"Well, there’s Grandmother. _She_ sits by the window all day long and just looks and looks, and wishes she was an angel with Grandfather up in the sky." "And Lizbeth?" "Oh, Lizbeth wishes she was Mother." "And how about Mother? Does she wish she were somebody else, do you think?" "Oh no, Father, _she_ doesn’t, ’cause then she wouldn’t have me and Lizbeth. Besides, she don’t have time to just sit and look, Mother don’t." Your eyes were big and shining. Father just looked and looked a long time. "And what do you think _now_, Father?" "I was thinking of Mother waiting for you and Lizbeth and Father, and wondering why we don’t come home." And almost always after that, when you went out walking with Father, Sundays, Mother went with you. It seemed strange at first, but fine, to have her sit with you on the river-bank and just look and look and look, smiling but never saying a word; and though you asked her many times what she thought about as she sat there dreaming, she was never once caught wishing that she were anybody but her own self. She was happy, she told you; but while it was you she told, she would be looking at Father. Oh, it was golden in the morning glow, when you were a little boy. But clouds skurried across the sky—black clouds, storm clouds—casting their chill and shadow for a while over all Our Yard, darkening Our House, so that a little boy playing on the hearth-rug left his toy soldier prostrate there to wander, wondering, from room to room. "Mother, why doesn’t Father play with us like he used to?" "Mother, why do you sew and sew and sew all the time? Hm, Mother?" All through the long evenings till bed-time came, and long afterwards, Father and Mother talked low together before the fire. The murmur of their voices downstairs was the last thing you heard before you fell asleep. It sounded like the brook in the meadow where the little green frogs lived, hopping through water-rings. Of those secret conferences by the fire you could make nothing at all. Mother stopped you whenever you drew near. "Run away, dear, and play." You frowned and sidled off as far as the door, lingering wistfully. "Father, the Jones boy made fun of me to-day. He called me Patchy-pants." "Never mind what the Jones boy says," Mother broke in; but Father said, "He ought to have a new pair, Mother." You brightened at that. "The Jones boy’s got awful nice pants," you said; "all striped like a zebra." Father smiled a little at that. Mother looked down at her sewing, saying never a word. That night you dreamed you had new pants, all spotted like a leopard, and you were proud, for every one knows that a leopard could whip a zebra, once he jumped upon his back. Leaning on the garden fence, the Jones boy watched you as you sprinkled the geraniums with your little green watering-can. "Where’d you get it?" he asked. "Down at my father’s store," you replied, loftily, for the Jones boy had no watering-can.