious to make each minute last, watching the closing in of time.
Mammy got some consolation in looking over and over again her son's
clothes that Hertha always attended to and kept in neat repair, and in
cooking his favorite dishes. "After the feast he'll surely feel the
famine," Ellen thought, remembering the scanty fare of her school days;
but she tried in every way to be as considerate as she could,
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