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"Have you got a pain, Mardie?" cried Sue, anxiously bending over her mother. "No, dear," she answered, smiling through her tears and stretching a hand to both children to help her to her feet. "No, dear, I've lost one!" "I cry when anything aches, not when it stops," remarked Jack, as the three started again on their walk.
"And we'll tell Fardie about Polly Reed and the little quail bird, won't we?" "Yes; but he and Jack will have a great deal to say to us, and we must n't talk all the time about the dear, kind Shakers, you know!" "You're all 'buts, Mardie!" at which Susanna smiled through her tears.
Now the place where the dog barks and snarls is coming next... P'raps he'll be dead.., or p'raps he'll be nicer... Keep close to me till we get past the gate... He did n't come out, so p'raps he is dead or gone a-visiting.... There's that 'specially lazy cow that's always lying down in the Buxtons' field.... I don't b'lieve she's moved since we came away.... Do you s'pose she stands up to be milked, Mardie?
"No," Susanna replied brokenly, "of course they would n't, unless sometimes they were wicked for a minute or two and forgot." "Do the Shakers shake all the time, Mardie, or just once in a while? And shall I see them do it?" "Sue, dear, I can't explain everything in the world to you while you are so little; you really must wait until you're more grown up.
"Don't cry, darling Mardie! I won't talk any more, not for days and days! Let me wipe your poor eyes. Don't let Elder Gray see you crying, or he'll think I've been naughty. He's just going in downstairs to see Eldress Abby. Was it wrong what I said about backsliding, or what, Mardie? We'll help each udder climb, an' then we'll go home an' help poor lonesome Fardie; shall we?"
"The cows have all gone into the barn," she chattered; "and the Shaker gentlemen are milking them, and not one of them is shaking the least bit, for I 'specially noticed; and I looked in through the porch window, and there is nice supper on a table bread and butter and milk and dried apple sauce and gingerbread and cottage cheese. Is it for us, Mardie?"
'I get up so early, Mardie, she said, 'and it takes so long to unsnarl and untangle me, and I get so hot when I'm helping in the hayfield, and then I have to be curled for dinner, and curled again for supper, and so it seems like wasting both our times! Her hair would be all the stronger for cutting, I thought, as it's so long for her age; but I could n't put the shears to it when the time came, Martha.
"Always when they must; never, never when they want to," answered Sue's mother. "But o' course they would n't ever want to if they had any little girls to be togedder with, like you and me, Mardie?" And Sue looked up with eyes that were always like two interrogation points, eager by turns and by turns wistful, but never satisfied.
She had never supposed it possible that she could laugh again, and indeed she seldom felt like it, but Ansel's interpretations of Shaker doctrine were almost too much for her latent sense of humor. "What are you smiling at, and me so sad, Mardie?" quavered Sue, piteously, from the little plot of easy weeding her mother had given her to do. "I keep remembering my game!
I had to take her to Eldress Abby. She sat up in front of the little looking-glass as still as a mouse, while the curls came off, but when the last one fell into Abby's apron, she suddenly put her hands over her face and cried: 'Oh, Mardie, we shall never be the same togedder, you and I, after this! She seemed to see her 'little past, her childhood, slipping away from her, all in an instant.
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