y the way he crossed the hall as far as the
living-room door and then turned back, by the way he slowly mounted
the stairs and passed leaden-footed on to his study. And I knew that
this time there'd be no "Are you there, Little Mother?" or "Where
beest thou, _Boca Chica_?"

I'd Poppsy and Pee-Wee safe and sound asleep in the swing-box that
dour old Whinstane Sandy had manufactured out of a packing-case, with
Francois' robe of plaited rabbit-skin to keep their tootsies warm. I'd
finished my ironing and bathed little Dinkie and buttoned him up in
his sleepers and made him hold his little hands together while I said
his "Now-I-lay-me" and tucked him up in his crib with his broken
mouth-organ and his beloved red-topped shoes under the pillow, so that
he could find them there first thing in the morning and bestow on them
his customary matutinal kiss of adoration. And I was standing at the
nursery window, pretty tired in body but foolishly happy and serene in
spirit, staring out across the leagues of open prairie at the last of
the sunset.

It was one of those wonderful sunsets of the winter-end that throw
wine-stains back across this bald old earth and make you remember that
although the green hasn't yet awakened into life there's release on
the way. It was a sunset with an infinite depth to its opal and gold
and rose and a whisper of spring in its softly prolonged afterglow. It
made me glad and sad all at once, for while there was a hint of vast
re-awakenings in the riotous wine-glow that merged off into pale green
to the north, there was also a touch of loneliness in the flat and
far-flung sky-line. It seemed to recede so bewilderingly and so
oppressively into a silence and into an emptiness which the lonely
plume of smoke from one lonely shack-chimney both crowned and
accentuated with a wordless touch of poignancy.

That pennon of shack-smoke, dotting the northern horizon, seemed to
become something valorous and fine. It seemed to me to typify the
spirit of man pioneering along the fringes of desolation, adventuring
into the unknown, conquering the untamed realms of his world. And it
was a good old world, I suddenly felt, a patient and bountiful old
world with its Browningesque old bones set out in the last of the
sun--until I heard my Dinky-Dunk go lumbering up to his study and
quietly yet deliberately shut himself in, as I gave one last look at
Poppsy and Pee-Wee to make sure they were safely covered. Then I stood
s