"You'll be grown up by that time." "I'm as tall as you now." Hertha looked across the water into the deep, velvet sky, and thought of the long days in which she would have to go about her work without her baby. Tom was seven years younger than she and since his birth had been her special charge. Hundreds of times she had washed his face and his soft little brown hands to which the grubby earth was as dear as to the roots of a flower. She it was who had always shielded him from severity, finding many and ingenious excuses for him. He had grown up a quiet, serious boy of a meditative cast, and sometimes came out with unusual, even startling remarks. Tom's "thinking" was one of the jokes of the family. Hertha found it hard to imagine life without him. "Do you remember," she said after they had sat silent for a time; "once I struck you?" "Naw!" "Of course you don't remember, you weren't more than three. We were out visiting at Aunt Mary's and I had dressed you for the afternoon. We were on the steps. I had some sewing and you slipped away and went off berrying. Oh, but weren't you a sight when you came back!" Tom grunted. "You came right up to me and leaned against my knee, not a bit afraid. I scolded and you looked up and smiled. You were very little then, seems to me you weren't more than a baby." "Yes?" "I slapped you on your cheek!" "Whew! I don't believe it would have killed a mosquito." "You were so grieved! You looked at me as though I had bruised 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."