Mrs. Moxom put on her slat sunbonnet, took a tin pan from the pantry shelf, and hurried across the kitchen toward the door. Her daughter-in-law looked up from the corner where she was kneading bread. She was a short, plump woman, and all of her convexities seemed emphasized by flour. She put up the back of her hand to adjust a loosened lock of hair, and added another high light to her forehead. "Where you going, mother?" she called anxiously. The old woman did not turn her head. "Oh, just out to see how the lettuce is coming on. I had a notion I'd like some for dinner, wilted with ham gravy." "Can't one of the children get it?" There was no response. Mrs. Weaver turned back to her bread. "Your grandmother seems kind of fidgety this morning," she fretted to her eldest daughter, who was decorating the cupboard shelves with tissue paper of an enervating magenta hue, and indulging at intervals in vocal reminiscences of a ship that never returned. "Oh, well, mother," said that young person comfortably, "let her alone. I think we all tag her too much. I hate to be tagged myself." "Well, I'm sure I don't want to tag her, Ethel; I just don't want her to overdo." Mrs. Weaver spoke in a tone of mingled injury and self-justification. "Oh, well, mother, she isn't likely to put her shoulder out of joint pulling a few heads of lettuce." The girl broke out again into cheerful interrogations concerning the disaster at sea:-- "Did she never_r_ re_tur_ren? No, she never_r_ re_tur_rened." Mrs. Weaver gave a little sigh, as if she feared her daughter's words might prove prophetic, and buried her plump fists in the puffy dough. Old Mrs. Moxom turned when she reached the garden gate and glanced back at the house. Then she clasped the pan to her breast and skurried along the fence toward the orchard. Once under the trees, she did not look behind her, but went rapidly toward the field where she knew her son was plowing. The reflection of the sun on the tin pan made him look up, and when he saw her he stopped his team. She came across the soft brown furrows to his side. "I'd have come to the fence when I saw you, if I hadn't had the colt," he said kindly. "What's wanted?" The old woman's face twitched. She pushed her sunbonnet back with one trembling hand. "Jason," she said, with a little jerk in her voice, "your paw's alive." The man arranged the lines carefully along the colt's back; then he took off his hat and wiped the top of his head on his sleeve, looking away from his mother with heavy, dull embarrassment. "I expect you'd 'most forgot all about him," pursued the old woman, with a vague reproach in her tone. "I hadn't much to forget," answered the man, resentment rising in his voice. "He hasn't troubled himself about me." "Well, he didn't know anything about you, Jason, he went away so soon after we was married. It's a dreadful position to be placed in. It 'u'd be awfully embarrassing to--to the Moxom girls."