ves into an
intricate pattern of growing clearness. She did not watch it grow. It
was only when it was quite complete that she would see it, but it was
growing fast.

CHAPTER EIGHT

"You'll find the coffee pot on the back of the stove. I'm washing out a
few things," said Mrs. Donovan.

Though she kept her five little nephews and nieces in dark-patterned
dresses or shirts, as the case might be, and encouraged her brother
Michael to wear flannel shirts, and even limited her eldest niece,
Maggie Brady, clerking in the Green River Dry Goods Emporium now,
instead of helping her father in his little store at the Falls, to three
white waists a week, she was usually washing out a few things.

The contending odours of damp clothes and rank coffee were as much a
part of the Brady kitchen as the dishes stacked in the sink for Neil to
wash, or the broken-legged, beautifully grained mahogany card table in
the warm corner near the stove, where his school books were piled, a
relic of his dead father's prosperous saloon-keeping days, or the view
of Larribee's Marsh through the curtainless windows with their torn
green shades.

The swampy field was the most improvident part of an improvident
purchase--a brown, tumbledown house, wind swept and cold,
inconveniently far from the settlement at the Falls and the larger town,
heavily mortgaged, and not paid for yet, but early on sunny spring
mornings like this the field was beautiful; level and empty and green,
the only monotonous thing in that restless stretch of New England
country, billowy with little hills, and rugged with clumps of trees. A
boy could people the sunlit emptiness of the field with airy creatures
of folk-lore, eagerly gleaned in a busy mother's rare story-telling
moments, or with Caesar's cohorts marching across it, splendid in the
sun, if he had eyes for them. The only boy who ever had regarded the
familiar, glinting green of the field with unkindled eyes to-day as he
sat finishing his lukewarm breakfast. Yet it was Saturday morning, that
magic time, the last Saturday of his last spring vacation, and he had
only one more term of school before him.

On this Saturday morning he had an unpleasant errand to do, and he was
carefully dressed for it, just as he had been dressed for the Lyceum
declamation contest and ball the night before, but not so effectively,
for his best black suit showed threadbare in the morning sun, and the
shine on his shoes was painstakin